(From The Star’s archive) Quiet life shields young victim of violence in Kansas City

This story originally published on Feb. 4, 1995, one year after Tashay Campbell was shot.

Practically everyone says Tashay Campbell is doing great. Better than anyone might expect, considering what the 7-year-old has been through this past year:

Her face shattered by a gunman’s bullet.

Her mouth turned to pulp and bone.

One, two, three, four corrective surgeries.

And now her father, in jail, charged with murdering a motorist.

But Chantelle Mullins, Tashay’s 26-year-old mother, insists: “She’s doing fine. Real good, except.”

Except?

“Except she never talks about the shooting,” Mullins said.

“And she’s afraid to go outside at night.

“And she still has nightmares.About once or twice a month. I hear them. I say, `Come in here with me.’ She lays right back down and goes to sleep.”

One year ago today, the innocent life view of a child was blasted away when a stray 9mm bullet pierced her chin, pulverized her jaw and exploded out her right cheek.

The story of Tashay’s ordeal the night of Feb. 4, 1994 - meant to illustrate the human cost of random violence - also captured the sympathies of the community.

In many ways, the Kansas City family never experienced as much kindness and compassion as they did in the weeks following the trauma. Cards, balloons, letters and white teddy bears - enough teddy bears to fill a little hammock strung above Tashay’s bed - came to the family in waves.

“It was wonderful,” Mullins said.

A year ago, Mullins was just arriving at her mother’s home near 50th Street and the Paseo about 9 p.m. when she saw two cars barreling by, one pursuing the other, the drivers swapping gunfire. A bullet ripped into her mother’s living room and into her daughter’s face.

Homicide Detective Jay Thompson, who investigated the shooting, said Tashay’s case was still open. “Nobody was ever arrested,” he said this week. “As I said that night, there’s more to the story than we’re being told.”

After the stories of Tashay’s shooting, “so many people were interested in how she was doing and stuff,” Mullins said. “Everywhere we go, people say they still pray for her. They ask about her all the time, how she’s doing.”

But that is the question, even now, that is so difficult to answer. Private secrets

On the surface, Tashay, or “Nana,” as her mother calls her, seems a typically joyous, albeit painfully shy, grade-schooler. ` OP After school, she runs around her mother’s one-story home east of Bannister Mall, giggling and smiling, laughing freely, and playing with her 9-year-old brother, T.T., and Tashyra, her 5-year-old sister.

The two girls are the same height and dress exactly the same. They watch “Barney and Friends” together, their favorite television show. They play with their toys.

For the most part, Tashay’s physical scars are healed. Part of her jaw is permanently numb, as doctors had suspected it might be because the bullet destroyed several nerves. The right side of her bottom lip droops a bit. Sometimes her chin tingles or itches, which drives Tashay a bit batty.

She has a pink, ropy scar that her doctor is trying to bring under control. And one top incisor, covered in a silver cap, hangs over her bottom lip, giving her a snaggletooth.

Brett Ferguson, the dental clinic director at Truman Medical Center, says Tashay will definitely need braces. She’ll need lifetime dental care.

The inside of her mouth is still a jumble of missing and crooked teeth. As she grows, it might even be necessary for him to break Tashay’s jaw and reset it so her face doesn’t grow too crookedly. Already, Ferguson says, it’s a bit off-center.

Yet none of that is his greatest worry.

Physically, Ferguson says, Tashay is doing fine. What worries him most, he says, is the psychological aspect.

Indeed, most experts will say that children are amazingly resilient, physically and mentally. But few think that even the most resilient child can have holes blasted in her face and come out emotionally unaffected.

The problem is, Tashay has always been so exceptionally shy that no one knows exactly what’s going on inside.

When she does speak - rarely to strangers - it’s scarcely more than a whisper and seldom more than a word. “Chocolate” is her favorite ice cream, she murmurs; “math” is her favorite school subject. More often, she dips her head shyly and turns her shoulders away.

In the half-dozen times she’s been to a psychologist since the shooting, she’s refused to open up.

It’s as if her thoughts, her words, are private secrets that she shares only with those she trusts absolutely - her mother, her sister, her brother.

“She’s like me - the quiet type,” said Mullins, who tells people her daughter is “doing fine” but concedes that, actually, even she is unsure about that.

She still wonders about Tashay’s emotions the night she was wounded. Tashay lay in the emergency room at Children’s Mercy Hospital, nurses and doctors hurrying about, strange faces and lights in her eyes, her face caked with blood, her teeth and jaw cracked into rice-sized pieces of bone that surgeons would work hours to cement. All around, relatives were crying.

But Tashay didn’t cry.

“It was amazing,” Mullins said. “I don’t know if she was in shock or what.”

The only hint Mullins ever gets that anything is wrong is when Tashay mutters a private fear. Even now, when Mullins pulls up to her mother’s home at night, Tashay says: “No, I don’t want to go.”

And, oddly, after the shooting, she refused to ride the school bus anymore. Her mother now drives her several miles every morning from their home to the Holliday Montessori School near Swope Park.

“I think she’s done really well for everything that’s happened to her,” said Lori McKinnie, who until this year had been Tashay’s teacher since the child was 3. But even she wonders. “She’s a quiet kid and she keeps a lot inside.

“This sounds strange, maybe, but when she came back to school” — with splints in her mouth, bandages on her face, having to constantly dab saliva from her numb lips - “she didn’t care so much about what the other kids thought. She thought about the other kids feeling bad for her.”

Anytime they attempted to help her, to retrieve from her cubbyhole the white cloth she used to dab her lips, “she would say, `It’s OK. Let me do it.’ “ McKinnie said. “Even the 3-year-olds wanted to help her. But she wanted to be self-sufficient.” A family’s pain

The fact is, until recently Tashay’s teachers haven’t known the half of it.

They weren’t aware that in July, Tashay’s father, Tyrone Campbell, was wounded in the left arm with a shotgun after a neighborhood tussle. Only a short time after he left the hospital, Campbell was arrested and charged with second-degree murder in the death of a motorist in a carjacking.

Campbell is being held in the Jackson County Jail. His brother and half-brother are also in jail on different charges, and his uncle is a guard. Campbell’s trial will likely be in March.

“I told her her father didn’t do it,” said Mullins, who supports the children on public assistance and who said she truly thinks their father is innocent.

The police, she said, have always thought Campbell was in a gang. Campbell’s public defender notes that Campbell was convicted of burglary in 1986 but of nothing since.

On the day his daughter was released from the hospital, Campbell dressed up in a giant purple Barney suit and carried balloons for the welcome-home festivities.

Now, on Saturdays, Tashay and the other children visit their father. Said Campbell on a recent visit:

“I don’t think she likes seeing me here.”

Indeed, Mullins said, Tashay probably doesn’t. But she hasn’t said a word.

Whatever she’s feeling, she’s keeping it inside.