MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Two lives were forever changed after a shooting outside of a back-to-school party.
While the gunmen are still free, one of the victims remains in the hospital almost six months later.
James Moton counts his blessings.He was shot multiple times at The Oak Place Event Hall in Holly Springs, Mississippi in August 2018.
“I heard the shots and then I felt it, cause it hit me in my stomach,” he said. “I parked the car. I got out and came up the sidewalk. I was just standing there. That’s all I did.”
Holly Springs Police say, seconds later someone opened fire on the crowd that was waiting to get into a college fraternity party.
“It’s a miracle that this wasn’t a mass shooting with the amount of rounds that was fired and the amount of people that was on the porch,” Chief Dwight Harris, with The Holly Springs Police Department, said.
Moton was air-lifted to Regional One Hospital in critical condition.
The scars from the bullet wounds and seven surgeries are a constant reminder of the months he spent in the hospital fighting for his life.
“They had him bandaged. He was swollen so dog gone big that he didn’t look like my son,” Moten’s father, James Bowen, said.
Javon Richmond, 18, was also shot that night. He was taken to the hospital with multiple gunshot wounds.
One of the bullets hit him in the chest. The other one hit his neck.
Richmond has spent everyday since August 23 in the hospital paralyzed from the neck down.
“A person that young that young to experience something like this that early in life, you hate to imagine anything like that happening to anyone,” Chief Harris said. “I want families to know that we are still actively investigating this matter.”
Investigators are searching for two “persons of interest” in the shooting.
If you know anything, you’re asked to call The Holly Springs Police Department at (662)-252-2122.
All calls are confidential.
