‘Was This What It’s Like to Be Dead?’

This is what it might look and feel like to be shot to death in a carjacking:

A pickup sideswipes you as you’re driving down a busy residential street. You pull over and stop, and so does the other driver. He gets out and apologizes. His brakes locked, he says.

Out of nowhere, a teenage gunman suddenly appears over your left shoulder. All you see, out of the corner of your eye, is the barrel of a handgun. It’s maybe 3 inches from your left ear.

Then a blue flash. A biting sting at your left eye. You slump over.

And that’s where violent crime too often ends--in death.

But 51-year-old Judy Showalter didn’t die. She’s tough--and smart. She just played dead.

“I knew immediately that I was shot, and I comprehended what was happening to me,” Showalter said from her hospital bed at Riverside Community Hospital. “I knew I had to pretend to be dead or they’d shoot me again.”

They were after her flashy 1996 BMW, a red beauty with chrome wheels.

One of the two assailants calmly reached in and took Showalter’s pager off her belt. She forced herself to remain limp as one of them grabbed her by her blazer, roughly pulled her from the car and dumped her on the street, by the back tire.

Showalter didn’t cry or whimper or scream or moan. She lay there silently.

“I was wondering, was this what it’s like to be dead? But I knew I wasn’t dead. I could hear sounds around me. And I remember seeing [the gunman’s] face. He wasn’t a bit nervous. He was very matter-of-fact.”

She heard her car driven off. Her head was throbbing. She stood up, blood pouring from her nose and mouth. “I thought now I was going to bleed to death,” she said in an interview Friday.

Showalter struggled up a hill, more than 100 feet, to the nearest house, all the while cupping her left eye to try to stop the bleeding. The front door was blocked by a security gate. She banged on the metal garage door and, after a few minutes, the residents came out. She apologized for bloodying the garage door and their driveway.

They got blankets and towels and sat her down and called 911. On the audiotape of the call, Showalter is heard in the background: “Look at the blood I’m losing!”

Still conscious, still feisty, Showalter asked the couple to call her co-worker Diane Mapes. The women work for the Riverside County Office of Education, and Showalter was going to pick up Mapes to drive with her to a meeting in Indio. But now Showalter was late and wanted her friend to know.

Mapes said: “When the phone rang, I knew something was wrong because she was late. Maybe she had car problems or was in fog. The lady on the other end of the phone said, ‘Your friend’s been in an accident, and she wants to talk to you.’ ”

“Judy, in a strange voice that didn’t sound like her, said: ‘They shot me. Come down now.’ That’s all I remember.” Mapes got in her car and drove five blocks to the scene, only to see her friend swaddled in bloody blankets.

Paramedics sped Showalter to the hospital.

The bullet of a .25-caliber handgun had entered her head, just behind her left eye. It took a downward, diagonal trajectory, searing through her nasal sinuses and shattering her right lower jaw. Then it ripped through her right cheek and tore her Christmas-wreath earring off her right ear.

Had the bullet’s flight been more horizontal, it would have gone through her brain, said Dr. Nicandro Marciano, who treated her. As it was, the bullet missed her carotid artery by half a centimeter, he said. Had it been struck, she probably would have bled to death.

Instead, she has a bruised and bloodied left eye, a small hole in her right cheek, sinuses filled with blood and a shattered jaw that will be repaired with surgery.

“A total miracle,” Marciano said--a refrain that was heard throughout the day at the hospital.

“Better a shattered right jaw than a shattered brain,” Showalter said.

Her alleged assailants were arrested within two hours of the Wednesday morning shooting. Perris city workers saw two men acting suspiciously, then saw the abandoned BMW. Deputies searched the two, found items belonging to Showalter and arrested them.

One is 29. The other--the alleged gunman--is 15, said Sheriff’s Sgt. Mark Lohman. They face other charges in addition to attempted murder and carjacking: assault with a deadly weapon, for allegedly shooting at another motorist earlier that day; strong-arm robbery, and the theft of the pickup truck that sideswiped Showalter’s vehicle.

The two suspects were taken to the hospital and stood outside a window so the Riverside woman could identify them.

“Seeing me there, looking at them, they probably thought they were looking at a ghost,” Showalter said. “That felt good.”