The state of Maryland is now telling Julia Hammond to make it on her own. That she cannot move her body is no longer the state's concern. Money is all. The Julia Hammonds around here will have to look elsewhere for help.
Hammond has been paralyzed from the waist down now for nearly 16 years. It was New Year's Eve, 1975, when everything changed. A carry-out place in Aberdeen. A gunman enters. Shots are fired.
Hammond was 23 then. Now she sits in a wheelchair in her Cockeysville home, slender, medicated, a history of surgery and suffering surrounding her, and she talks about the moment her life changed and about the burden the state of Maryland is threatening to put on her shoulders.
''Joe and I had been dating about four months,'' she says.
She means Joseph Lee, who owned the Aberdeen carry-out back then. She'd gone to the store about 9 that night, and they were waiting for an employee to show up so she and Lee could spend New Year's Eve more festively.
About 10:30, a customer came to the cash register with a bottle of wine. Then, without a word, he pulled out a gun. He shot Lee in the face, and then he shot Hammond in the face. Hammond remembers falling behind the counter and holding the side of her head. Blood was everywhere.
''Get up,'' the gunman yelled. He yanked Lee to his feet and forced him to open the cash register. There wasn't much money inside. The gunman seemed to know there was a safe in the back.
''Joe had a .357 Magnum in the store,'' Hammond remembers. ''It belonged to a friend, a policeman in Ocean City, who'd given it to him. The robber found it. He made Joe give him the money out of the safe, and then he told us to get down on the floor.''
Lee lay face-down, and Hammond was ordered to lie atop him, also face-down. The gunman fired the .357 three times. Hammond's spinal cord was severed. The gunman ran into the night and has never been caught.
''Get up,'' Lee said, still lying on the floor. But Hammond could not move. Get up, he said again. Hammond remembers him finally rolling her over, and the blood pouring out of her, and still she could not move.
Soon there were police in the store, and medics, and they were asking Hammond for her family's telephone number. She remembers twice, maybe three times, they returned to her and said, ''That's not the right number.''
Finally, someone realized her family lived in Baltimore and it was a long-distance call from Aberdeen.
