Paralyzed Gun Victim Testifies

Unable to point her finger, a paralyzed teenager lifted her left arm and directed it toward her former boyfriend when a prosecutor asked her Tuesday to identify the teen on trial for the girl’s attempted murder.

“There,” said the girl, known as Sara S. because she is a minor.

Asked why she was confined to a wheelchair, Sara S. replied, “Because I was shot by Jeff Fitzhenry.”

On the opening day of Jeffrey Cameron Fitzhenry’s trial for allegedly shooting Sara S. inside a Palm Desert abortion clinic waiting room in April, the girl’s testimony brought Fitzhenry and several of the girl’s classmates in attendance to tears. Fitzhenry is charged with attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon.

The shooting, 16-year-old Sara S. said, ended her stormy, seven-month relationship with Fitzhenry, 17.

The girl, in a dark pink sweater, her long hair pulled back, testified that she was a high school sophomore when she found out she was pregnant in early April. She said she sought an abortion “because of my age,” and Fitzhenry gave her $300 to help pay for the procedure. But Fitzhenry changed his mind within hours, she said, and later took the money back.

“He called me about [the scheduled abortion] at least every day,” Sara S. said. “He told me I was depriving him of his unborn child. He told me there would be consequences if I went through with it: that if I took something of his, he’d take something of mine.”

The girl said she later pressed Fitzhenry for the meaning of his threat. She said Fitzhenry pointed his index finger out and his thumb up, in the shape of a gun, pointed it at her “and winked at me.”

“Did he appear serious? Was he angry?” Riverside County prosecutor Traci Carrillo asked Sara S.

“Yes,” she answered.

Sara S. cried intermittently during the day’s testimony, her mother wiping away the tears.

A classmate of the girl, known as Lynda H., opened the trial’s testimony by recounting how she and Sara S. drove together from Sara’s home in Thermal to the clinic. There, she said, they found Fitzhenry waiting for them in the parking lot, displaying a black handgun in a body holster.

Sara S. said Fitzhenry told her in the days preceding the scheduled abortion: “I know I said I’d never shoot you, but that might change.”

When Fitzhenry’s attorney, Robert Dunn, asked Sara S. under cross-examination why she wasn’t scared by the gun, she replied, “Because he loved me.” She said she did not believe his threats.

Fitzhenry, 17, cried in response, sniffling and tugging tissues from a box placed atop the defendant’s table.

Sara S. said Fitzhenry’s anger steadily escalated as the three teens walked from the parking lot into the abortion clinic. He continued trying to talk her out of the abortion, she said, and tried to persuade her to leave.

In the seconds before the shooting, Sara S. testified, Fitzhenry grabbed her and repeatedly told her, “Stand up, we’re leaving.”

“He was a lot more angry and frustrated, to the point he had the look of rage on his face ... as if something had snapped,” Sara S. said. “He pulled out the gun, held the gun toward my cheek, and he pulled the trigger.

“I remember my body feeling like it was curling up into a ball, like it was in a fetal position, but my body was still straight. I looked down at my shirt and saw blood everywhere.”

She was shot in the neck, and left mostly paralyzed. Her head supported by a headrest fitted to her black wheelchair, Sara S. said she required six months of hospitalization.

Fitzhenry was arrested hours later, after barricading himself in his parents’ Indio home and swallowing prescription pills.

When her testimony ended, Sara S. was wheeled backward out of the courtroom, facing Fitzhenry as he looked up at her sadly. The two did not make eye contact.