Pair Lose $8, Survive Gunshot : Robber’s Attack Came as No Great Surprise

As a nurse pulled away bloody bandages, Geri Chevalier said calmly Monday that she was not scared when a masked gunman cornered her and her husband in their van outside their Westminster apartment complex Sunday night, took $8 and then fired a single shot that ripped through her chest and into her husband’s shoulder.

She wasn’t even surprised, except to find that she survived.

“To me, everybody is going to be attacked some time. This was just our time,” Chevalier said in a Fountain Valley Regional Hospital room before her release later Monday.

“I figured one of these years something was going to happen to me. I just didn’t expect the gunshot,” she said.

Chevalier, 26, and her husband, Aubrey, 34, a Long Beach schoolteacher, had just returned to the Calespana Apartments, 15200 Magnolia St., about 8:30 p.m. after visiting his mother in Pomona for a late Christmas celebration. They parked, and when Geri Chevalier opened her door, “All of a sudden there was someone there wanting our money,” she said.

She saw only one robber in the dark parking lot, the bottom of his face hidden beneath a light-colored bandana. But police said there were two robbers, who remain at large. There was no scuffle or argument, just the gunman demanding money, she said.

‘Sat There in a Daze’

“All I wanted to do was give him the money and get him to leave,” she said.

“Then, all of a sudden, the gun went off,” she said. “I’ve never been that close to a gun before. I’ve never seen one go off before. I just sat there in a daze.”

Seeing her jacket torn, she realized she had been shot and “I was trying to figure out why I was still alive,” she said.

The shot tore through her left chest and arm and then hit Aubrey Chevalier in the right shoulder. Somehow, the driver’s door to the van opened and her husband fell out and beckoned her to get a blanket, she said.

“When I realized I was still alive, I knew the police had to be called,” said Geri Chevalier, an occupational therapist at UCI Medical Center. She crooked her left arm to make a “self-splint,” and climbed the stairs to their second-floor apartment, where she had a neighbor call police and obtained insurance forms. Geri Chevalier returned to the van but then made a second trip to the apartment to take care of some possessions before the police and paramedics arrived, she said.

‘Guardian Angel Watching’

She did not worry about her wounds during the episode, she said, while a nurse who was changing the dressing shook her head in amazement. “Your guardian angel was watching,” the nurse said.

Although the bullet missed vital organs, Geri Chevalier’s wounds were considered potentially fatal and she was taken to Fountain Valley’s trauma center. Her husband was treated at the same hospital and released, with the bullet still lodged in his shoulder, she said.

Police said no one else saw the shooting, and they are seeking the public’s help in tracking down the robbers, described as black males in their early to middle 20s. Both fled on foot, dropping $1 of the $8 in Geri Chevalier’s wallet at the scene, said Westminster Police Officer Larry Woessner.