Stray Bullet Tragedy: 15-Year Struggle of Young Brussels Man Left Quadriplegic After Senseless Shooting

As he was about to return home after a short walk with a friend on the Bethléem Square in Saint-Gilles, Adam received a stray bullet. Men from Tbilisi in Georgia had come to settle a score with a cousin involved in a small marijuana trafficking operation worth ten euros. One of them "fired into the crowd" and hit Adam, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. "I remember the ground. The blood I was coughing up. I wanted to sleep. Something kept repeating: ’stay awake, stay awake.’ It was only when I arrived at the hospital that they put me to sleep," he recounts to La Libre.

The young man was hit by a nine-millimeter bullet in the neck, which reached his cervical spinal cord. As a result, Adam is quadriplegic for life, at only 20 years old. He underwent a first operation, remained in a coma for several weeks. In total, he spent two years in the hospital, where he couldn’t even speak. A dark period that he remembers with great pain. "Every time, I thought I was going to die, because the mucus regularly blocks the tracheotomy. I was suffocating. I had to call the nurses to come with a kind of tube to let me breathe again. It’s psychologically traumatic. Not being able to speak, not being understood, not being able to sleep."

Back home in a wheelchair in April 2012, Adam does not accept his new situation. He locks himself in his room and takes refuge in screens. "I didn’t want others to see me. Normal people walk down the street and no one looks at them. Someone like me, they look up and down or with pity. And that look, it kills. I’d rather have indifference," he says. The Brussels resident has the support of his family, but does not appreciate this full-time care: "They ruined my life and blocked my mother’s. She has to take care of me all the time. She can’t go out when she wants to, go on vacation or just breathe a little," the young man fumes.

Five suspects were identified and arrested. But for lack of evidence, four of them were acquitted in 2015 by the Brussels criminal court. The last one was sentenced to six months in prison for carrying a weapon. Adam’s family appealed. After several postponements, the court of appeal finally sentenced the defendants to four years in prison in January 2018, nearly eight years after the events. The family is pleased that justice has finally been served. "It’s proof that there is justice, even if the prison sentences that were handed down will never be up to the harm these people have done: they destroyed my brother’s life," declared one of Adam’s sisters after the verdict.

Adam’s lawyer, Me Pierre Chomé, is demanding 7.2 million euros in damages from the convicted persons. But in the end, the victim will only receive about 20,000 euros from the sale of an apartment. "They inflict a double sentence on him. The State knows that these damages will never be paid by anyone... I am outraged." "I know I’ll never get them. I’m not going to go to Ibiza with that money. It will only serve to improve my quality of life and relieve my aging parents. Nothing more," Adam exasperates. "The taxable event is the fact of being sentenced to pay a sum as soon as it exceeds 12,500 euros. This rate is 3%. To recover this tax, all the sums that will be awarded to the civil party as coming from the patrimony of the person sentenced to pay, will be subject to a privilege in favor of the State," explains Florence Angelici, spokesperson for the FPS Finance.