On the night of July 19th 2012, in the city of Aurora, a man walked into the midnight showing of Batman, and began shooting. That night 12 people lost their lives and many more were injured. Amongst the injured is Petra Anderson with a truly remarkable story. Somehow her story has become buried in the mass of details emanating from this incident. Four shots hit her and one went through her brain. Yet the bullet through her skull caused minimal damage. How is that?
Unkown even to Petra Anderson she had a birth defect that created a small tube like cavity in her brain. This cavity was filled with fluids and was free from brain tissue. Miraculously, when she was shot, the bullet smashed through her skull and entered her brain at the same exact spot where this defect was. The bullet was able to pass through this channel of fluid and go from one end of the brain to another without hitting any tissue or any blood vessel. Her neorosurgeon had this to say:
“It would be hard to create a path similar to this where it goes all the way from the front to the back and misses every single blood vessel, doesn’t bother any of the major structures, and leaves her able to talk and move everything and not be paralyzed or dead. Never in my entire career have I seen a case where a bullet has traversed the entire brain like this and not caused severe damage or death.”
Related links:
Petra Anderson story on NBC
Ways to donate money to victims of shooting
Stories of victims
Story of heroism