The day of the shooting started like any other for Oxford High School student Kylie Ossege — until she said she thought a “balloon popped.”
“I fell right to the ground. I remember hearing screams. I saw running, but I couldn’t run. I was already down,” she told the court in her victim impact statement. “I realized what had just happened — I was just shot. I thought I was going to die.”
As she laid on the floor, Ossege said she attempted to get up but her legs weren’t moving. She said she hit her legs in an attempt to regain any kind of feeling. “But not a single thing,” she told the court.
Ossege described feeling warm under her cheek as she laid on the floor. It was the blood-soaked carpet that also made a “squish” sound against her ear.
When she reached her hand over her head, she said she realized it was 14-year-old shooting victim Hana St. Juliana. “I could hear her groaning beside me. Realizing I wasn’t alone, I kept trying to reassure her, ‘someone will come help us, don’t worry, just keep breathing. Just please stay with me.’ I said that to her a thousand times.”
As they lay there “in loneliness,” Ossege described repeating her mother’s phone number “to make sure my brain was functioning” and “creating math problems in my head and solving them to make sure I wasn’t dying.”
Ossege said she spent a week in the intensive care unit (ICU) and five weeks in rehabilitation, learning basic tasks: eating, brushing teeth, showering, getting dressed, walking and climbing stairs.
The bullet had shattered her clavicle, broke two ribs, grazed her spine, causing a spinal cord injury, she said, adding that she underwent surgeries and is still under treatment for it. Since this event, she described not being able to play sports that she loved, returning to her job and walking long distances. Her body, she said, has also lost the ability to keep itself warm or cool according to the temperature outside.
“My life has changed its path entirely,” Ossege said.
