“You might be a redneck if you got a couch outside!” Doris Jean Burnett joked as she talked to us from her outdoor couch.
As we talked to her, Jean also had a warning for us. “Whoever did it doesn’t even know they did it. They could do it again. Watch out!”
That’s because Jean was sitting in the same place on the couch around noon on Sunday when she was hit by a stray bullet.
Jean remembers being shocked by the gunshot. “We weren’t sure. It took us a few seconds. I was, like, ‘I think I’ve been shot.’ That’s what I said when I went to the fire station. ‘I think I’ve been shot.’ They’re like, ‘You think?’ Well, we heard ‘pop, pop’ and I’m hurting really bad and blood was gushing out my arm, so…”
Coincidentally, it happened just a block and a half away from the Brooksville Police Department. So when Jean got shot, her friend ran across the street for help.
“The bullet landed between the bones. It didn’t shatter the bone. It just tore the nerves and the muscles,” she explained.
But her main problem is that the bullet is still right where it was when she showed up to Brooksville Regional Hospital. “The [doctors] said they don’t do that. I would have to consult a surgeon. I don’t have insurance,” Jean told us. “The doctor said sometimes [the bullet] works itself out. That ought to feel real good.”
Still, neither Jean nor Brooksville Police know who fired the gun or why. “That’s a question for them. I don’t know. I would like to ask them the same question. Don’t they know what goes up must come down? It’s got to land somewhere.”
Unfortunately for Jean, that happened to be right between the bones in her forearm.
10 News contacted Brooksville Regional Hospital to find out why they couldn’t remove the bullet despite Jean being uninsured. The hospital told us they couldn’t comment because of patient privacy laws.
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