A Miracle, by Inches : Officer Shot on Duty Exceeds Doctors’ Expectations--but Not His Own

Abel Dominguez has no recollection of the afternoon he sat in his police cruiser, writing a ticket, and got shot in the head.

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What happened Aug. 6 is not even hazy to him. “I have no memory of that day whatsoever--not from the time I woke up,” he said.

It was many weeks before the Long Beach police officer learned that he had been shot three times. Fragments of a bullet fired through the window of his car entered the right side of his head; another bullet went through his arm, and a third was deflected by a protective vest. He hung so precariously to life that a chaplain kept vigil at the hospital for three days, praying alongside the family.

Doctors gave the grim news to Dominguez’s wife, Cindy, and their three children: The officer was likely to die, and if he lived, probably would never recognize them again.

Today, Dominguez is talking, exercising, practicing movements in his wheelchair and learning to walk again. After three months at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, he is surrounded by his family in the comfort of his North Long Beach home, which has been remodeled by volunteers.

“It’s a miracle,” he says.

Dominguez, 31, attributes his rapid healing to his faith, as well as to his ability to let go of the hate he felt for his attackers when he was told what had happened to him.

“At first, I was real bitter. I didn’t understand.” Dominguez said. But since then, he has accepted his fate.

“I have a deep faith in God. That’s basically what pulled me through it--a lot of praying,” he said. “I remember some Bible Scriptures: Don’t hate your transgressors. . . . That’s partly why I healed so quickly.”

The incident began with a simple traffic stop.

Dominguez pulled over Melvin Johnson, 26, near Grisham Avenue and 49th Street in North Long Beach for speeding. While checking for outstanding warrants against Johnson, Dominguez put him in the back seat of the patrol car. As the officer worked on a computer console and wrote out a ticket, two men walked up to the car to free Johnson, according to police. One of the men pulled out a gun and shot the young officer through a closed window while the other let Johnson out of the patrol car.

Dazed and confused, Dominguez drove a few feet until he crashed into a wall.

What irks Cindy Dominguez is that her husband apparently was giving the driver a break. Dominguez had originally called a tow truck to take away Johnson’s car, but later canceled the request and opted just to give him a ticket.

“He was like that,” Cindy Dominguez, 31, said. “He treated people well. They had no reason to shoot him.”

At the hospital, Dr. Barry Ceverha told Cindy Dominguez not even to think about her husband’s “quality of life.” The important thing, the doctor told her, was “his survival.” The message was clear. What she heard was that doctors would be “operating on a dead man.”

But she says she never doubted that her husband would live.

“All I could say to the nurses was, ‘Did you take his contacts out? ‘Cause that would make him uncomfortable.’ He was on life support. They had a chaplain out at midnight, but all I could think about was his contacts.”

While the officer clung to life, a massive manhunt was under way.

Within 12 hours, police rounded up four suspects. Two of them, Anthony Sims, 21, and Cashus Ward, 19, have been charged with attempted murder and are in jail pending a court hearing next month.

Johnson, the driver that Dominguez detained, and his brother, Andre Johnson, were released after questioning.

It took Abel Dominguez five days to begin coming out of a coma. At first, he said, he was confused, unsure of what he was doing in a hospital. “I had a feeding tube in my nose. I took it out, thinking, ‘What’s this doing here?’ ”

When he finally spoke, he said hello to his mother and his wife. The first thing he asked for was to see his three children: Phillip, 12, Abel, 5, and Alexandra, nearly 3.

Cindy told them: “Daddy looks different, but he wants to see you, and he will come home soon.”

His arrival home came sooner than anyone could have imagined. “I’ve stopped predicting with Abel,” said Ceverha, the hospital’s medical director of neurosciences.

Dominguez’s recovery has been amazing, Ceverha said. “I’m not religious, (but) we had other, perhaps non-medical intervention, perhaps divine intervention.”

His new routine entails daylong therapy sessions Monday through Friday. He has adjusted to his wheelchair and gets around fairly well, he said. He can get water from the refrigerator door by himself. And he can dress himself.

“Abel is going to need therapy for many more months. Rehab after brain surgery is a long process,” said physical therapist Lynn Eckerson

Turning to Dominguez, she said: “I know you want me to say it’d be one week.”

“Then I know you’d be lying,” he said with a smile.

Those who have seen the progress, such as Officer Ali Assef, attribute Dominguez’s improvement to his will to live.

“When he started rehab, he barely could move his foot to the side. When I went back the next week, there was an incredible change,” Assef said. “His speech had cleared up; his movements were more steady. And by the following week, he was even better. And look at him now. He’s doing exercises.”

Doctors are hopeful that Dominguez will fully recuperate. He has lost some peripheral vision in his left eye, and the left side of his body is weak because the right side of his brain suffered the most damage, Ceverha said.

A runner and weightlifter, Dominguez, who’s 5 feet, 8 inches, has dropped from 205 to 183 pounds since the shooting.

Next summer, Dominguez faces further surgery, when doctors insert an acrylic plate to protect part of his brain where the skull is missing.

And he still needs some help with things most people take for granted.

“My wife assists me taking a shower,” Dominguez said. “And I can’t go to the bathroom by myself. That’s the one thing that bugs me.”

Cindy Dominguez said she minds none of it. She’s too happy to have her best friend home again.

They were teen-age sweethearts in the Walnut Park area of Los Angeles. They lost touch but met again in 1986 and were married in 1987. He said it was June 20. She corrected him, saying it was the 24th, but he insisted. She had to laugh when she realized he was right.

“And I’m the one with the brain injury,” he said, chuckling.

Dominguez didn’t always want to be a police officer, he said. He served in the Marines and attended Long Beach City College.

He was snagged at a recruiting booth for the Long Beach Police Department because, he said, “I was looking for something similar to the Marine Corps. I really enjoyed being outdoors, traveling, not being stuck inside an office.”

A six-year veteran of the department, Dominguez said he wants to return to the force. “I liked it. I was very happy, and I worked with a great bunch of people,” he said. “I can’t see myself doing anything else.”

Even their oldest child, Phillip, said he wants to become a police officer.

“I can see how much the city needs help,” the youngster said. “I saw how he helped people out, and I want to help people out too. I also saw lots of police officers show up at the hospital. They were like a family. People that didn’t even know him came by.”

In fact, they did more than stop by. Along with neighbors and friends, officers pitched in around the clock to fix up the family’s small North Long Beach home, adding a bedroom, a bathroom, remodeling the kitchen, replacing the roof and putting in temporary wheelchair ramps. Even strangers helped.

Tom Rasada, a general contractor who took a leave of absence from work to help remodel the officer’s home, said, “I live five minutes from here, and I never met him. But I’m 32. He’s 31. I have a 3-, 5- and 7-year-old. He has a 2-, 5- and 12-year-old. It was easy to put myself in their position.”

Such an outpouring of support has sometimes overwhelmed the Dominguez family. Some years back, the couple considered leaving Long Beach because of its crime problems. The shooting prompted one of Dominguez’s sisters to put her house up for sale.

But Cindy and Abel Dominguez said now they are committed to staying.

“I can never thank this community enough,” Abel Dominguez said.

The family wants to give something back to the community, said Cindy Dominguez, whose company, Northern Trust Bank, plans to install a computer in her home so she can work part time, she said. The bank has paid her salary while she has taken the time to be with her husband.

“How do you pay them back?” Abel Dominguez asked. “People said, ‘Just by you getting better is good enough.’ ”

And he intends to do just that. “There’s no doubt in my mind that I’ll be able to walk again,” he said.