Doctors have found a bullet fragment in the neck of a 10-year-old survivor of last week’s Minneapolis church shooting who had extolled his friend’s heroism in shielding him.
“I think I got, like, gunpowder on my neck,” fifth grader Weston Halsne told media outlets as he recounted diving under a pew and credited his friend Victor Greenawalt with saving his life “because he laid on top of me” and got hit in the back.
At the time Weston thought he had escaped physically unscathed, but doctors later discovered the potentially life-threatening shard.
“Weston will need surgery to remove a bullet fragment that is lodged in his neck, dangerously close to his carotid artery,” his aunt said in an online fund-raising appeal.
If the fragment had gone any farther, “he would’ve died,” Weston’s father, Grant Halsne, told NBC News, noting that a doctor had described the near-miss as a “miracle.”
Weston was sitting two seats away from the end of a pew, just feet from the stained-glass windows, when bullets started flying Wednesday morning. “It was like, shots fired, and then we kind of like got under pews,” he told WCCO-TV. “It was really scary.”
Investigators found 40 bullet fragments inside the church, according to WCCO.
Two students were killed, 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski, and 18 people were wounded — 15 of them children and three of them adults in their 80s.
With News Wire Services
