The teenager’s body was limp amid the tangle of wires and tubes that were keeping her internal organs alive until they could be harvested.
The 14-year-old girl wouldn’t need them. A bullet allegedly fired by Uber driver Jason Brian Dalton during his bloody rampage across Kalazmazoo, Mich., Saturday night had struck her as she sat in a car in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel.
She was the seventh person to die in the attack, police said around 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. Headlines were updated to reflect the new death toll; shoulders sank even lower at the loss of one more life. At Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo, the girl’s body was being prepared for the surgery that would remove her organs, Michigan Live reported. The girl’s mother stood at her daughter’s side for what seemed like the last time.
Then she felt her daughter squeeze her hand.
“The only word to describe it is, ‘wow,'” Michigan State Police First Lt. Dale Hinz told Michigan Live. The young victim, who has not been named, went into surgery Sunday morning and is still in critical condition, officials said.
After meeting with the girl’s parents on Sunday, Michigan Republican Gov. Rick Snyder said the teenager is “working hard to stay alive.”
“She’s got all our thoughts and prayers to have a chance to come back,” he told reporters. “So it’s going to be quite a recovery period.”
According to local reports, the girl had stopped at Cracker Barrel with a group of family friends after seeing a show at Western Michigan University’s Miller Auditorium. All four of the women she was with — Mary Lou Nye, 63, of Baroda, Mich., and Mary Jo Nye, 60; Dorothy Brown, 74, and Barbara Hawthorne, 68, all of Battle Creek — were killed when Dalton allegedly fired on their cars.
