Savannah couple recounts stray bullet through living room window on New Year's Eve
What happened to George McGarvey on New Year’s Eve likely could happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time.
McGarvey and his partner, Bruce Miller, were in the rear of their Gordonston residence watching television when they heard a deafening noise coming from the front of their house.
“It was close to midnight,” recalled McGarvey, explaining the couple’s annual tradition. “Every year Bruce gets out his mother’s Bible at midnight, opens it randomly and reads whatever is on that page. We then toasted with eggnog before it was literally crash, bang, boom.”
The two were shocked by the horrific noise and wondered if a tree had fallen on the house.
“We were baffled,” McGarvey said. He slowly walked down the hall and spotted a small piece of plaster on the floor. Still confused, he continued into the living room and saw that a handful of framed family photographs on a table by the front window were toppled over and shattered glass seemed to be everywhere.
Upon closer examination of the scene, McGarvey noticed a bullet hole in the bottom of one of the window’s shutters and later found a bullet in the hall.
“It took the police forever to get here ― it was over an hour,” he remembered. When McGarvey asked the officer why he took so long, the cop responded: “Do you realize what we’re dealing with in this city?”
What goes up must come down
McGarvey soon found out that his next-door neighbor also had experienced a shooting, except that the bullet went crashing through a window in their 3-year-old daughter’s room. Miraculously, no one was hurt in either incident, and it’s a mystery as to how the shootings occurred.
“We don’t know if it was a drive by or what,” he said. “We just have no idea, and we’ll never find out. We just pray it never happens again.”
Sometimes on holidays, revelers will shoot guns in the air not thinking that what goes up has to come down.
Looking back, McGarvey is thankful for several things, including that his brother had left the house earlier.
“We had gone out to dinner with my brother and he came over,” he said. “Our (outside) motion sensor light wasn’t working, and he was on the front lawn taking a look. That was about 7 [p.m.].”
He’s also grateful that they weren’t hosting a party because guests would’ve been in the living room. Additionally, he is glad that he has copies of several of the “dear pictures” that were smashed to smithereens.
McGarvey and Miller were in shock for about a week after the random shooting but insist they are not going to “let it ruin our lives.”
“We love our little house, and we love Gordonston,” he explained. When the two moved from New York City in 2019 where they had lived for decades, they chose Gordonston because that was where McGarvey grew up.
“I was raised here by my grandmother and loved it during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s,” he said.
McGarvey, who won an Emmy Award for set design, had a 35-year career in New York and was tired of the big city. Miller is an artist and was a graphic designer for a major designer, and had been there for 50 years.
“We wanted to come home and relax,” McGarvey explained. In December 2019, a month shy of the COVID pandemic shutdown, the two moved into their charming, brick home.
Since then, McGarvey has experienced some health issues but is doing well and “feeling good aside from dodging bullets,” he said.
“When we have family or friends over for dinner, we tell them to wear their bullet-proof vests,” he joked. “We have to laugh a little, but it’s not the least bit funny. We’re over the shock and praying that God will protect us. Guns are just out of control in this country.”
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah couple recounts stray bullet in home on New Year's Eve
