Trish is a 31-year-old activist living in Los Angeles. At a protest for Black Lives Matter on May 30, 2020, police shot her with a rubber bullet, breaking her nose and lacerating her face. Dr. Urmen Desai, a Beverly Hills, California, board-certified plastic surgeon, was on call in the ER that day, and he treated her gruesome injuries and restored her nose to its original state. This is her story, as told to Alix Tunell, edited for length and clarity.
Warning: Graphic images below
I think it’s important to get out there and explain what’s going on, because I don’t really think people have an idea of what the protests were like. There is footage of a reporter trying to document what happened on the day I was shot, and she called Los Angeles “the new Baghdad.” I don’t like how sensationalist that is, but it really was chaotic and it really was violent. I thought that I was going to be arrested and that’d be the worst of it. But I definitely got more than I bargained for.
The BLM protest that day was at Pan Pacific Park in the Fairfax neighborhood of L.A. It had started at 2 p.m., and I didn’t arrive until about 6:30, to give you an idea of how slowly things had been progressing at that point. I’d planned to meet up with friends, so I showed up alone. The scene was chaotic as soon as I walked up—people had already been teargassed; dumpsters were on fire; and there was a line of police officers in a blockade, facing the crowd of protestors gathered in the middle of the street. I was there to peacefully protest, as were many others, but it felt like a dangerous situation.
I’d been at a protest the night before too, and I had seen police use a lot of the same kettling tactics. There had been maneuvering and grandstanding, and some rubber bullets had been shot, but where they’re supposed to be shot—at the ground or below the waist. I expected the same here.
At one point shortly after I got there, some fire trucks pulled through the crowd and a motorcade of police officers on motorcycles came through, so there was a tidal movement where people would disperse and then line up again. Then the police would throw a smoke bomb into the crowd, and people would try to toss it back. It was very frenzied.
Curfew was instituted for 7 p.m., and almost the second the clock hit is when the cops started to advance on us, their guns at the ready. I was at the front of the crowd. People started running away, and I thought, I’m just going to walk back slowly, with my hands in the air, and not draw attention to myself. I was in this no-man’s-land situation, with cops 10 feet ahead of me and a crowd dispersing 10 feet behind me, but I kept moving slowly, with my hands up.
I got shot in the fanny pack first, which I didn’t really feel, but to give you an idea of how hard it hit, the zipper around the fanny pack burst, my hand sanitizer and vape pen shattered, and my car keys were destroyed.
Then I got hit in the face. The shot came from my left-hand side, out of my periphery, and you can see that pretty clearly, based on where my scars are and how my nose was displaced. I immediately knew that my nose was broken. I felt the shock of being hit and the reverberation of that hit—and the way it felt, I thought that something exploded and I had gotten hit with a trash can lid. The impact was so explosive that I figured it was something much larger than a rubber bullet.
I didn’t really have time to think about it, because the police were continuing to advance, so I just got out of Dodge. Somebody handed me a towel to put around my face as I was running, and I rounded the corner and found this little alcove in a building where I could sit down and assess the damage. I had this moment of debate with myself over whether I wanted to look at my face. Is the psychology of seeing this going to be helpful, or is it going to shut me down? Am I going to pass out if I look at this? Am I not going to be able to help myself or get through this if I see this?
But at the same time, there was so much numbness in the area—I didn’t know if I had teeth left either. I decided I had to look, and when I did, I was like, OK, it’s just the nose, I can live with this. My next thought was that I’m uninsured.
There was a guy parked on the street who had seen me, and he was like, “Get in, let’s go.” He drove me to Cedars-Sinai, but that was really difficult because even though this was clearly a medical emergency, the police wouldn’t let us through blockades and kept telling us to reroute.
Initially, when I got to the ER, the staff were going to make me wait because there were a couple of people in line, but then they saw that there was a blood clot forming and coming out of my nose, so they moved me up. And it’s the best luck in the world that Dr. Urmen Desai was the on-call plastic surgeon that day. He really looked out for me, and from top to bottom, I have nothing but amazing things to say about my experience with him.
The nurse gave me morphine, then I had to do a CT scan, to make sure that the impact didn’t cause any bone fragments to lodge in other parts of the body. There are cases of that happening with rubber bullets, but mine was a clean break. Two hours later, Dr. Desai injected some lidocaine into my nose and upper lip, in preparation to reset the bone, but that, along with whatever morphine was left, was all I had in my system.
I wasn’t prepared for the level of pain that followed. It took him between 10 and 15 minutes to reset my nose, and it was horrendous. I was scream-crying for most of it, and Dr. Desai stayed so cool throughout and kept calling me a champ, even as I was wailing. When he was resetting my nose, blood was just gushing down the back of my throat—and because my lip was so badly swollen, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut, so blood was also pouring out of my mouth. It was to the point where he actually had to give me one of those suction straws so that I could suck the blood out of my mouth while he was resetting my nose. He’d push it a little bit, all the blood would gush, I’d scream and cry, he’d give me a moment, then we’d do it again.
[Dr. Desai writes in an email that Trish “had bilateral nasal bone fractures as well as a septal fracture. She also had a laceration of the left nasal sidewall, with metallic debris embedded in her soft tissues from the gunshot. I cleaned out all of the debris, repaired the laceration, and performed an open reduction of her nasal bones as well as her septum. After realigning her nasal bones and septum, we allowed a few weeks for the swelling and edema to subside.”]
I can laugh about it now, because I know that nothing will ever be as painful as that moment. That was the worst part and it’s over, so now I can focus on recovery. I’ve since had two follow-ups with Dr. Desai to take the stitches out, and it’s healing so well after just three weeks.
The most difficult thing has been that my teeth and jaw are still really sore, so I can’t bite into anything—and I assume it will be some time before I can. My lip is still swollen and there’s some scar tissue that is bothersome, but I’m working on treating that. My nose set really well and the bone feels very straight, but if there’s any crookedness right now, I attribute it to the fact that there’s still a lot of swelling. The big benchmark for me, when I knew things were going back to normal, was when the facial recognition on my phone started working again.
Right now, my total bill is hovering at around $3,000. Dr. Desai billed me separately from the ER, so I’ve basically just been charged for the wound care and CT scan at the ER. I’m fortunate enough to still be working, so I have the resources to bounce back from this pretty easily, and I have an awesome network of women I found through protesting who have helped collect some money for me. I’m also pursuing a lawsuit against the LAPD—we’ll see if there’s any recovery from that.
For a lot of my white friends, this is the closest to home that police brutality has ever come, and it’s almost offensive to me that this is when people have begun to care. Of course, I want them to care. I got shot in the face. But at the same time, it’s disappointing and frustrating that this had to be the tipping point. I have to do something with what happened to me to feel like it was worth something, which is why I’m suing, but at the same time, I can’t take away from [the BLM] message.
Two weeks after my injury, I went to the All Black Lives Matter March, which was a combination of Pride and Black Lives Matter. I’m pansexual, so Pride is important to me as a queer person. I wore a face shield this time, and at one point, “Titanium” [by David Guetta, featuring Sia] was playing, and I started laughing hysterically because the lyrics are “I’m bulletproof, nothing to lose/Fire away, fire away/You shoot me down, but I won’t fall…”
My lawyer doesn’t know if there is any recourse for me, but we have to try because this could set a precedent. This is one domino in this network of systemic racism, police oppression and brutality, the prison industrial complex, the school-to-prison pipeline… All these things are interconnected, and we’re just asking for Black people to basically be given their humanity. If flicking this one domino is the only thing that I can do, then Goddamn it, I hope that the rest of them fall.
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