I learn later that while I have been scrambling through the forest around Camp David, FBI agents have been scrambling around an abandoned warehouse in Chicago. Not special agents in tailored suits, but soldiers in black tactical gear, with machine guns and explosives.
They breach the building at 3.45pm, around the same time as I am shooting out the tyre on the Vice President’s Humvee.
The gun battle inside is short and brutal. Four of Boak’s men inside are gunned down as they exchange fire with the FBI agents. One tactical officer is seriously wounded, and others sustain minor wounds, protected by their Kevlar armour.
James Boak is in a rear room of the warehouse, which was used as a boardroom when the business was solvent.
As the front door is breached and the firing begins outside he draws his own weapon and fires two shots even as a ‘flashbang’ stun grenade smashes through the window and fills the room with smoke, light and ear-crushing noise.
As the smoke clears and the FBI officers fill the room, Boak is kneeling, his hands clasped behind his head. The gun is on the floor, kicked well away from him.
He is quickly arrested.
My mom lies on top of my sister in a spreading pool of blood.
A .357 bullet from a Sig Sauer P226 semi-automatic leaves the barrel at nearly fifteen hundred feet per second, or about a thousand miles per hour. Its mass of around eight grams gives it easily enough energy to pass through a human body, leaving a bullet-shaped hole on the way through, as long as it does not strike bone and lodge in the body or get deflected in a new direction.
What happens to the person who has been shot depends on where the hole is.
A bullet that misses any major organs might not kill, unless it hits an artery, in which case the victim will probably bleed to death.
A bullet that hits an organ like the lungs can often prove fatal. It depends on luck. But a bullet to the spine, heart or brain is almost always fatal, except in exceedingly rare circumstances.
The first bullet Boak fired missed completely, striking a filing cabinet on the far side of the room. It was recovered by forensics teams later that day.
The second bullet struck my mom in the chest as she pushed herself in front of Katz. It clipped her heart on the way through, emerged from her back and struck Katz in the sternum, the long flat bone in the middle of the chest. It should have been fatal both times. It should have passed through the bone and cut right through Katz’s spine.
What saved her was my mom. The bullet lost so much energy passing through her body that it could not penetrate Katz’s sternum and simply cracked it, lodging in her chest.
Katz is expected to make a full recovery.
My mom died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.
I miss you Mom. I love you and I miss everything about you. The bad times as well as the good. Oh God I wish I hadn’t run away to San Diego. I wish I’d had more days, more hours to spend with you. I wish you’d lived to see me marry, have kids, grow old…
But wishes won’t do the dishes, I hear her say.