Highest Form Of Forgiveness -- Cop Wants To Help Shooter Who Paralyzed Him

MALVERNE, N.Y. - Because of what Shavod Jones did to him, Officer Steven McDonald feels nothing below his neck, breathes only with a machine, goes nowhere without a wheelchair and nurse.

Because of Shavod Jones, McDonald will never make love with his wife or hug his son. His body is wracked by spasms, his sleep haunted by nightmares. He cannot tell hot from cold. He cannot scratch his nose.

But Steven McDonald long ago forgave Jones for shooting him. When Jones gets out of prison this year, McDonald wants to team up with him.

"I don't think we've ever seen anything like what I envision - the two of us, together," McDonald says in a soft, high voice, another legacy of the bullet in his spine.

He turns to catch the sun on his face, one of the few pleasures left him. A respirator pumps air through a tube in his throat.

"Maybe Shavod and I will go to schools together and speak to kids. It'd be an amazing sight," he says, beaming, like he's talking about a Beatles reunion.

"Steven really, truly, believes that," his wife, Patti Ann, says later. "People get upset with him. You know, like, `Come on, Steven, wake up!' "

"You remind me of Christ"

On July 7, 1986, 29-year-old Steven McDonald was in his second year on the New York City Police Department, the force on which his father and grandfather had served. He had never been shot at or drawn his gun in the line of duty.

He was patrolling Central Park, looking for kids who'd been robbing bicyclists.

He found Shavod Jones.

Shavod had been abandoned by parents and raised in Harlem by a grandmother who lost control of him. In four years, he had been arrested six times and pleaded guilty to armed robbery. He was 15.

Shavod was in the park with two other boys when McDonald showed his badge. The cop stooped to pat down a bulge in one boy's pants cuff. Shavod pulled a snub-nosed .22 and fired three shots into McDonald's head.

As he lost consciousness, Steven McDonald saw the face of his wife, three months pregnant. "God," he prayed, "don't let me die."

He didn't, but a bullet had cut his spinal cord between the second and third vertebrae, leaving him paralyzed below his chin. A vital mind was now trapped in an inert body.

One of McDonald's first visitors in the hospital was John O'Connor, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of New York. O'Connor looked down at the broken man and told him: "You feel helpless, but you remind me so much of Christ now. He didn't save the world through teaching and preaching and miracles. He made it possible when he was lying motionless on the cross.

"If you unite yourself and your helplessness with Christ on the cross, you are the most powerful man in the world. You'll touch people you'll never see. I can't reach out and touch them. You can."

McDonald was barely conscious, but he heard the words: "The most powerful man in the world." As the weeks passed and his spirits sank, he tried to remember them.

"I feel sorry for him"

Six months later, McDonald was still in the hospital, unable to speak above a whisper. A friend asked about Shavod Jones, who'd been arrested after the shooting and sentenced to three to 10 years in prison.

"No one really knows me," the youth said at the time.

"I feel sorry for him," McDonald mouthed.

Patti Ann, meanwhile, had given birth to a son, Conor, who was to be baptized March 1. Steven wanted to use the occasion to thank everyone for their help. He decided to mention Shavod Jones.

"Steven was trying to deal with anger - other cops' anger and his family's anger," recalls Peter Johnson, a friend who wrote McDonald's statement. "But he wasn't angry. He wanted to forgive."

Patti Ann read her husband's words. Her voice quavered when she came to this: "I'm sometimes angry at the teenage boy who shot me. But more often, I feel sorry for him. I only hope he can turn his life into helping and not hurting people. I forgive him, and hope he can find peace and purpose in his life."

Publicly, everyone praised McDonald's graciousness. Privately, many were skeptical, particularly police officers. Wait and see, they said. The bitterness always wins.

"You're going to be a saint"

Bad as it is for McDonald, it could be worse. McDonald receives his full patrolman's salary and remains on the NYPD active duty roster.

The quadriplegic has become a man about town. He turns up everywhere from the St. Patrick's Day Parade to the Letterman show. He has met the powerful - the president, the pope, Nelson Mandela.

McDonald's refusal to give in to his handicap inspires many. Their letters fill his attic. One day after church, he looked down to see a woman kissing his feet. (He hadn't felt anything.) "You're going to be a saint," she told him. "Have a nice day," he answered.

For a time, he groped for a mission, a way to live up to what O'Connor had said.

Then, McDonald began visiting schools. Younger children bombarded him with questions ("How do you open your Christmas presents?" was his favorite). Older ones were riveted by the details of his shooting.

"My forgiving Shavod has had a powerful effect," he says. "One girl sent me a letter. Her house was burned down - arson - and everyone else in her family was killed. She heard what I said, and she chose to forgive, too. She felt better as a result."

To prepare for such appearances, McDonald must be lifted from bed before dawn. Today, his nurse has dressed McDonald's 6-foot-2, 180-pound body in a turtleneck and corduroys. Finally, she drapes a chain with a badge around his neck: 15231, his father's old number.

"This is probably the best place for me to be," McDonald says as his van moves through a dreary Brooklyn streetscape toward black and Hispanic Bishop Loughlin High School. "A lot of these kids have relatives or friends who have been shot. . . . And for me, it's a chance to dispel myths about cops, especially white cops."

He will speak at two assemblies. When he is introduced and rolls out on the big stage, he looks frail and alone.

He says all the right things about being thankful and learning to forgive. But his voice is faint. Because his nervous system is alive yet undirected by the brain, his body is wracked by spasms. He repeatedly pauses in midsentence.

The audience seems distracted. The speaker seems tentative. "You may be thinking, `What does HE have to be thankful for?' You'll just have to take my word for it. . . . The words aren't always there, but I hope through my presence I've shown you that life is good."

But to many of these kids, life is tough. And they seem disinclined to take this cop's word to the contrary.

McDonald asks if there are any questions. There aren't.

Another attempt

Why does he try this? Nothing prepared him for it. He was never eloquent or profound, never particularly good in school; just a good-looking, good-natured, utterly unremarkable young man, turned into a symbol by a punk with a gun.

But when it's time for the afternoon session, he's ready. He asks - demands, in his mild way - to speak from the auditorium floor.

A few students come over and he chats with them easily about nothing in particular. The mood is different, and when he begins his speech he's connecting. He gets a laugh.

He also dwells on the fascinating, gruesome facts of his injury, establishing credentials for the message that follows.

The students don't see where he's heading until he says that Jones "has had to struggle every bit as much as I have. Prison has not been a good experience for him. I hope when he returns to the community, he will never return to those destructive ways."

Students look at each other.

McDonald moves on to the equally implausible theme of thanksgiving, which fell flat an hour ago. "The Lord has favored me," he says. "I feel God's love more now than I'd ever felt it in my life."

His injured voice makes it sound like he is on the verge of tears. He isn't, but some in the audience are.

"Even though I need nurses to do everything you do for yourself, I've never regretted what happened," he says. "Like today, talking with you, I feel good about it. I could find a reason not to go on, but I ask God for the strength to do things like come here today."

McDonald has them now. When he pauses, the only sound is the "whoop, whoosh" of the respirator.

"I don't think I'm anybody special. I look up to you; I applaud you," he says, adding with a smile, "although I can't move my hands."

They rise and applaud him. A girl says, "My love goes out to you."

"How could you forgive someone who's done this to you?" a boy asks. "I couldn't."

McDonald explains: "When I was shot, I was dying, and my family and I said all sorts of prayers. I wanted to be forgiven then for my sins, and if I was to be forgiven by God, I had to forgive Shavod Jones."

Not a model prisoner

In 1988, two years after he was shot, Steven McDonald met with Shavod Jones' mother to say all was forgiven. It didn't go well.

Harris and her lawyer "couldn't trust me," McDonald said. "My intentions were misunderstood."

But then McDonald met Lenora Jones, Shavod's grandmother.

He gave her his number. One night the phone rang. Collect call from Shavod Jones.

Jones said he was very sorry; McDonald said he was forgiven. They began to correspond.

But the prisoner made an extraordinary request - his victim's help in getting parole.

McDonald knew any opinion he expressed would carry weight with the parole board, but he didn't know if Jones was ready for the street. "I've changed many ways since my injury. I'm doing a much better job at not sinning. Perhaps it was better he was in prison so he could do better, too."

When McDonald decided not to intervene, the Joneses "never wrote to criticize me. But I don't think they were happy."

Last March Jones was suddenly released and, after a few hours of freedom, taken back into custody. The state had neglected to tack on time for bad behavior, including two assaults on guards.

A dozen officers took Jones away in handcuffs. "In all my years," said a senior parole officer, "I have never seen as much hate in a man's eyes as I saw in his. He looked as though he wanted to kill someone."

Jones is up for parole in November. He didn't grant an interview.

"Something deeper there"

Although McDonald has not heard from Jones lately, he hopes to visit Shavod in prison.

Such talk makes some believe McDonald is either a fake or a sap.

"I've told him I'll break his arms if he brings Shavod Jones into that house; it wouldn't be fair to Patti Ann," says a friend. "But he'd do it!"

The Rev. Mychal Judge, the New York Fire Department chaplain and a friend of the McDonalds, has never seen anything like McDonald's attitude.

"When Shavod's name comes up, there is no anger. He takes it seriously that Christ said, `Turn the other cheek.'

"This is the highest form of forgiveness I know of. You can say it, but to live it every day, when vengeance seems natural. . . ." He raises an eyebrow. "There's something deeper there than you and I know."

Too deep, apparently, for Hollywood, which has made three films about Joey Buttafuocco but not one about his fellow Long Islander, whose autobiography, written with Patti Ann, was published in 1988.

"Producers ask, `What's the payoff? Does he get up and walk at the end?' " says Peter Johnson, McDonald's lawyer. "They want a happy ending."

So would McDonald. But despite two trips to Lourdes and countless Hail Marys, he's made no progress since he suddenly moved his left fingers seven Ash Wednesdays ago.

"You wouldn't say it's a lot," he says, "but even that is a sign of hope."