"It's not that I wouldn't have wanted to grow up with an eye and a father, but it made me who I am today." -- David Lyons
One of David Lyons' last memories of the New Orleans area is waking up in a hospital room surrounded by stuffed animals and get well cards from people he didn't know. The walls were lined with plush playthings, including plenty of E.T.s and colorful Smurfs.
Family members from Colorado, whom Lyons had never met, also were there.
It was 1982, and the 5-year-old boy awoke - after three days - to some cold, harsh facts: robbers' bullets had destroyed his right eye and torn apart his small body, his father had been shot to death, and life as he knew it would never be the same.
After about 10 days of recuperation at Ochsner Foundation Hospital, relatives took Lyons back to Colorado, where their plane touched down in a fierce snowstorm. He never set foot in Louisiana again.
Now, 30 years after the horrific shooting that he occasionally refers to as "the accident," Lyons for the first time has been reaching out to learn more about what happened on that Halloween night in 1982 along Jefferson Highway in Jefferson. And he hopes to return to Louisiana some day.
"I never really pursued it," Lyons, who lives in Golden, Colo., with this girlfriend, said in a recent interview. "I left it alone, made peace with it and moved on with my life.
"But I always wanted to know a little more about what happened and look up some of the people that my father knew ... and get a little closure."
"More jewelry than Mr. T''
Two weeks after being born in Denver, Lyons and his family moved to the New Orleans area in 1977, where his father, Vincent, had visited once and long dreamed of settling. After three years here, Vincent and Vanessa Lyons divorced, and David remained with his father.
Vincent Lyons, of Leadville, Colo, was a flashy jeweler who operated a booth, apparently at the French Market in the French Quarter.
"He wore more jewelry than Mr. T," David Lyons said. "He was a showboat .... He would have $100s rolling out of his pockets."
On that fateful Halloween, David's father dressed him up as a devil and painted his face red before dropping him off at a babysitter's house. The sitter took Lyons and other children trick-or-treating that night before Vincent Lyons, 39, arrived in his green Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon to take his son home.
Lyons said he remembered standing up in the front passenger seat - he loved doing that - at about 8:30 p.m. when his dad pulled into Trailer Town at 4038 Jefferson Highway, where they lived. Suddenly, without warning, bullets began screaming into the car.
"That's when everything went Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! out of nowhere.
"I remember it being hot. Extremely hot. In my eye and my stomach and my leg."
A .38-caliber bullet tore through Lyons' eye; two slugs ripped open his abdomen, with one exiting his back; another hit his leg. His father was shot multiple times and later died at Ochsner.
Lyons apparently blacked out, and he recalls being on the ground when he came to. He'll never forget the searing heat from the bullets that tore through his small body.
"Unbearable amounts of heat ... and at the same time I was freezing cold. I kept asking for a blanket. I was in shock.
"I remember playing with my guts. People kept pulling my hands away."
And then Lyons awoke in the hospital days later, his world shattered.
Jefferson Parish sheriff's deputies found a large amount of blood on the station wagon's driver's seat and passenger seat, as well as on the shell roadway outside the open driver's side door.
In typical fashion, Vincent Lyons was wearing and carrying a lot of jewelry on the day that he died.
Court records said the Jefferson Parish Coroner's office turned over to investigators the many items found on the elder Lyons' body: 11 gold rings, a gold wrist watch, a gold stick pin, gold money clip, two gold chain necklaces with attached charms, three plain gold necklaces, one large gold bracelet, four small gold bracelets, one gold "charm of the world," two gold cuff links, an "unknown animal tooth" and $583 in cash.
Three suitcases containing jewelry were found in the back of the station wagon.
Less than a month after the shooting, three men were booked with the crime. Juan Caceres, Rigoberta Machado and Libio Calzadilla were described by authorities as Cubans who came to the United States in the 1980 freedom flotilla in which thousands of Cubans fled their country in makeshift boats and floated to Florida.
About a year later - Nov. 30, 1983 - the charges against the trio were dismissed by the Jefferson Parish District Attorney's Office. The court record does not list a reason for the dismissal.
Growing up
A .38-caliber bullet still lodged in his head, David Lyons was raised in Denver by his paternal grandparents, Robert and Petra Lyons.
His father dead, his mother living in North Carolina, and sporting a glass eye, Lyons endured some tough times as a youngster. "Growing up was hard . . . kids can be cruel," he said.
When he was 7 or 8, he rummaged through his grandparents' closet and came across a Nov. 20, 1982, newspaper story from The Times-Picayune: "3 are booked with Halloween killing, shooting."
For another 27 years or so, that's about all Lyons would know about the crime that robbed him of his father and his eye.
At age 15, Lyons left school, left home and got a $5-per-hour job cleaning out cat boxes for an animal rescue outfit. "I was one of those geniuses who dropped out," he said of his decision to call his education quits in 10th grade.
He held a variety of jobs over the years, including operating the deli for a Wild Oats store. Lyons became a certified nursing assistant and worked in the home health, longterm care and hospice fields.
By 2002, while he was living in Phoenix, Ariz., the bullet in his head had worked itself down to his jaw. It was time for it to come out.
The flattened-out slug, which was too close to a nerve for doctors to remove in 1982, was taken out nearly 20 years to the day that it bore into Lyons' head. Arizona authorities kept it for about 60 days before releasing it to Lyons, who drilled a hole in it, slipped on a necklace and wore it around his neck.
"That piece of metal took my eye," he said. "I wasn't going to let 'em just throw it away."
Lyons eventually lost the trophy slug somewhere in Arizona, but isn't bothered by it. "I don't need it anymore."
Embracing the past
Lyons returned to Denver in 2006 and recently moved to nearby Golden, where he lives with his girlfriend of one year, Barbara Miller, and works for Spyderco, a knife manufacturing company.
It was Miller who began asking questions about that Halloween night 30 years ago. Without any prompting from Lyons, she started doing research and contacted The Times-Picayune to request whatever stories the newspaper had on file.
Three stories were emailed to Lyons on Halloween, the 30th anniversary of the shooting.
"Best Halloween ever," a thankful Lyons told a reporter after receiving the email.
"I pretty much did it myself,'' Miller said. "I started wondering. And I thought he needed to know."
"Once I started finding things, he was really glad and wanted to know more. It's definitely been good for him."
Lyons, now 35, said that while he never pursued the details of what happened, "I've always been on the road to find out. All these questions have always been with me."
He said he holds no ill will toward Louisiana and has forgiven the men responsible for the shooting.
In spite of it all, "I really think I turned out to be a decent young man. I have a kick-ass career, a big house and ... the greatest woman in the world. How could you ask for more than that?
"In some ways, you're thankful for what happened ... Losing an eye and a father at the same time really shapes a man. It really sets the path.
"It's not that I wouldn't have wanted to grow up with an eye and a father, but it made me who I am today."
Source: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/12/thirty_years_later_a_jefferson.html
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Editor?s note: James Altucher?is an investor, programmer, author, and several-times entrepreneur. Ugh, I can't write anything today. It's the end of the year. Tomorrow is Christmas. You'd think I would have something to say. Merry Christmas. Oh wait, you can't even say that anymore. I'm Jewish! I have to say something like Happy Holidays. I don't even know what Hannukah is.
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Public release date: 21-Dec-2012
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