Spring Break turns into Spring Disaster 

^{By Gabe Lane}  

^{Staff Writer} 

Attempting to take some time to get off Langston’s campus, these two nursing students were not planning to use their medical training in real time during their spring break.   

On March 18th, Soli Pannell and Asher Bellavigna, students in the Langston nursing program, were on spring break with their friends Jalani Doolin and Mykah Sellers, in Ardmore, Oklahoma. While at the Blue River Campgrounds in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, they heard a gunshot go off nearby while walking along the river.   

“Of course, we’re all alarmed because why is a gunshot going off at a campsite? I mean, there are hunting grounds nearby, but not in the area where we were at, so it was kind of weird,” said Pannel. Having made their way back to the main road, only five minutes after hearing the gunshot, they spotted a man lying in a pool of blood at one of the campsites.   

Pannel and Bellavigna quickly stepped into action and began to assess the situation while Doolin, a junior psychology major, was sent to go after the warden. The three remaining students realized the man had been shot. Bellavigna began to apply pressure to the wounds and Pannel took some towels and a hoodie that were hanging on a clothesline behind them to use as tourniquet.   

“When I came up to him, I could see he had been shot and so we put two and two together like oh, that must have been the gunshot we heard,” said Pannel. They asked the man where the gun was and his son luckily put it away in the truck. The injured man was still conscious and told the students that he had accidentally shot himself.   

First noticing the wound on his leg, Bellavigna used the makeshift tourniquet to stop the bleeding. Pannel then looked at the man’s chest and saw that his upper chest was also covered in blood. She pulled out her pocketknife, cut the shirt open and found another wound where a bullet had stuck in his chest. She then began to apply pressure to the second wound.   

At first the warden, trying to help, had driven to the wrong campsite. “I don’t blame him. The warden is more for hunting and fishing, but he was driving like 70 mph down the dirt road, almost hitting us. I actually had to shove one of my friends out of the way,” said Bellavigna. Doolin again going after the warden, went to flag him down and bring him to the correct campsite. Sellers then went to talk to the man’s 12-year-old son who was with his father at the time of the incident.   

“At this point there was nothing else that we could do except keep pressure on his wounds and keep him talking, that way he doesn’t pass out on us because obviously he’s lost a lot of blood,” said Pannel. They waited 15-20 minutes before the ambulance and police arrived on the scene.  

“What ended up happening was he had his gun fully cocked and loaded,” said Pannel. “He placed the gun in his left jacket pocket and ended up tripping over a rock which caused the gun to flip out and hit the rock that set the gun off. The bullet traveled through his left knee and into his right chest cavity, where the bullet ended up being stuck.”   

Although he is only a first-year nursing student, Bellavigna had already decided that he wanted to go into ER nursing. He said, “I usually enjoy high pressure, fast passed situations like this, so it really just confirmed that I’m going into the right field.   

A day after the incident, they were told the man was now out the hospital and doing well. The doctors said that the man is very fortunate to be alive, any minute longer and he would have been dead.