Exclusive: Shooting survivor meets officers, 911 caller who saved her life 25 years ago

A Westmoreland County woman who was critically injured in a domestic dispute is defying all odds.

Christy Hampton has spent decades rebuilding everything she lost in a matter of minutes.

“I remember mostly every second,” she said. “I feel like I wear it every day.”

In August 2000, she and her boyfriend Jonathon welcomed their baby boy, Garret.

Two months later, on a cold October night, their love story ended in tragic front-page news.

Hampton was Christy Weishorn at the time. She was 22 years old.

Jonathon Hoblak was 27.

The couple had a disagreement over baby photos. They planned to pick up professional photos from the mall one day. Hampton got off work early and decided to pick them up herself. That turned into a big fight. To this day, she does not know why it became such an ordeal but said her boyfriend was sick, under a lot of stress and was acting out of character.

“I wanted to leave, and there was a struggle for the car keys and the phone,” she said.

She walked a few houses down to the East McKeesport police station and met Sgt. Gary Martin and Officer Charlie Rozzo. Martin now works security at the federal courthouse. Rozzo is the chief of police for West Homestead. Both still remember that night from 25 years ago.

“We discussed the argument that they had had, and he had agreed that he would go to his parents’ house,” Martin said.

An hour later, Hampton woke up in bed and said her infant wasn’t beside her. She could hear her boyfriend’s truck running outside.

Hampton ran outside to stop her boyfriend from leaving with the baby. The infant was lying on the passenger’s seat.

“I heard the female yell, ‘Stop, you’re hurting me,’” said April Martin.

At the time, she was April Gwinner, a single mom who lived a couple of doors down. She’d just gotten home from her waitressing job when she heard yelling and dialed 911.

“I was like, ‘You’re never going to have this baby,’ and that’s when he said ‘and neither are you,’ and he pulled out the gun,” Hampton explained. “I turned, and I started running, and I started screaming for help… I looked to see where he was and that’s when I saw the flashes.”

“I saw him shoot her five times,” April Martin said. “And I’m yelling on the phone, ‘He just shot her five times. Get here! Somebody get here!’”

She decided to call 911 because she knows what it is like to be in a violent domestic violence situation and need help.

“Nobody was there for me. I wanted to be there for her,” she said through tears.

While she stayed on the line with 911, retired Sgt. Martin and Officer Rozzo had already been dispatched. They were driving down the alley when they heard gunshots.

In separate cruisers, they came down the alley from opposite ends, unknowingly blocking Hoblak’s escape route.

By all accounts, when he saw the police officers, he walked back to where his girlfriend was wounded in the grass, sat down and fatally shot himself.

Hampton had been shot five times with hollow-point bullets. They expand on impact and cause more damage. The entry wounds were in her chest, stomach, arms and leg. The femoral artery in her leg was hit.

“I’m looking at her shot up as much as she was shot up, and I knew I had to stay with her,” retired Sgt. Martin said.

She recalls being unable to move or see, but all these years later, she still remembers hearing, “Christy, stay with me.”

“Just please stay with me,” retired Sgt. Martin remembers repeating. He said he held her hand until medics stabilized her enough to load her up in an ambulance. She was then flown to a local hospital.

On the way, Hampton remembers hearing something else: that the “other victim” was “DOA,” dead on arrival.

“And I thought it was my son,” she said. “And I started to come out of shock and started to feel the pain. And I felt like I was on fire. It was so overwhelming. And I felt that I had nothing to live for,” she said.

Her heart stopped in the ambulance. Medics revived her. Doctors revived her again at the hospital, working frantically to stop the bleeding and rush her into emergency surgery.

Officer Rozzo was a rookie. He says he was around 21 at the time, just a year younger than Hampton.

“I was working a double shift, I think, that day,” he recalled. “We were just at the right place at the right time, and by the grace of God, we were lucky that it was enough.”

As they were working on Hampton, using toboggans and anything they had close by to try to keep her from bleeding out, they realized there was another problem.

“We remember hearing people screaming and yelling ‘Where’s the baby?’” Rozzo said.

After a frantic search of the apartment that came up empty, baby Garret was eventually found safe in the passenger’s seat of Hoblak’s pickup truck.

The officers credit North Versailles medics for getting to the scene quickly, before they were even dispatched. But Hampton was not out of the woods.

Her family was warned she may not wake up. She spent weeks in the hospital.

“The next thing I remember was waking up in the ICU and seeing my mother and her say, ‘You have a son to live for,’ she said. “And then that was it. I was on a mission.”

She fought to get well and back to her son. And she kept fighting. For the first eight years of her recovery, she said she underwent surgery after surgery. Some were major. Some weren’t. All the while, doctors told her she likely would only survive a few years due to the trauma her body sustained.

While she continued to heal physically and mentally, anger was not an emotion she says she experienced.

“I forgave him as soon as I woke up,” she said.

She attributes the shooting to Hoblak snapping under immense stress. She believes he was losing his mind.

Just weeks before the shooting, about a month after the birth of her son, she confronted Hoblak about unusual behavior, a short temper and extreme weight loss. That’s when he told her – he was dying from cancer.

He had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma during her pregnancy, hiding the diagnosis and chemotherapy treatments from everyone, including her. He had been fighting his toughest battle alone, while continuing to work to try to provide for his new family.

Garret Hampton says he does not hold ill feelings toward his late father either.

“That story, yes, it’s part of me, but it doesn’t define me. And I think she feels the same way about it,” he said. “And I’m really, really grateful to have her in my life.”

His pride in his mother is clear. He calls her a survivor, an inspiration and the strongest person he knows.

Meanwhile, he is her pride and joy. She loves sharing his successes, like the fact that he just graduated from law school this summer and passed the bar.

Hampton has a lot to be proud of, too. Shortly after the shooting, she changed careers and became a surgical technician. Currently, she is the director of surgical technology for UPMC, the health system that saved her life. She considers it giving back, educating future surgical technicians so more lives can be saved.

One thing about her, she is not big on regrets. But there is one thing she regrets not doing sooner: meeting the people who helped save her life.

Using police paperwork, Hampton’s account and a little digging, Channel 11 helped make that happen this week.

There were many hugs and many tears as Hampton met Chief Rozzo, retired Sgt. Martin and her former neighbor, April Martin.

“Thank you,” she repeated. “Oh, thank you so much.”

“It’s so good to see you,” the group told her.

They shared memories from the night and caught up about the last 25 years, sharing photos and exchanging contact information with each other.

“We’ve thought a lot about you,” April Martin said.

April Martin shared some news with Hampton that something beautiful came out of that dreadful night. After the shooting, Sgt. Martin would stop by April’s home to check on her.

She was taking the situation hard and having a hard time coping with the trauma.

The two formed a close friendship, then started dating.

“Couple years later, we wound up getting married,” Gary Martin said.

They said their vows in a courthouse ceremony in 2003.

They said Monday’s meetup is one of their new favorite memories. For retired Sgt. Martin, he said it was one of the highlights of his career in law enforcement.

“This gratification today surpasses everything!” he said.

“Yeah, for me too,” Hampton said with tears in her eyes and a smile that said even more.

Click here to watch the trauma surgeon who helped save Hampton’s life recount the medical miracle.

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