2nd Victim of Shooting at Plant Thrives : Violence: General Dynamics supervisor, shot in the head at close range in a shooting spree in which another employee was killed, can move his limbs and answer questions. Relatives call it a miracle.

Shot in the head by a irate gunman just 24 hours earlier, James English was recovering with remarkable speed Saturday, the beneficiary of the bullet’s fluke pathway and prompt medical attention, according to English’s brother and the neurosurgeon who operated on him.

English, a 52-year-old General Dynamics supervisor who was shot in the back of his skull at close range when employee Robert Earl Mack opened fire after a grievance hearing, was answering questions and had been removed from a breathing apparatus Saturday. His condition was upgraded from critical to serious.

“With a gunshot wound to the head, I honestly didn’t expect my brother to be alive when I got here today, and if he were, I expected to see someone almost in a vegetative state,” Jerry English, the victim’s 46-year-old brother, told a news conference at UC San Diego Medical Center. “I really think it’s a miracle.”

“He was a very lucky man,” said Dr. Philip Shields, one of two UC San Diego neurosurgeons who removed bullet and bone fragments and damaged brain tissue from English’s head during more than three hours of surgery Friday. “Two millimeters more toward the midline (of his brain) and he wouldn’t be with us today.”

English had been Mack’s supervisor at the sprawling Convair Division plant off Pacific Highway before Mack was fired Jan. 15 for unsatisfactory attendance. Following a grievance hearing on the dismissal, police say Mack opened fire with a .38-caliber handgun that he had smuggled into the plant, killing Michael Konz, a 25-year-old human resources counselor, and wounding English.

Police persuaded Mack to give himself up a short time later.

English has suffered permanent damage to his field of vision and may have other mental function problems that doctors will not be able to detect until they can ask him more complex questions, Shields said. While he is not completely out of danger, Shields was confident enough in his patient’s improvement to predict English could leave the hospital within 10 days.

“We know it’ll be a long process. I think the visual deficits will be significant. He may not be able to read. He’ll have to relearn a lot of things,” said Jerry English, an Army orthodontist in Honolulu and an Operation Desert Storm veteran. “But he’s alive.”

That is largely because the bullet, which entered English’s head from the right rear, penetrated his brain just 4 or 5 centimeters, Shields said. It damaged his visual cortex, the brain area that translates visual information, but left most of the rest of the brain intact, he said.

“The skull took a lot of the (bullet’s) kinetic energy,” Shields said. “(The bullet) stayed in the posterior part of the brain.”

Jerry English praised the swift response of paramedics, who began working on his brother even as police were trying to persuade Mack to give up. Shields said that the hospital’s trauma team brought English into surgery within 45 minutes after he arrived at UCSD Medical Center.

Sedated and paralyzed by medication overnight, English began coming around just an hour or so before the 1 p.m. news conference. That raised the spirits of about a dozen family members who flew in to support the Crest resident, who is married and the father of two sons. English was able to move all of his limbs and could answer questions.

“This morning, when we first saw Jim, he had tubes everywhere and I just shook him, and asked him ‘Can you hear me? Are you OK?’ ” Jerry English said. “I got one of these,” English said, giving the thumbs-up sign, “and that was very emotional.”

Though English has complained that “my head hurts,” he is apparently unaware that he was shot or that Konz is dead, Jerry English and Shields said. Doctors do not want to burden him with the information now, Shields said.

“He knows something happened, that he’s here in the hospital,” Jerry English said. English’s health was improving so rapidly that doctors considered upgrading him to fair condition and moving him out of the surgical intensive care unit Saturday afternoon, UCSD spokeswoman Leslie Franz said.

But Shields, who said that English is still at risk for complications such as brain swelling and pneumonia, decided to leave him under observation there for at least one more day, Franz said.