Bullet fired at Lane Field ruptures little boy's spleen, shatters Akron community's heart

The school year is a month old, and yet a desk still sits empty at the back of Tara Green's second grade classroom at Helen Arnold Community Learning Center in Akron.

It was never adorned with the colorful, handwritten name tag that graces the top of every other metal desk in the room. Its cubby lacks pencils, notebooks, crayons, glue sticks. And yet, wherever Derrick Miller's desk sits, the empty desk sits close by.

Derrick is saving it for his friend. As soon as his teacher sets a stack of books or binders on the desk, Derrick politely reminds her, "That's Tyren's desk."

Tyren Thompson wasn't with his classmates at Helen Arnold to start the year. On the first day of school, a surgeon was stitching his abdomen back together after a bullet tore through several organs in his 50-pound body earlier that week.

That bullet was one of about a dozen allegedly fired by a 16-year-old boy in a crowd of hundreds in the middle of back-to-back pee wee football games on a Sunday afternoon in Akron.

It entered the left side of Tyren's 7-year-old body, collapsing his lung and busting a hole in his diaphragm. The bullet obliterated his spleen and sliced into his colon before exiting his diaphragm through a second hole, breaking a rib and lodging on his back against his heart.

With one fingertip inside of the boy's entrance wound, his surgeon at Akron Children's Hospital could feel the bullet, the boy's aorta and his heart, all at the same time.

Tyren survived, even returning to the school for a brief visit, walking through the doors of Helen Arnold to the shock of everyone, less than three weeks after being shot.

But that single bullet damaged more than just Tyren's body. It also ripped a path of destruction through his family, his football team, his friends, his school and his community.

The scope of gun violence in a city or a neighborhood is often measured by the number of people wounded and killed. Those numbers tell a fraction of the story. The blast radius of one shooting, one bullet, is always much wider than the numbers can show.

In the case of the Lane Field Park shooting that injured Tyren and a 19-year-old who was shot in the leg, the impact goes far beyond the two victims.

Tyren's little sister spent her first week of kindergarten clinging to her principal's side, refusing to join her peers in class.

Tyren's desk sits empty with his friend wondering when he will return. (The school learned in the last few weeks that he likely won't, as his family relocated, but he hasn't been officially unenrolled.)

A social worker assigned to Helen Arnold who is a pee wee coach is now tasked with figuring out which kids — including in his own family — need the most help after a shooting he also witnessed.

A principal who was planning to retire can't bear to think of leaving her students, even though most of them seem to have moved on from the shooting like nothing happened.

In a community where gun violence is simultaneously traumatizing and normalized, the ripple effects of one bullet still cause significant trauma for dozens, even hundreds of people.

'That baby's gone!' Chaos and tears as gunshots ring out at Lane Field

Sunday, Aug. 20 was a hot summer day on the last weekend before most kids would return to school. Lane Field Park, a wide expanse of football fields, a running track, baseball and softball fields and playground equipment tucked into the Sherbondy Hill neighborhood, had just hosted its fourth pee wee football game of the day. The games went youngest to oldest, with 6-year-olds up first.

The 11-and-under game had just finished, with kids slapping hands and saying "good game" before heading to opposite end zones for a chat with their coaches and to be dismissed.

A moment later, pee wee coach William McWain said, it was "pure panic" as about a dozen shots rang out across the fields.

"People running, hitting the ground, not knowing was anybody harmed or what's going on," McWain recalled.

He said he looked around quickly for the kids on his team, including his own son, but also for his wife and youngest daughter, who is a cheerleader. Kids and adults around him screamed in fear.

A single shooter had fired in the direction of the jungle gym before fleeing. Word spread quickly that a child was hit. McWain consoled a referee who was hysterical and crying out "that baby's gone" after seeing people carry the injured boy toward the cars.

Multiple parents thought it was their child who was shot, McWain said. He found out a few hours later it was Tyren. His heart sank.

McWain wasn't Tyren's coach but knew the boy from school. McWain is a case manager for Minority Behavioral Health, and he and a therapist are permanently assigned to Helen Arnold, a small school with an it-takes-a-village mentality where staff members know almost every student.

He stayed at the field long after the shooting, sitting around with a few friends who had also been there, talking through what had happened, asking each other the unanswerable question:

When would it all stop?

Repairing the damage from a single 'R.I.P.' bullet

Trauma Medical Director and pediatric general surgeon Dr. Nathan Heinzerling was just starting his on-call shift at 5 p.m. at Akron Children's Hospital when he received word a 7-year-old patient with a gunshot wound would be coming from Cleveland Clinic Akron General.

People at the scene, which was less than 2 miles from the downtown hospital corridor, put Tyren into a vehicle and drove him to the closest emergency room.

Although the Cleveland Clinic facility is a Level 1 trauma center, the highest level, it rarely treats kids because Akron Children's Hospital is right across the street. But when Tyren arrived on their doorstep, the staff worked to stabilize him before an ambulance transferred him to the facility better equipped for his needs.

Heinzerling and the doctor who was on call before him met Tyren in the emergency room, where he already had a tube down his throat breathing for him, and another in his chest to re-inflate his collapsed lung. The boy was bleeding into his belly, and Heinzerling knew he needed surgery as soon as possible.

Tyren was just stable enough to do X-rays and a CT scan. The X-ray of his chest showed a single bullet that looked ludicrously like an octopus emoji. The end of the bullet facing up was round and intact. The end facing down had broken apart, with tentacle-like arms spreading outward, each one razor-sharp.

"As soon as it hits soft tissue, it starts opening up, so it creates as much of a blast and damage effect," Heinzerling said. "That's the type of bullet this is."

He identified the bullet as hollow-point known as a "Radically Invasive Projectile" — R.I.P. for short.

It sat between Tyren's spine and his heart.

By the time they got him upstairs, the boy's heart rate and blood pressure were starting to tank. Heinzerling opened Tyren's abdomen to release the pressure of the blood building in his belly while the anesthesiologist gave him more blood, fluid and resuscitation drugs to keep his heart pumping. Heinzerling made a small hole in the sack surrounding the heart to see if it was filling with blood, but it wasn't. That was good news — the surgeon avoided cracking open Tyren's chest.

Heinzerling identified the injuries to Tyren's spleen, which was bleeding profusely, and determined he couldn't salvage it. He removed the organ — humans can live without a spleen — along with the damaged portion of Tyren's colon, washed out the area and packed his belly with sterile surgical towels. That would be all they could do that night. Tyren's organs needed time to rest before they could be fully repaired. He stayed in the ICU under sedation.

Back at home that night, Heinzerling could barely sleep, waking up every 45 minutes or so to check Tyren's chart, making sure he hadn't taken a turn for the worse. Heinzerling said his wife is used to his restless nights worrying about a patient. Their four dogs, less so.

Two days later, Heinzerling closed the section of Tyren's colon that had to be resected. It took two more days for Tyren's swelling to go down so another surgeon could fully close his abdomen. As his classmates enjoyed their first day back to school, Tyren was in his third surgery in a week.

Tyren spent two weeks in intensive care, and after just a few days on a regular floor, headed home. He should have no severe long-term issues because of the shooting, his doctor said, but will be more vulnerable to infection without a spleen.

Heinzerling said he has seen wounds like Tyren's all too often.

"We've had some that, if the bullet would have been a centimeter higher and not gone through the diaphragm it could have not needed a surgery," he said. "On the other hand, it could have been two centimeters higher.... Those patients, we don't even see because they don't make it to the hospital."

'Isn't that Tyren?' Shooting devastates Helen Arnold principal

Helen Arnold Principal LaMonica Davis was home with her husband that Sunday night when a teacher sent her a post she'd seen on Facebook. "Isn't that Tyren?" the teacher asked.

The post showed a picture of a happy kid in a football uniform, with a message above it saying this boy had been shot at his pee wee game.

"I screamed," Davis said.

She called the boy's aunt, who confirmed it was true. She then called Tyren's first grade teacher, Denise Williams, who fell to her knees and cried and prayed.

Davis couldn't just sit at home, so she and her husband headed for the hospital, determined to see her Tyren.

It would have been tragic for any child to be shot, Davis said, especially a child in her school. But there was something about it being Tyren, who loved his principal and would run to her side, that shattered Davis's heart.

After her best efforts to talk her way into Tyren's ICU room were flatly rejected, Davis found his family in the waiting area. Davis's husband, Gerald, is a deacon in their church. He gathered the seven or so family members and even a security guard nearby, and they prayed.

During the car ride home, Davis cried and called out to God to save the boy as if he were her own.

"All I kept thinking is: 'He's not going to make it. He's not going to make it. This little child's not going to make it,'" Davis said.

Helen Arnold has had only one principal. Davis grew up in the neighborhood that is now home to the school, which opened in 2007. Her brother used to hang out with other neighborhood kids on the patch of sand and dirt where her school now sits, just on the outskirts of downtown.

Her mother still lives nearby, and on New Year's Eve, had a gunshot come through her bedroom. They assume it wasn't malicious, just someone firing shots in celebration. Davis's mother would have been in bed when the shot punched a hole in her headboard, but Davis had called moments earlier to wish her a happy new year.

Davis is used to hearing gunshots in the neighborhood around the school and knows her students are too.

Since 2019, the 44307 ZIP code in Akron, which covers the Sherbondy Hill neighborhood that includes Helen Arnold and Lane Field, had the highest per-capita gun homicide rate in the city at 2.2 deaths per 1,000 residents.

Any day of the week, a Helen Arnold student walks through the school's doors with a fresh trauma, whether someone they know was shot, their parents had a fight or they walked past a crime scene on their way to school. Davis lost one student to a house fire in 2017.

But this was the first time one of her students had been shot. Davis has come to school every day since, providing positive updates on the morning announcements about Tyren's progress and smiling for news cameras and her students.

Beneath the smile, Davis wrestles with bigger demons than she lets on in the wake of the shooting.

"For 20-some years I've had control of situations," she said while weeping, her hands covering her eyes. "I had control of my school. I had control of parents. I had control of students, whether their behaviors were good or bad, I had a fix on it. I could try and fix it. But I couldn't fix this with Tyren. I couldn't fix it. I couldn't fix it. But I had to come to school the next day and smile and just pray to God that he was going to be OK.

"It worked. But ever since I feel like I have lost of all my sense of being the safety net for those kids."

She was planning to retire after this school year. Her husband joked with her, saying he always knew that was a lie. But now, she can't see leaving.

"I can't leave them," she said. "I feel like they need me. And I'm not saying I'm Superwoman. I'm not saying I'm all that and a bag of chips, but it's just something about these kids, they need to feel a sense of belonging, and that someone does have control."

Her grief only deepened when she found out the teen arrested in the shooting was another boy she tried to save.

'A punch in the gut.' Accused shooter is former Helen Arnold student

In the first days of school in Sara Wilkerson's fifth grade classroom this year, a few students had questions about the shooting. The first thing they wanted to know was who did it.

Wilkerson gave them an honest answer at the time, that it was still under investigation.

Days later, she learned the teen accused in the shooting was, in a way, in the room with them when the kids asked her that question. His face can be found in several of the dozens of pictures she has of former students on a cabinet behind her desk.

The teen, whom the Beacon Journal is not identifying because he is a juvenile and has not been charged as an adult, was a former Helen Arnold student, one who used to come back to visit after he went on to middle and high school.

In one of the pictures on the cabinet, taken just two years ago, Wilkerson had spotted him as she was driving and pulled over and they took a selfie, the teen smiling with his usual closed-mouth grin.

Finding out he had been arrested in Tyren's shooting, Wilkerson said, was "a punch to the gut."

"Knowing he was one of mine, knowing that I had a good relationship with him as his teacher," she said. "Knowing that he had come to me after he left here for help, help with school. When I would see him in the neighborhood or out on the street, he always acknowledged me, always said hi. He was always very cordial, very nice, very, very, very, respectful towards me. That's where it hit hard. Because I know he has the caring side to him."

Still, Wilkerson said she knew he had little support or supervision at home and feared he was headed down a dangerous path.

She wants to see him now. She wants to hug him and tell him she still loves him.

"I would always tell him I love him, and he'd tell me he loved me back," she said.

If she could, she said, "I'd tell him I care about him, (that) I wish he had made better choices. And just to be honest with everything."

Wilkerson hasn't told her students that the person arrested for the shooting once sat in their chairs. If he's convicted, it may be a lesson for future students, but not yet, she said.

They also asked her why, and "who would target a kid?"

"I explained, no one targets a child," she said. "I said it was a careless act."

'I don't like guns.' Friend worries about brother, himself

Fifth grader Chance Bivins wasn't at the field that day, but his older brother was there.

Chance knows Tyren from school. Their families are also close, and he considers Tyren a cousin. Chance's brother came home that night and told him what happened.

"He said that 'your little cousin got shot,'" Chance said.

He was sad, he said, and worried about Tyren, who is a few years younger than him, but the two liked to play games together.

Chance said he worries about his 15-year-old brother sometimes when he goes out. What if someone has a gun that goes off by accident? Or what if people are fighting and someone pulls out a gun and shoots? His brother could get hurt.

He worries the same thing could happen to him some day.

"I don't like guns," the 10-year-old said. "I don't like violence. Guns should be tortured. If I was the president, I would have tortured all the guns. Because nobody likes guns. It's just hurtin' people."

Chance's mother, Jamia Truss, shares his worries. Her older son was scared to go back down to Lane Field, she said, but Truss is a cheerleading coach, and they felt like they didn't have a choice. Several families have pulled out of the cheerleading organization, she said.

"They were really frightened, and it's just sad," she said. "We as parents have got to do better. We as a community have to do better, because it's just too much."

'My mind kept getting madder and madder.' Tyren's shooting angers classmate

Demetria Miller, the mother of Derrick, the boy who is saving a desk for Tyren, said she speaks with her son about guns regularly. She has to, she said, because she has a gun.

It's locked away in a safe, she said, but still, she said her son knows he's not allowed to touch the safe or the gun.

"He knows guns are to be taken serious, not to hurt people," she said.

Miller said she also talks to her son about what to do in a shooting, especially if one happened in his school, a rare occurrence but one that plays out in the United States at a far greater rate than in other countries with stricter gun laws. She's told him to follow the direction of his teachers, but if someone fires a bullet through his classroom door and there's nowhere else for him to go, that he should act like he's already dead.

"You've got to think about, are your kids prepared for that action?" she said.

Derrick plays football with Tyren on the Bengals pee wee team but had already gone home that Sunday when the shooting occurred. Miller was hoping her son wouldn't hear what happened. Despite all the preparation for the possibility of gun violence, she wanted to protect him from the reality of it. But Derrick saw Tyren on the news that night and asked his mom why his teammate was on TV.

"I said someone was doing some nonsense at a kid's football game and a kid got accidentally hurt," she said.

The second grader said hearing the news about Tyren "made me really mad."

"I was worried and my mind kept getting madder and madder and madder and madder and madder," he said.

The 7-year-old said a hug from his mom made him feel better.

"I'm glad my mom came to me and gave me a hug," he said. "That made me feel better. I wasn't mad after because she hugged me."

Derrick also loved getting to see Tyren again at football practice and when Tyren came to visit school. Still, he had to keep his distance so Tyren wouldn't get hurt or sick.

"I just wanted to give him a hug," he said.

Second graders draw pictures and write notes for Tyren

Tara Green's class list for the year was finalized in August, so when the shooting happened, she knew he was one of her students. She didn't know Tyren well but knew his injury was going to hit her students hard.

She rethought her approach to her classroom and her teaching, making sure to stick to a schedule and preparing students for any deviations, including ones that would involve loud noises, especially fire and lockdown drills. On the playground, she stayed on high alert, finding herself nervous for the first time in her 12 years at Helen Arnold about the neighborhood around the school.

She waited to put Tyren's name on a desk, not wanting to prompt any questions students didn't already plan to ask. But the questions came on the first day, and Green knew she had to pivot.

"It was like, 'OK, we do have to make sure...we do deal with this, because there are people that are affected by it,'" Green said.

She worked with school counselor Bryce Harris to talk to the students about what happened in a truthful but age-appropriate way.

Green focused on how they could help cheer up Tyren, how they could help him get better.

She designated a desk for him, the one she put next to Derrick because she knew the boys played football together. She told students if they felt sad they could draw Tyren a picture or write him a note and put it in his desk, and Principal Davis would deliver it when she went to visit him.

Students created a stack of artwork and notes. But before Davis had the chance to deliver them, Tyren dropped by the school for a visit.

'My Super hero, Tyren Strong.' Boy and community try to heal

Tyren walked in the front door of Helen Arnold clutching his sister's hand, flanked by another sister and their parents.

Davis was the first to greet him, wrapping her arms around him before leading him toward the cafeteria to see his friends. Williams, his first grade teacher, was waiting for him as well, enveloping him in a hug.

"Oh, my baby boy!" she said as she hugged him. "Let me look at you."

He looked, if you didn't know, like nothing had happened. He was perhaps a little thinner, a little paler, and certainly a lot more subdued than the bouncy, energetic, Spider-Man-loving, Hot-Taki-eating Tyren they all once new. But that he was there at all, Davis said, was a miracle.

Williams said last year, Tyren was so excited to start football practice.

"'Ms. Williams, I can't go to Boys and Girls Club tonight because I have football practice,' 'Ms. Williams, I had football practice yesterday,'" he would tell her. "And I would tell him, 'You make sure I get that schedule so I can come watch you.'"

Tyren's doctor said he will be able to play football again. But he is on injured reserve this season, needing a few more months to heal.

He hasn't come back to school yet, but a family move may have him enrolling elsewhere when he is able to return. He may never occupy that desk in Green's classroom.

But his family expressed gratitude for all those in the community who helped him get this far.

In several statements sent through Tyren's mother, Jazmere Stephens, family members thanked the hospital staff and those at the field who saw Tyren was injured and took him to the hospital.

Stephens declined to be interviewed, but said that the events had traumatized her entire family, especially her.

She wasn't at the field that day, she said, and feels like she wasn't where she was supposed to be protect her son. She's asked herself "why" every night since.

"This whole situation with my son is just a total shock," she said. "I never in my LIFE ever thought I would get a call saying my SON has been shot."

Tyren's grandfather, Reggie Greene, said he was grateful Tyren got justice before he even left the hospital with the arrest of his accused shooter. "My Super hero, Tyren Strong," he wrote.

Tyren also had something of his own to say.

"Tyren says, 'Me getting shot makes me sad,'" his mother wrote. It makes him "not want to go places," even football games, she said, although he's attended a few. He doesn't even want to be at friends' houses for long.

But energy wise, he's just about back to his old self, she said, like nothing happened.

'It shouldn't be that way.' One bullet's lasting impact

Weeks after the shooting, coach William McWain's daughter still wanted to sleep in her parents' bed every night.

But at school and at football practice, most of the kids the Helen Arnold social worker and coach sees day to day seem fine.

Kids may show their grief and trauma in different ways — some immediate, others months later or never at all, he said. They may have behavioral issues, become unusually quiet or have trouble sleeping. But for those who show no outward issues, McWain worries there's another issue at play: the normalization of gun violence.

"I think just unfortunately in this neighborhood in the African American community, you're dealing with trauma always," he said. "The trauma almost becomes normalized, and it shouldn't be that way."

At the same time, he said, he doesn't want to make kids panic. He wants them to feel safe, especially at school. That's why he puts on his own "shield," to be there for the kids.

Through Minority Behavioral Health, he works to instill the organization's values into students: truth, justice, balance, order.

He's up against the rest of these kids' worlds, though, especially when it comes to media they consume daily.

"I think society pushes a narrative, sets the tone of what's cool or what makes you tough or what makes you a certain way," he said.

Akron Public Schools has a crisis response team that dispatches out to schools immediately following a trauma like a shooting. The district also has several partnerships with counseling services, but it does not have an official gun violence prevention program. Several Helen Arnold teachers said they have used a hodgepodge of approaches but are mostly on their own to talk to their kids about guns and gun safety.

Wilkerson said she addresses it with her fifth graders every year.

"I tell them that people have guns for a reason, that their reasoning is their own business, that there's a good way to have them and an illegal way to have them," she said. "The good way is to have it registered and have a permit and have them locked up and safe because kids should not be anywhere near them or around them... I say the negative way is how we see them on the streets, purchased illegally, handed off illegally, not registered, not carried how you should have them, and used for violent purposes. Because that's what's going to get you in trouble."

Maybe one day, what happened to Tyren — and the former Helen Arnold student accused of shooting him — will be a lesson for her future students. Wilkerson wonders if that teen knows the boy he's accused of hurting is a member of the Helen Arnold family.

Davis wants the teen to know he's still part of that family. And despite what he's accused of doing, Davis is, in a way, relieved. In jail, she said, "he's safe now."

Davis said she doesn't "love him any less" for what he's accused of doing, "but I just pray that God will change his heart."

For the rest of the neighborhood and even the city of Akron, Davis suspects something about this shooting has broken through the consciousness of a community numb to gun violence. She suspects it's because a 7-year-old child got hurt, and so many people saw it happen.

It feels, she said, like the streets have been quieter.

"People are saying, 'it could have been mine,'" she said. "It has to stop. It has to stop."

Contact education reporter Jennifer Pignolet at jpignolet@thebeaconjournal.com, at 330-996-3216 or on Twitter @JenPignolet.

This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Akron shooting ruptures boy's spleen, breaks community's heart