Emergency room doctors speak out on Southern California gun violence

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On June 23 at 2:25 a.m., two teenage gunshot victims walked through the front door Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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While the trauma team assesses the youth’s gunshot wound, Dr. Brant Putnam, 44, is racing down from the operating room, where he was performing surgery on another patient. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Dr. Brant Putnam helps wheel the wounded youth to the operating room. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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An X-ray shows a bullet in the youth’s spine. The trauma team knows nothing about him. No name, no age, no family. For now, they call him Zinc, a pseudonym the hospital sometimes uses for its John Does. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Dr. Brant Putnam and the trauma team operate on the youth for nearly three hours . (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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The youth had almost 80% of his blood replaced during surgery. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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The emergency room team washes the youth with an antiseptic. He has been intubated and anesthetized. Blood transfusions have begun and the team rushes to get medical equipment ready. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Dr. Brant Putnam, left, sets a clock running in his mind. Two hours is optimum. Three is the limit. Anything longer compounds the trauma with a phenomena known as physiologic exhaustion, when the body has worn itself out trying to compensate for the injury. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Emergency departments in hospitals throughout America have physicians like Dr. Brant Putnam, center, doctors who specialize in saving the lives of shooting victims. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Dr. Brant Putnam finishes the operation. The youth will survive. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Cloths are used to mop up the blood from the youth’s surgery. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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At 5:25 a.m., three hours after the wounded youth arrived, Dr. Brant Putnam pronounces him in critical condition but expected to live. The team prepares to move him to the ICU. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Dr. Brant Putnam, center, holds the youth’s hands to secure his position as he is prepared to go to the ICU. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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The youth is treated in the ICU. The hospital still doesn’t have any information about him. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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The youth has been identified as Leandrus “Lee” Benton, 16. His mother, Connie Greene, changes his bandages. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Connie Greene, whose son Lee has her name tattooed on his arm, dresses her son after changing his bandages about two weeks after the shooting. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Leandrus “Lee” Benton said he was walking home from a party and thought it would be safer to cut through an alley, where he was shot. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Lee makes his way down the hall to the bathroom of his grandmother’s home, where his mother waits to help him shower. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Lee is frail and thin as he looks into a mirror while his mother helps him after a shower. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

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Lee’s aunt and cousin are happy to see him standing and slowly walking around the house. Dr. Brant Putnam says Lee’s youth was a major factor in his survival. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

By Thomas Curwen

Aug. 19, 2013 11:39 AM PT

After he heard the gunshot, Lee Benton sat down, lifted his shirt and saw the hole in his body.

The 16-year-old, who had been at a party in Wilmington, was going to spend the night with a friend. Walking home, the two had decided it would be safer if they took an alley rather than Wilmington Boulevard. It was a little past midnight.

There was no confrontation, Lee says. All he could remember was hearing a gun and feeling a burning pain in his stomach.

His friend, who was hit in the shoulder, was able to call a girlfriend, who met the boys and drove them to the hospital. Lee recalls feeling dizzy and scared.

Dr. Brant Putnam of Harbor-UCLA Medical Center treated Lee. The bullet severed the boy’s inferior vena cava, an injury with a 50-50 survival rate. Putnam’s efforts to save Lee’s life were featured in The Times over the weekend.

Putnam estimates he has treated about 5,000 GSWs – gunshot wounds – and consulted on nearly 2,000 more over the last 20 years. Harbor-UCLA annually treats on average two victims a day.

Firearm-related assaults in California have gone down 74% from 1992 to 2012, according to a recent report by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development, but no matter the trend, Putnam is baffled by the conversation in this country over the 2nd Amendment.

“Guns change lives forever,” he says, “and the debate about gun control is not in step with life on the streets. It’s a different world out there than in the congressional hearings or warm conference room.”

Grace-Ann Dinkins, a surgeon with the MemorialCare Health System, wishes legislators would consult trauma surgeons before casting votes about gun control.

“There are too many guns in our society,” she says, “and they often land in the wrong hands, like a school kid.”

Michael Lekawa, the trauma director at the UC Irvine Medical Center since 1997, describes his job as both fatiguing and frustrating.

Injuries from guns are, from his perspective, unnecessary.

“We don’t do enough to make guns safe,” says Lekawa. “If people saw what a GSW does, they would limit the availability of guns. Look at Space Mountain: When they find a loose bolt, they shut it down, and yet we allow guns into homes where there are children.”

When Lee’s mother, Connie Greene, heard that her son was going to survive the shooting, she remembered two family members whom doctors weren’t able to save.

Jacob Benavidez, a nephew, was 15 when he was shot several times on a street in Long Beach in 2009. Another nephew, Larry Christopher Greene, 23, was killed by gun fire almost a year earlier.

During the first two days of Lee’s recovery, Greene sat beside her son in the ICU. At the time, she didn’t know whether he would live, and she credits her faith for sustaining her.

“I want this story to get out,” she said. “The impact and end results on families and youth that come from these random acts of crime and violence are immeasurable.”

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