The Road Back : A Determined Do-It-Yourselfer Fights to Regain His Cherished Independence After Being Shot in the Head by a Disgruntled Ex-Employee

The cruel reality hit Charlotte English the day two repairmen arrived to fix a few things.

Normally, the light switch adjustments and tinkering with the downstairs toilet would have been child’s play for her husband, Jim. A capable do-it-yourselfer and Navy electronics veteran, he eagerly spent most weekends keeping his house in rural east San Diego County ship-shape.

But that was before “the mishap,” as Charlotte calls it--the day in late January when Robert Mack, a disgruntled General Dynamics assembly worker whom James English had fired only nine days before, allegedly returned to put a bullet in English’s head and fatally gun down a second employee.

Four months after surgeons removed parts of his brain, a subdued English struggles through severe losses of vision and memory toward whatever normalcy he might regain.

“I definitely feel that I have a will to live,” English says. “Through every step of this thing, I’ve been a fighter.”

Though Charlotte English shares his hopes for recovery, she sometimes finds herself silently combatting her doubts. Like when the two repairmen left a $193 bill for work Jim once could have done in his sleep. But he wasn’t even home that day. He was miles away at an outpatient therapy center.

“I remember thinking that day how frustrating it was not to have Jim around to help me. It’s like he was gone, that this other man I used to know had just picked up and left,” she recalls.

“And there’s a different man living here now.”

Day by day, through simple tasks at which he sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails, Jim English discovers his new self. Whether trying to balance his checkbook or taking a neighborhood stroll with his wife, he is forced to struggle with newfound limitations that have robbed him of the pride of heading his own household. And stripped him of his cherished independence.

For his own safety, his wife has restricted him from certain areas of the couple’s rock-hewn back yard. Recently, English fell while leading his Doberman pinscher down the back steps. That required two stitches in his head.

He is forbidden to use his chain saw. And when he stubbornly insisted on helping Charlotte carry groceries up the steps--two bags at a time, like always--she held the back of his belt to keep him from falling.

“If you’re a hard-head like me,” he says, “well, it just hurts to know that your wife can’t trust you after all these years--even with simple tasks of moving from here to there.”

Still, the 53-year-old English talks like a fighter who, though knocked against the ropes, has returned to fight.

And while his recovery has slowed after an extraordinary start, he holds fast to the belief that life’s broken pieces eventually will mend.

“I feel that if I was a quitter, I’d be dead right now,” says English, a former operations supervisor for General Dynamics’ advanced cruise missile program.

Along with daily physical and psychological therapy, he does push-ups and sit-ups in a bullish effort to regain his strength. He pushes doctors and therapists for more freedom to test his body and mind.

“All through the surgery and the rehabilitation, the doctors and nurses have all commented about how hard I work,” he said. “And I tell them all--I’ve got something to work for. To get my life back to what it was before this thing ever happened, or as close to it as I possibly can.”

The devastating round, fired into English’s head from less than two feet away, was a hollow-point bullet, designed to break on impact and increase the bone and tissue damage.

Luckily, doctors say, the projectile missed--barely--the vital brain stem, which would have killed English instantly.

But in trying to remove the bullet and debris, trauma surgeons at UC San Diego Medical Center cut away a portion of English’s brain that affects his vision and depth perception.

He also emerged from surgery with other brain parts impaired--areas that control his memory, hearing, balance, concentration and personality, says Dr. David Barba, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at UCSD who supervised English’s surgery.

“The bullet did its share of damage,” Barba says. “And if it had hit the brain stem, the party would have been over. But that round also sent damaging shock waves through the brain. And those waves have caused most of the trouble.”

Since leaving the hospital in late February, English has been staggered with recurring lapses in balance.

And while the eyes themselves were not damaged, doctors now consider English legally blind, with less than 10% of his field of vision intact and much of the view to the left now gone. The reason, they say, is that the back side of his wounded brain--the occipital lobe--has lost much of its ability to translate the visual images it receives, casting him into a nether world of lines and shadows.

Worse, English’s short-term memory has shown signs of damage. The effect, his family says, is like a cassette tape erased each evening of key bits of information recorded during the day.

The day after seeing his beloved Los Angeles Dodgers play baseball on television, his son says, English will have trouble recalling that he even watched the game.

He struggles to balance his checkbook because he often forgets the numbers he must carry in his mind for simple arithmetic.

But the bullet left perhaps its darkest mark on English’s reasoning processes, his wife says, leaving him unable to make many normal judgments--particularly when it comes to his own safety.

With a gentle, guiding hand, Charlotte English now accompanies her husband almost constantly.

She makes sure he has his glasses and notebook before he leaves each day for therapy. On walks around the neighborhood, she guards against his straying into the middle of the road. She hovers nervously even when he pulls weeds from his cherished front garden.

“It’s just hard for Jim to accept that he’s disabled,” Charlotte says, “because he always wanted to be the best in everything he did. If he wasn’t No. 1, he wanted to know why and who was and how he could improve.”

Lionel English, the older of the couple’s two sons, has trouble watching his once-confident father struggle to lead a normal life.

“He used to make the decisions--now he just listens to what my mom wants,” Lionel says. “It’s like he’s gotten much older all of a sudden. Sometimes, it’s almost like visiting with my grandfather, not my father.”

These strange new limitations have become a bitter pill for the once-avid outdoorsman who loved to hunt and fish, who worked hard and expected his dinner on the table when he got home from work.

Sometimes, Charlotte hears him on the telephone telling friends he did tasks around the house she actually had to do for him. Indeed, for Jim English, his swallowed pride has gone down in hard gulps.

“It’s just hard to have to have Charlotte feel that she has to watch over me, to protect me,” he says, walking outside the house in rural Crest that he and his wife bought in 1989.

The dark changes, English knows, came courtesy of Robert Mack, who is accused of unleashing his anger Jan. 24 in a courtyard at the General Dynamics Convair Division plant near San Diego’s Lindbergh Field.

A veteran machinist who had worked for General Dynamics his entire adult life, Mack, 42, had been summoned for a routine status hearing after being fired from his job just nine days earlier.

Moments after the 2:30 p.m. session ended, however, Mack allegedly brandished a .38-caliber handgun and wreaked his revenge.

As other employees scurried for cover, Mack allegedly chased down and fatally shot labor negotiator Michael M. Koonz, 25, moments after firing a single shot into the back of English’s head.

English cannot recall the day of the hearing, let alone the shooting. His mind draws a blank from the day he fired Mack for repeated unexplained absences until he regained consciousness a week after surgery.

He came to with his head bandaged, his eyes swollen and his face sickly shades of yellow and blue. “I feel like the tip of my head is coming off,” he told his wife.

In the hours ahead, Jim English would continue to wage his battle of recovery. He flashed the thumbs-up signal and began speaking with relatives who had been advised not to show any emotion for fear of upsetting him.

But he still had little clue as to where he was or what had happened to him, Charlotte recalls.

At first, English believed he was in Virginia, then Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and finally, San Diego--telling nurses he was in the hospital because of old age. He also insisted that the year was 1989. When asked why, he would reply “Because it was a good year.”

Meanwhile, a sign hung over his bed to remind him: “My name is James English. I have a gunshot wound to the head.”

Finally, one morning while son Brett sat by his hospital bed, English seized upon reality with a sobering dash of humor. He asked about the shooting--and when told who had pulled the trigger, he facetiously replied: “My good buddy, Mack.”

When Brett guessed how angry Mack would be to know English was still alive, his father lay in bed silently, flashing a beaming smile.

English left the hospital on Feb. 18 for three weeks at a rehabilitation center before returning home.

Since then, he has attended a day treatment center where he rides a stationary bike and tests his mind on computer tasks, always volunteering for extra therapy.

But as English’s recovery pace slows, his family prays he will be able to accept new limitations.

For now, insurance and worker’s compensation have covered the many medical bills. But his family knows changes will come, decisions will have to be made. Some wonder whether the family eventually will be forced to sell their house, built next to a huge rock that consumes the back yard and can make footing perilous. (The family declines to discuss what financial arrangements General Dynamics has made to help them.)

And they hold their tongues when Jim talks of returning to his old job at the General Dynamics plant, defiantly saying that he wouldn’t “return to just any old flunky job.”

Doctors, too, can only watch and wait.

“A lot of his future hangs in the balance now,” says Betty Joan Maly, the physician overseeing English’s recovery. “Right now, he isn’t fully aware of the losses. It might be too soon for him to face the full picture of it.”

Walking in his tree-laden front yard, Jim English talks about the anger he still harbors for the man who changed his life but says his own therapy sessions will prevent him from attending Robert Mack’s trial in June. (This week, Mack pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.)

Rather, English talks about finally getting those pesky gophers that have pockmarked the place he considers his one last refuge. Stopping to measure his words as carefully as he does his steps, he says the past months of recovery have stolen time from him, time he will eventually gain back.

“The doctors might not all agree with me, but most of them thought I wouldn’t get out of the hospital bed,” he says, stopping to pick a burdock from his wife Charlotte’s white sock.

“We’ll just go a day at a time, steady and determined, just like my steps.”