Parents Insist on Making Accidental Shooting a Lesson to Others

Even with 21 shotgun pellets still under his skin and a hole the size of a silver dollar in his back, young Frank Wall’s energy is enough to make his mother roll her eyes and sigh.

She coaxes and finally orders the 10-year-old to a chair in the family’s large farmhouse.

“Now, you sit still and answer his questions,” Bea Wall says, pointing her son toward a reporter at the kitchen table. “Consider it part of your punishment.”

She snags Frank’s 8-year-old brother, Nicholas, by the shirt as he tries to sneak through the kitchen. “You too,” she demands. Nicholas sulks but climbs onto a stool at the counter.

Two weeks earlier, Alvin and Bea Wall’s two youngest were involved in something these strict but loving parents never imagined would happen.

While Mom helped pull a neighbor’s tractor from the mud and Dad was at a livestock auction, Frank and Nicholas took a hunting rifle and shotgun from their father’s gun case.

And as they later admitted they had done at least once previously, Frank practiced loading bullets into the hunting rifle while his little brother rested the 12-gauge shotgun on a chair.

But this time, the unthinkable happened. Unaware the shotgun had a shell in it, Nicholas pulled the trigger.

The blast struck his older brother in the left shoulder, tearing a 4-inch-wide, 8-inch-long canyon halfway across his back and splattering flesh and blood around the kitchen.

Today, the skinny boy with dark, matted hair is mostly recovered, enough at least to chase his brother through the house again. Doctors stitched up most of his wound but left one gaping hole open, stuffed with gauze, so the flesh will grow back and heal properly.

Thankful their two boys are alive, Alvin and Bea Wall are also stunned by the kids’ actions, and they are bent on making the incident an example to others.

The lesson for kids: This is what can happen when you play with guns.

For parents: We trusted our kids as much as you think you can trust yours.

“We never, never imagined they touched the guns when we weren’t around,” says Alvin Wall, a farmer near the tiny town of Sheldon, about 50 miles southwest of Fargo. “And then to find out this wasn’t the first time. It was a shock.”

In rural areas like this, almost everyone has at least one or two guns for bird or deer hunting. They are looked at less as weapons than as essential tools. As with any hazardous tool, parents try to instill in their children the common sense to stay away from them.

As punishment for having not done so, the Walls have decided young Frank--and maybe even Nicholas eventually--must share the story with other youngsters. Schools, clubs, hunter safety classes. Wherever. He must admit to his actions and show the consequences, including his scar and the blood-soaked denim shirt. Mom--only half joking--insists he must also cart around the door to her dishwasher, pockmarked from shotgun pellets.

The idea of telling the story doesn’t sit well with young Frank. It’s all so embarrassing, he says.

His dad steps in with stern words. “You’re going to have to do it every year until you’re 21, so you might as well start practicing,” he says.

Frank lowers his head, recognizing the seriousness in his dad’s voice.

“If I have my say, you will go to the schools along with your bloody shirt if we have to handcuff you,” his dad continues. “There has to be some good to come out of this, Frank.”

It started on a Thursday afternoon when the youngest of the Walls’ eight children were on spring break from school. Alvin Wall was more than 100 miles away at a livestock auction. Bea Wall had just received a phone call from a neighbor, asking for help to free his tractor from the mud.

She left Frank and Nicholas at home with a list of household chores.

Frank says his mom was barely out the door when he turned to his little brother and motioned to the gun cabinet.

The Walls kept ammunition for their guns locked away separately, but Frank and Nicholas had found a shotgun shell and two rifle bullets elsewhere.

As Frank tried to load the rifle, one bullet got jammed in the chamber and the second fell to the floor. He bent over to pick it up just as Nicholas pulled the trigger on the shotgun.

“It felt like a bee sting at first,” Frank says. “I thought I’d gotten hit by just one BB or something.”

Frank ran outside and got into the family truck, believing he could drive down the road and find his mom. Mom, however, had taken the keys.

He ran back inside and, with the help of his little brother, jumped in the shower, still convinced his wound wasn’t that bad.

“I still thought maybe I had only one BB in me,” he says. “Then I heard ‘ping, ping, ping, ping.’ It was all the BBs falling into the shower.”

Nicholas dialed 911. On another phone line, Frank hit the “redial” button. At the other end, family friend Lynn Wolff heard a tiny voice say, “I’m shot.”

Wolff raced to the house 10 miles away. About that time, state Game and Fish Warden Tim Phalen was headed home from work when he heard the call over his radio and headed straight to the Walls’ house.

On the kitchen floor, he found Frank lying on his stomach, his younger brother pressing a blood-soaked towel to Frank’s back. At one point, Nicholas actually had stood on his brother’s wound, trying to apply as much pressure as he could to stop the bleeding.

Frank was conscious, whimpering slightly. Nicholas, Phalen says, was obviously scared, but remarkably calm.

“Frank’s brother was more worried about making sure Mom knew they were going to be at the hospital,” Phalen says. “He was saying, ‘We’ve got to leave Mom a note.’ So he grabbed a big pad of paper and was asking me, ‘How do you spell hospital?’ ”

As Frank was loaded into an ambulance, Wolff raced off to find Bea Wall.

“He drove up to the gate, got out of the car and came trucking across the field,” she says. “As calmly as he could manage, he told me Frank had been shot but was still talking.”

The two raced back to the Wall farm, just missing the ambulance. At the house, Bea saw the blood trail leading to the truck and the pools of blood on the kitchen floor. In the shower, the drain was so clogged with buckshot and her son’s flesh that the water had backed up.

At a hospital 30 miles away, doctors removed as much of the shot as they could and stitched Frank up. His father, paged in the middle of the livestock auction, sped home.

X-rays still show 21 small pellets under the skin on Frank’s back. Some will be there for years before working their way to the surface.

The pellets, along with what will become a large scar, will be reminders of what Frank and Nicholas recognize as the stupidest thing they ever did.

“Curiosity,” Frank says, struggling with the big word, “killed the cat, and it almost killed Frank and Nicholas.”

For their parents, and even Phalen, a game warden for 12 years, the shooting was a rude awakening.

“I’ve got two little kids too,” Phalen says. “The first thing I did when I got home that day was to hug them and say, ‘You know never to touch the guns, right?’ ”

Phalen keeps most of his firearms, even his boys’ BB guns, locked in a gun vault with the ammunition stored elsewhere.

But he says even that is no guarantee against childhood curiosity.

“No one ever thinks their kids would do such a thing,” he says. “As much as you want to believe that, kids are kids, and they are curious.”