It has been more than two decades since a tragedy unfolded on a cold night in East McKeesport. The shooting left a young father dead, his girlfriend critically injured and their newborn nearly orphaned.
“I turned, and I started running and I started screaming for help, ... I felt myself get hit, and I started to run a few more feet, and then I hit the ground,” said Christy Hampton, who was Christy Weishorn at the time of the shooting. “I just thought that it was the end.”
Jonathon Hoblak had shot his girlfriend five times during a dispute outside their apartment. When police arrived minutes later, he shot himself.
Their 2-month-old baby was found sleeping in Hoblak’s pickup truck.
Hampton thought she would die alone, bleeding out in the grass. But first responders got to her within minutes and did everything they could to keep her alive.
She has obsessed over trying to understand the tragedy that unfolded on Oct. 23, 2000. She attributes much of it to stress and poor health.
A month before the shooting, Hoblak revealed he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He had kept it a secret during her pregnancy and fought his cancer battle alone for months. Hampton wonders if the cancer was also affecting his brain.
No matter the reason, the shooting left Hampton critically injured. Medics revived her on the way to the hospital. Doctors were not sure she would make it to surgery or survive it.
They warned her family not to get their hopes up.
“We’re fighting against the clock, ‘cause every minute without blood flow to the brain, less the chances are that somebody is going to survive and wake up,” said Dr. Samuel Tisherman.
Tisherman is a professor of surgery, the director of the Center for Critical Care and Trauma Education and the director of the Surgical ICU at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
In October 2000, he was an attending physician at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital. He remembers Hampton’s case all these years later. She came in with no pulse.
“So we opened the chest to directly massage the heart,” Tisherman explained.
Hampton had been shot with hollow-point bullets. They expand on impact and cause more damage. She was hit in the chest, stomach, arm and leg.
“The bleeding was in the femoral artery, so we had to deal with that first,” Tisherman said. “Each one of them could have been deadly. One just about was.”
Tisherman said the chance of someone with cardiac arrest from a trauma leaving the hospital alive is between five and seven percent.
“Many don’t make it to the hospital, and many don’t make it to the emergency department, and then many don’t make it out of the operating room,” he said, adding that Hampton’s injuries were among the most severe he has seen.
It’s why he is so impressed with her recovery. She said for the first eight years after the shooting, she underwent surgeries every year, sometimes multiple times a year. She just had a hip replacement a couple of years back.
“I was given so many expiration dates,” Hampton said. “I made so many deals that, if I just had lived for X amount of time, … I just want to see him go to school, I want to see him graduate.”
This summer, she got to see her son Garret graduate from law school. He has since passed the bar. His mom is beaming with pride at his accomplishments and the stigmas the two of them have overcome together.
“She sounded so happy, and she’s got her life back,” Tisherman said.
The two bumped into one another at a UPMC hospital before Tisherman made the move to Maryland. Just a couple of weeks ago, she called to check in with him.
Tisherman commended Hampton’s resilience, physically and emotionally, and that she’s dedicated her life to giving back to the field of medicine.
She had a successful career as a surgical technician and is now the director of surgical technology for UPMC, the health system that saved her life.
“To be able to bounce back from that in such a positive way is incredibly gratifying,” Tisherman said. “That’s the greatest thing. It doesn’t happen often enough, but it definitely reminds us of why we do what we do, … It’s what keeps us going.”
Although Hampton met Dr. Tisherman years ago, she never had the chance to meet the first responders who gave her a fighting chance 25 years ago. That changed this week.
Click here to watch the emotional reunion with the police officers and 911 caller who helped save her life.
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