La’Niya Richardson of Louisville, Kentucky is a young woman with a multitude of talents. She is currently a student, studying nursing, but also has a passion for cooking and singing.
“I’ve always wanted to be either a nurse or a chef, but I always stuck with nursing,” Richardson said.
On the morning of April 10, 2023 around 11 a.m., Richardson experienced gun violence firsthand while on a break from classes at Jefferson Community Technical College in Louisville, Kentucky, just hours after the Old National Bank shooting a few blocks away.
“I woke up to get ready for my job training program with Goodwill, and I had a gut feeling that I didn’t want to go that day,” she shared. “It was like really bad anxiety, combined with your gut telling you that something bad was going to happen. I had never felt it until that day. One of the boys who went there was my friend at the time, and he mentioned ‘We shouldn’t go if you’re having that feeling, besides, my car is having problems.’ I decided to go anyway. The whole time I was walking, I noticed that something didn’t feel right. I remember thinking ‘Maybe it’s just me,’ but even once I got in the classroom, I couldn’t shake the feeling.”
Over the course of the morning, Richardson and her classmates stepped outside for a break. “We were outside, and I was standing with one group of people; they were talking about the bank shooting that had happened earlier, which I didn’t realize had happened. We were about to head back inside, talking about what we were going to do for the rest of the day. I decided I was going to stay in the house, because there wasn’t really anything to do. Maybe five or 10 minutes later, I noticed what was happening. The boy who died that day looked up at the street, and said, “Oh sh*t,” and I saw him run. I knew something was wrong, so I ran too before I blacked out. It felt like someone was trying to pull me into the building, but I wasn’t aware of what was going on. At that moment, I thought I was dead before I could even get up, just urging myself to move, because I’d fallen on top of someone. ‘Get up, get up, get up,’ I kept telling myself. I felt a burning sensation in my arm, and that’s when I knew I had been shot.”
Once she was inside, a friend of Richardson’s took off her jacket, while she tried to process what had happened. “I thought it was the guy from the bank shooting on a killing spree.” Richardson followed her friend, running deeper into the building seeking safety inside. At one point, one of the maintenance men sat her down on the floor, and seeing she had been shot, removed his shirt and began applying pressure to her arm. She also felt pain in her leg, but the man couldn’t identify anything wrong with her leg at the time.
Once Richardson realized she had her phone in her back pocket, she tried calling her mom. “‘Hey Siri, call Mom,’ and she started calling my stepmom. I was like, ‘No! Call Mom,’ and for some reason she actually picked up on three rings. My mom was dead asleep, though, so it takes her a while normally to answer the phone. I said, ‘Mom, I’ve been shot,’ and she ran into my sister’s room, needing her phone to call 911 while she was on the phone with me. My sister asked, ‘Who is screaming on the phone?’ and my mom told her I’d been shot. I kept saying ‘Mom please help me, there’s so much pain in my arm.’”
Once at UofL Health – UofL Hospital, the team began to remove Richardson’s clothing, when they noticed she had been shot in the back and would require emergency surgery. As Richardson later learned, the boy who died was being targeted by someone, and the shooting was intentional when she was caught in the crossfire. The assailant had walked up and began shooting. In total, Richardson was shot in her arm and her hip/lower back, resulting in a hip fracture and a humerus fracture.
She spent about a week at Frazier Rehabilitation Institute for physical and occupational therapy. She still does therapy for her arm, hip and back.
Richardson finds that she still experiences sharp feelings as a result of the day. “I suffer from PTSD, and my anxiety has been through the roof ever since. There’s concern always in the back of my mind. If it happened once, you just never know if it could happen again. I was trying to better myself at the time that it happened, so it’s like if I was doing good here, what if I’m doing good somewhere else and it happens again? You just never know.”
Richardson’s mindset improved drastically after she shared her story with Whitney Strong (of the Whitney/Strong organization) in October 2024. “It was the first time I got to share my personal story, and be on the news. It made me super emotional, and I was very nervous. When I got to actually say my speech, I realized it wasn’t that bad, and my stage fright wasn’t anything I couldn’t overcome. I remember thinking ‘This isn’t as bad as I thought, because people actually wanted to hear my story.’ It was actually kind of fun.”
Richardson finds that she has developed a sense of pride in her survivorship, and in making it to the other side of this experience. “When I was shot, I thought there was absolutely no way that I’d want to be a nurse after all this. But after meeting Whitney, I realized she had been through a lot too. She was shot 12 times, and was doing all of this; I had only been shot three times. So maybe I could be better. There’s no way that something so small, but so big could impact my life this much. I can still be a nurse, and I still tell myself that I’m going to be a nurse. She really pushed me.”
Richardson also noted to, “Always trust your gut.”
