Stabbing Victim and Doctors Weren’t Quite Ready for His Death

The surgeons thought it was all over for Christopher Valva, victim of a knife wound to the heart. Nearly two years ago at a San Diego hospital, he was declared dead.

The police thought it was all over, too. They were prepared to begin the paper work and start the investigation into the killing. The coroner’s office was standing by to determine the precise cause of death, and the district attorney’s office was ready to file charges against the person who stabbed Valva.

It was supposed to be just another murder in San Diego. It wasn’t.

Thanks to the fast work of paramedics and surgeons at Mercy Hospital, Valva, now 21 years old, lived.

Police two years ago filed charges of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon against the alleged assailant, but a Superior Court judge eventually dismissed all charges against the defendant when it appeared that Valva himself had provoked the attack.

Valva barely survived that night. Today, almost two years later, the long-haired fan of heavy metal rock music is still struggling to survive.

After his release from the hospital, Valva returned to his job at a graphics shop but stayed there only two days because he could not handle the physical work. He landed another job as a parking lot attendant in late December, 1985.

He quit two months later, and it has been almost a year since he was employed.

“I ride my bike, work on my car and play my guitar,” he said recently. “I feel 100% frustrated.”

Valva said he suffers an occasional twitching movement in his head, a nervous reaction that he said doctors told him resulted from the stabbing.

It is that sudden jerking that Valva said he believes tends to make prospective employers believe that he is on drugs.

“My friend gave me the name ‘shaky duck,’ but I don’t even notice it,” Valva said. “I didn’t do any drugs before I got stabbed; I used to smoke a little pot. But I guess the lady who I went to see the other day about a job thought I was on drugs.”

Valva lives with his mother, Irene Ferguson, a free-lance photographer who is divorced and cares for her two other children, ages 12 and 16.

Valva’s immediate goal is to land a job as a janitor at a local school. His long-time desire is to become a guitar player in a rock ‘n’ roll band.

He doesn’t mind discussing the night of Feb. 1, 1985. He remembers being declared dead.

“I heard him say it,” Valva said. “Yeah, I was unconscious, and this is what I freak out on. I remember him saying the (pulse) was gone and I knew I was in trouble.”

With a swinging wave of his arm and hand to indicate covering a dead body with a blanket and the uncovering of a live person, Valva said: “It was just as easy to go like this and to go like this. The doctor could have just put the sheet over my head.”

He also recalls that even after he was declared dead, with his upper torso still tied to the gurney, the gurney collapsed. “I just remembered my head slamming,” he remembered. “Some people say that may have kept me alive.”

Mercy Hospital trauma surgeons were credited with bringing Valva back to life. Dr. Eugene Rumsey Jr., the trauma surgeon on the scene when Valva arrived, opened up his chest and began immediate heart massage. There had been massive hemorrhaging and blood was spewing from the wound, Valva said he was told later.

Blood was injected into the heart as surgeons continued the procedure for more than five minutes, when doctors noted a faint heart beat.

But his chances were still as good as grim, said Ferguson, who rode with the paramedics as they transferred her son.

“The doctor came to us about three hours after the stabbing, and he told us there was a 99% chance that he was going to die,” Ferguson, 41, said.

“He then turned to another person who was with him and said, ‘There’s a 100% chance that he’s not going to make it.’ But all I needed to learn was that he was alive and I knew he was going to make it.”

Rumsey acknowledged that usually, the amount of blood that Valva lost from his heart would almost certainly prove fatal. Despite the odds, Rumsey had a good a feeling on this one, too.

“Most of these patients don’t live,” he said. “But realistically, I thought he was a young man and we have a state-of-the-art trauma center. I thought if this guy had a chance to live, it would be right here and now.

“I thought basically it was in the hands of the Lord, and if the Lord was to work through me and save this young man’s life, then I think it would be a privilege.”

While recuperating, Valva had to face another ordeal--the trial of his accused assailant. The trial indicated that it was Valva who provoked the attack.

The attorney for Kenneth Lamont Sexton, 22, who was charged with the stabbing, said the incident is in the past and he hopes the parties involved have gone on to better things in life. Sexton was 19 years old at the time of the stabbing.

“I’m glad that his life was saved and my client was glad that his life was saved,” said Elisabeth Semel, who successfully defended Sexton.

Valva remains bitter about the outcome of the case. He said he remembers everything leading up to the confrontation between him and a friend and about eight other young men a block away from where he lived.

He said that he and his friend were returning home from work when they approached the eight young males and confronted them about loitering in the area and tampering with vehicles parked on the residential streets.

Statements made to police and in the preliminary hearing by the eight people, including Sexton, indicated that Valva was hostile and made disparaging racial remarks for no apparent reason. The racial slurs, which Valva admitted, were made to Sexton, who is black.

A short time later, Sexton and two others were walking south on Bancroft Street across from where Valva lived. Valva admitted approaching Sexton and demanding, “What’s up, man? What’s up?”

Valva claimed Sexton plunged a knife into the left side of his chest. Sexton told authorities that he pulled out a knife when Valva lunged and swung at him and that Valva landed on the knife.

Valva said that he still sees Sexton around. “I see him all the time,” he said. “I’ll see him every day or every other day. I’ll yell, ‘Hey, Kenny, what’s happening.’ I don’t have any animosity to him.”

He added that he sometimes makes obscene gestures to Sexton. “I can’t do anything to him because I’ll get in trouble,” he said.

Asked if he regretted confronting the young men, Valva said: “I regret doing it in the sense of the consequences. If there’s a next time, I wouldn’t go empty-handed. But the next time I would probably call 911.”