A Gunman’s Bullet Paralyzed Officer’s Body, but Not His Spirit : New York: Steven McDonald speaks to schoolchildren in attempt to stop violence. He hopes his assailant will team up with him.

Because of what Shavod Jones did to him, Officer Steven McDonald feels nothing below his neck, breathes only with a machine, goes nowhere without a wheelchair and a nurse.

Because of Shavod Jones, McDonald will never make love with his wife or hug his son. His body is racked by spasms, his sleep haunted by nightmares. He cannot tell hot from cold. He cannot scratch his nose.

But this morning, sitting in his kitchen on Long Island, Steven McDonald is not talking about what Jones did to him nine years ago; he’s talking about what he wants to do for Jones when he gets out of prison later this year.

McDonald long ago forgave Jones for shooting him. Now, he’s saying, he’d like to team up with him.

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like what I envision--the two of us, together,” he says in a soft, high voice, another legacy of the bullet in his spine.

He sits near the window to catch the sun on his face, one of the few pleasures left him. A respirator on his wheelchair pumps air into a tube protruding from the front of his throat.

“Maybe Shavod and I will go to schools together and speak to kids. It’d be an amazing sight,” he says, beaming, like he’s talking about a Beatles reunion.

“Steven really, truly, believes that,” his wife, Patti Ann, says later. “People get upset with him. You know, like, ‘Come on, Steven, wake up!’ ”

*

On July 7, 1986, 29-year-old Steven McDonald was in his second year on the New York City Police Department, the force on which his father and grandfather had served. He had never been shot at or drawn his gun in the line of duty.

That afternoon, he was on plainclothes patrol in Central Park, looking for kids who’d been robbing bicyclists.

He found Shavod Jones.

Shavod’s nickname was Buddha; he’d been a pudgy baby. Abandoned by his parents, he was reared in Harlem by a grandmother who eventually lost control of him. Over the last four years, he’d been arrested six times. He was 15 years old.

He had pleaded guilty to armed robbery just two months earlier, but he was free because his lawyer assured a judge the boy would enter a home for troubled youths. In fact, the home had expelled him previously for repeatedly running away, and refused to readmit him.

That July afternoon, Shavod was in the park with two other boys when a casually dressed blond man walked up and showed his police shield. As the cop stooped to pat down a bulge in one boy’s pants cuff, Shavod pulled out a snub-nosed .22 pistol and fired three shots into his head.

As he was losing consciousness, Steven McDonald saw the face of his wife, three months pregnant with their first child. “God,” he prayed, “don’t let me die.”

He didn’t, but a bullet had cut his spinal cord between the second and third vertebrae, leaving him paralyzed below his chin. A vital mind was now trapped in an inert body.

One of McDonald’s first visitors in the hospital was John O’Connor, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of New York. O’Connor has a long, sad face. He looked down at the broken man on the bed and told him: “You feel helpless, but you remind me so much of Christ now. He didn’t save the world through teaching and preaching and miracles. He made it possible when he was lying motionless on the cross.

“If you unite yourself and your helplessness with Christ on the cross, you are the most powerful man in the world. You’ll touch people you’ll never see. I can’t reach out and touch them. You can.”

McDonald was barely conscious, but he heard the strange words: “The most powerful man in the world.” As the weeks passed and his spirits sank, he tried to remember them.

*

Six months later, McDonald was still in the hospital, unable to speak above a whisper. A friend asked about Shavod Jones, who’d been arrested shortly after the shooting and sentenced to three to 10 years in prison. “No one really knows me,” the boy said at the time.

“I feel sorry for him,” McDonald mouthed.

Patti Ann, meanwhile, had given birth to a son, Conor, who was to be baptized March 1. Steven had wanted to use the occasion to thank everyone for their help. He now decided to mention Shavod Jones in the statement.

“Steven was trying to deal with anger--other cops’ anger and his family’s anger,” said Peter Johnson, a friend who wrote McDonald’s statement. “But he wasn’t angry. He wanted to forgive.”

Patti Ann read her husband’s words. Her voice quavered when she came to these: “I’m sometimes angry at the teen-age boy who shot me. But more often, I feel sorry for him. I only hope he can turn his life into helping and not hurting people. I forgive him, and hope he can find peace and purpose in his life.”

Publicly, everyone praised McDonald’s graciousness. Privately, many were skeptical, particularly police officers and their relatives. Many of them had been scarred by the likes of Shavod Jones. Wait and see, they said; the bitterness always wins.

*

His arms and legs strapped to his wheelchair, Steven McDonald is being shaken like a big doll in the back of his van as it bangs along the rutted highway to Brooklyn, where he speaks today at Bishop Loughlin High School.

Bad as it is for McDonald, it could be worse. McDonald still receives his full patrolman’s salary and remains on the active-duty roster of the NYPD.

The McDonalds receive $20,000 a year from the late philanthropist Milton Petrie, who also established a $100,000 scholarship fund for Conor. The family’s house was purchased for them by friends, and customized by a squad of volunteer contractors.

When he got out of the hospital, McDonald had regained his voice and learned to operate his motorized wheelchair by blowing in two tubes. The van, which has a wheelchair lift, is provided by the city and driven by a policeman.

Against all odds, the quadriplegic has become a man about town. He turns up everywhere from the St. Patrick’s Day Parade to the Letterman show. He has met the powerful--the President, the Pope, Nelson Mandela.

McDonald’s refusal to give in to his handicap inspires many; their letters fill his attic. One day after church, he looked down to see a woman kissing his feet. (He hadn’t felt anything).

“You’re going to be a saint,” she told him.

“Have a nice day,” he answered.

But, for a time, he groped for a mission, a way to live up to what O’Connor had said about helplessness and power.

He attended a few precinct house roll calls with a group of other injured officers, but he didn’t feel that he fit in.

A friend of McDonald’s, the Rev. Mychal Judge, says many cops didn’t know what to say to their paralyzed colleague. Others hung back, he suspects, because they were scared by such a vivid reminder of their own vulnerability.

Then, McDonald began visiting schools. Younger children bombarded him with questions. “How do you open your Christmas presents?” was his favorite. Older ones were riveted by the details of his shooting and his readings from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

“My forgiving Shavod has had a powerful effect,” he says. “One girl sent me a letter. Her house was burned down--arson--and everyone else in her family was killed. She heard what I said, and she chose to forgive too. She felt better as a result.”

To prepare for such appearances, McDonald must be lifted from bed before dawn, even though he usually cannot fall asleep until well after midnight. It can take him hours just to have his morning bowel movement, which is achieved only with the help of a nurse’s digital stimulation.

Today, the nurse has dressed McDonald’s 6-foot-2, 180-pound body in a sweater, turtleneck, corduroys and topsiders. Finally, she drapes a chain with a badge around his neck: 15231, his father’s old number.

Steven McDonald’s father graduated from Bishop Loughlin five decades ago. Today, the enrollment has shrunk in half, and the students are almost all black and Hispanic.

“This is probably the best place for me to be,” McDonald says as the van moves through a dreary Brooklyn streetscape. “A lot of these kids have relatives or friends who have been shot. . . . And for me, it’s a chance to dispel myths about cops, especially white cops.”

He will speak at two assemblies. Waiting backstage before the first, he has no chance to chat with students or size up his audience, which fills only a third of the auditorium. When he is introduced and rolls out on the big stage, he looks frail and alone, as if isolated by a moat. From the seats, they can barely see his face, the only part of him that moves.

He says all the right things about being thankful and learning to forgive. But his voice is faint, like a radio tuned to a weak signal. His neck crooks at an uncomfortable angle.

Because his nervous system is alive below his wound, yet undirected by the brain, his body is racked by spasms. His hand jerks unpredictably, and the spasms--as well as the rhythms of his respirator--repeatedly force him to pause in mid-sentence.

The audience seems distracted and the speaker seems tentative. “You may be thinking, ‘What does he have to be thankful for?’ You’ll just have to take my word for it. . . . The words aren’t always there, but I hope through my presence I’ve shown you that life is good.”

But to many of these kids life is tough, and they seem disinclined to take this cop’s word to the contrary.

Why does he try this? Nothing prepared him for it: He was never eloquent or profound, never particularly good in school; just a good-looking, good-natured, utterly unremarkable young man, turned into a symbol by a punk with a gun.

McDonald asks if there are any questions. There aren’t.

At lunch, McDonald sits quietly at the end of a table in the faculty dining room, eating nothing, oblivious to the conversation around him.

But when it’s time for the afternoon session, he’s ready. He asks--demands, in his mild way--to speak from the auditorium floor, even though the microphone will have to be moved.

A few students come over and he chats with them easily about nothing in particular. But the mood is different now, and when he begins his speech he’s connecting. He gets a laugh when he recalls his father’s stories of how, at the old Loughlin, “the tough Christian brothers would smack you down if you pulled something.”

He also dwells on the fascinating, gruesome facts of his injury, establishing credentials for the message that follows, a message of forgiveness, thanksgiving and faith.

The students don’t see where he’s heading until he says that Jones “has had to struggle every bit as much as I have. Prison has not been a good experience for him. I hope when he returns to the community, he will never return to those destructive ways.”

Several students look quizzically at each other.

McDonald moves on to the equally implausible theme of thanksgiving, which fell flat an hour ago. “The Lord has favored me,” he says, referring to a reading from Isaiah earlier in the assembly. “I feel God’s love more now than I’d ever felt it in my life.”

This time, instead of tuning out, the kids seem to listen harder. The timbre of his injured voice makes it sound as if he is on the verge of tears. He isn’t, but some in the audience are.

“Even though I need nurses to do everything you do for yourself, I’ve never regretted what happened,” he says. “Like today, talking with you, I feel good about it. I could find a reason not to go on, but I ask God for the strength to do things like come here today.”

McDonald has them now; when he pauses, the only sound is the rhythmic “whoop, whoosh” of the respirator.

“I don’t think I’m anybody special. I look up to you; I applaud you,” he says, adding with a smile, “although I can’t move my hands.”

Instead, they rise and applaud him. A girl says, “My love goes out to you.”

“How could you forgive someone who’s done this to you?” a boy asks. “I couldn’t.”

McDonald explains: “When I was shot, I was dying, and my family and I said all sorts of prayers. I wanted to be forgiven then for my sins, and if I was to be forgiven by God, I had to forgive Shavod Jones.

“It hasn’t always been easy to do that, but if I’m going to live my faith, if I want to get to heaven, this is what I must do.”

*

In 1988, two years after he was shot, Steven McDonald arranged to meet with Shavod Jones’ mother, Sharon Harris, to say all was forgiven. It didn’t go as he’d expected.

Harris and her lawyer “treated me like a . . .” He stops in frustration. “They couldn’t trust me. My intentions were misunderstood. It was like, ‘What bad am I up to now?”’

But McDonald subsequently met Lenora Jones, Shavod’s grandmother, and visited her church in Harlem several times.

He gave her his number and, one night, as he was rolling out the door to a fund-raiser, the phone rang. “You better take this,” the baby sitter said. Collect call from Shavod Jones.

Jones said he was very sorry; McDonald said he was forgiven. Addresses were exchanged, and they began to correspond.

But the prisoner had an extraordinary request--his victim’s help in getting parole.

McDonald knew any opinion he expressed would carry weight with the parole board, but he didn’t know if Jones was ready for the street. “I’ve changed many ways since my injury. I’m doing a much better job at not sinning. Perhaps it was better he was in prison so he could do better too.”

When McDonald finally decided not to intervene, he couldn’t bring himself to tell Jones’ grandmother. “She’s a sweet, kind woman,” he said. “I didn’t want to disappoint her.”

“They never wrote to criticize me,” he added, “but I don’t think they were happy.”

McDonald was as startled as anyone last March when Jones was released and, after a few hours of freedom in New York, taken back into custody. The state Corrections Department said it had neglected to tack time onto his sentence for bad behavior, including two assaults on guards.

A dozen officers took Jones away in handcuffs. “In all my years,” said a senior parole officer, “I have never seen as much hate in a man’s eyes as I saw in his. He looked as though he wanted to kill someone.”

Shavod Jones is scheduled for parole from Auburn state prison in November. He did not respond to a written request for an interview.

His grandmother has moved out of the city. Ron Cook, a staffer at her old church, said Lenora Jones left no forwarding address. “She didn’t want anyone reaching her,” Cook said. “That thing with that boy was real hard on her.”

Although McDonald has not heard from the Joneses lately, he says he hopes to visit Shavod in prison.

Such talk makes some believe he is either a fake or a sap, as he has learned from his brother, also a cop.

“My brother has heard it from some people on the force. Some people think I’m not sincere,” McDonald acknowledges. “Even in my own family, some people find it very difficult, because they’ve been hurt very badly. They ask, ‘How could you forgive him?’ ”

“I’ve told him I’ll break his arms if he brings Shavod Jones into that house; it wouldn’t be fair to Patti Ann,” says a close friend. “But he’d do it!”

Father Judge, the New York Fire Department chaplain and a friend of the McDonalds, has worn the Franciscans’ robe and sandals for 33 years. He says he’s never seen anything like McDonald’s attitude.

“When Shavod’s name comes up, there is no anger. He takes it seriously that Christ said, ‘Turn the other cheek.’

“This is the highest form of forgiveness I know of. You can say it, but to live it every day, when vengeance seems natural . . .” He raises an eyebrow. “There’s something deeper there than you and I know.”

Too deep, apparently, for Hollywood, which has made three films about Joey Buttafucco but not one about his fellow Long Islander, whose autobiography, written with Patti Ann, was published in 1988.

“Producers ask, ‘What’s the payoff? Does he get up and walk at the end?’ ” says Peter Johnson, McDonald’s lawyer. “They want a happy ending.”

So would McDonald. But despite two trips to Lourdes and countless Hail Marys, he’s made no real progress since he suddenly moved his left fingers a bit seven Ash Wednesdays ago.

“You wouldn’t say it’s a lot,” he says, “but even that is a sign of hope.”

His doctor suggests removing the bullet in his spinal canal. In the past, McDonald has viewed surgery as too risky; he could gain some movement and possibly some freedom from the respirator, but he also could lose his ability to speak.

“Now, I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe after Lourdes . . .”

The van is heading back to Long Island. McDonald lowers his chair back and closes his eyes, exhausted. The late-afternoon sun shines on his face and soon he is asleep, the most powerful man in the world.