‘I just don’t understand’: Uber driver recalls being shot trying to intervene in South Side robbery
CHICAGO — A terrifying experience unfolded in Chinatown early Wednesday morning for Uber driver Paul Bessette. He had just dropped a passenger off at a bar near 22nd Place and South Wentworth Avenue and was parked waiting for his next ride, when he saw two people beating up and robbing an old man.
“I turned towards them and I honked my horn and laid on the horn,” Bessette said. “One of them turned around and shot me right through the window of my car.”
Bessette said the bullet hit his passenger window and went straight through his seatbelt.
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“I just grabbed my chest, squeezed it really hard. I started to feel tingling across my chest,” Bessette said. “I knew I had to get out of there so, I turned my wheel all the way and gunned it.”
A photo of Bessette’s passenger side window. A photo of Bessette’s passenger side window.
Bessette drove South down Wentworth Avenue, pulled over and called 911 before paramedics arrived and took him to the University of Chicago Medical Center.
“My kids are who I thought about when I called 911,” Bessette said. “I really just wanted to give my kids a hug.
“[The doctors] said, ‘You got really lucky man. This is a superficial bullet that went across your chest that didn’t go into your organs.'”
An extremely close call for a Chicagoan who experienced, firsthand, the kind of violence that can take place in the city he calls home.
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“We’re all a bunch of people in the city who are just working and the city is not working for us,” Bessette said. “Why do people think they can just behave however they want, and beat people up, steal from them and when approached, escalate the violence and shoot ’em? I just don’t understand.
“I’m thankful, really thankful I can spend the rest of my life with my kids.”
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