15 bullets.
This is the number of gunshots Craig Collins, who wants to mentor children from tough neighborhoods, survived over two years and two incidents.
“I grew up in Walnut Park. When I got shot, I was going through a tough time in my life. I was going through depression. I even started battling a drug problem,” Collins said.
An assailant shot Collins six times in 2021, and he experienced different emotions when the reality of his injuries set in on his way to the hospital.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.’ The first thing you think is, ‘I’m gonna die.’ I remembered taking off running and I made it to a house and knocked on the front door and they ended up calling the ambulance for me,” he said.
While in recovery at Barnes Jewish Hospital with a shattered left arm that now contained 30 screws and pins to hold it together, Collins received information about the Bullet-Related Injury Clinic (BRIC), founded by trauma surgeon Dr. LJ Punch.
Photo courtesy of Collins family
“I ended up getting a brochure, and it said, they’ll help you with your medicine if you don’t have insurance. They do wound care, and they offer a variety of services,” Collins said.
“I had been shot six times then, so it was bad. I kept going to Dr. Punch and I was getting better, getting myself together. After that incident, I started caring about myself again.”
Second shooting incident
Fast forward to February 25, 2023, Collins was shot again.
“I saw some people in the city, and I planned to show [them] I was doing good. But when he asked me if he could get a ride, I told him no. Then he said he wanted to see his son, and that struck a chord with me,” he said.
Collins agreed to give his friend a ride since he would be in the area that same day. However, the unthinkable happened when they stopped at a store before arriving at his friend’s house.
“[When] we stopped by the store, I didn’t know that [he and another man] him had argued earlier that day, I was just giving him a ride,” Collins said.
“The guy pulls up, and he shoots [at] the car; I got shot nine times. The person that was in the car with me was shot 15 times.
“I ended up pulling through from that and changed my life,” Collins said.
Craig’s wife Carla helped him recover from the second shooting. She recalled how the uncertainty of his well-being made her feel.
“Initially, it was the shock of me arriving at the scene and seeing bullet casings all over the [ground], the window shot out of my car, blood on the concrete… crime tape everywhere, police everywhere, and I just got out of the car screaming, and collapsed to my knees crying,” Carla said.
She [tracked] Collins’ location on her cellphone and noticed that he had been in the same location for 40 minutes, which was “not like him.”
She thought that he had been involved in a car accident, and called the manager at the store to confirm her suspicions but it turned out to be a shooting incident.
“I can’t even explain the torment that I felt when I arrived. It was just detrimental to my spirit. I found relief when the detective told me my husband was alive,” she said.
“I headed straight to the hospital. When I got there, the nurses knew who I was because my husband, even though he had to be resuscitated, within those last breaths kept saying, ‘my wife, Muffin, get me to Muffin.’”
Collins was in a coma for eight days, according to his wife.
“It was a scary situation because I had never been through anything like that before,” she said. “I just told myself that I need to be strong, and I need to be strong for my children and him, because if I break then we won’t be able to make it through.”
Collins and his wife have three children: an 18-year-old who just graduated from Ritenour High School, an eight-year-old, and a one-year-old. Collins wants to become involved in the mentorship program at the BRIC to have influence.
“I’m going to be a mentor like I figured out what I want to do, and it’s helping somebody else,” Craig said.”
Addressing the community impact of gun violence
“When we focus on gun violence, we might create a war on guns or a war on violence and both of those things generally end up being harmful to people and disproportionately harmful to people of color and Black people specifically,” Punch, a trauma surgeon, said.
“I’m encouraged that we’re recognizing the broad devastating impacts of bullets in our lives and our communities.”
A bullet-related injury (BRI) is defined as the physical, emotional, social, and spiritual impact a bullet has on a person whether they or someone they love is harmed by a bullet, according to the BRIC’s website. This includes physical wounds, the threat of a bullet, and the loss of a loved one.
“I want to make sure I honor and recognize the many lives that this way has already touched before anyone was even paying attention, which is the Black experience, and it’s very important to me that we not gloss over that,” Punch said. “It’s important to me that we say it’s about time.”
War on drugs crisis: past and present
Punch said the ongoing “crisis of drug addiction [has] created the war on drugs.”
“We know the war on drugs has completely devastated the Black community because rather than focusing on the reason why people struggle with addiction and helping people heal, we criminalized it and locked people up, and that has not worked because more people are dying from drug use now than before,” he said.
Punch asserts if a problem is identified as violence among people, “then the only answer is the police.”
Additionally, he emphasizes that if the outcomes of solving a problem of this magnitude aren’t clear then, “things like this can end up being misdirected toward Black people.”
“As a physician, I want to be clear that my concern is the injuries that are created by bullets and not gun violence … because I think that term is stigmatizing and problematic,” Punch said.
“This is something I talk about a lot in addition to being the reason why I created the Bullet Related Injury Clinic [BRIC].”
Rising bullet-related injury rates in the St. Louis region
According to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, there have been 103 homicides in the region in 2024, compared to 128 recorded in August of 2022.
The U.S. Surgeon General declared gun violence as a public health crisis in June.
The data showed the rate of firearm-related deaths in our nation has been steadily rising, driven by both firearm-related homicides over the last decade and firearm-related suicides over the last two decades.
Of all firearm-related deaths in 2022, more than half (56.1%) were from suicide. 40.8% were from homicide, and the remaining were from legal intervention, unintentional injuries, and injuries of unknown intent, according to the research.
“We must be clear here that St. Louis has [seen] a steady decline in those deaths over the last three years, but if you look at the data that this is reflective of nationally,” said Punch.
Punch explained that deaths due to bullet injuries in the first year of the pandemic, 2020, were devastating.
“And there continue to be higher rates of deaths from bullets nationally, which are the majority self-inflicted,” he said.
“At the BRIC, we think of mental health as one of many pieces of the whole person, including their physical health, their social support, their spiritual well-being, and even just having access to things like food.”
BRIC will host a three-day conference from November 7-9 at the BRIC at the Delmar Divine building.
“We’re going to be hosting a three-day event to share, not just a conference where people are talking at you, but a hands-on immersive experience in understanding, caring for, and moving toward the healing of bullet-related injury,” Punch said.
“If you’re a doctor, nurse, social worker, community health worker, outreach worker, or if your work has something to do with bullet-related injury, BRIC Institute will be for you.”
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