Paralyzed in ‘the Incident,’ Officer Fights to Walk Again

Don Johnston remembers “the incident” in vivid detail.

It was a routine call last January to investigate a forgery attempt at the Security Pacific Bank in El Monte. “It’s not the sort of call on which you’d expect violence,” the El Monte police officer said.

A husky man with rust-colored hair, Johnston spotted the suspect from the bank’s foyer. “I saw him turn and look at me, with a real nervous, excited look on his face,” Johnston recalled. “He immediately started walking towards me.”

Using a bank customer as a shield, the suspect pulled a handgun from his belt and headed for the door. “I couldn’t shoot because the other man was in the way,” Johnston said. “With my left hand, I pushed the customer out of the way. At that exact moment, I got shot.”

The suspect fired three times, hitting Johnston once in the throat and blasting the bank’s glass door to smithereens. “I was lying there and it seemed like forever that the glass was falling on me.”

“The incident”--as he and his wife, Ruth, sometimes numbly refer to the shooting--thrust Johnston into a nightmare world, with the veteran police officer facing the very real possibility that he would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the chest down and unable to speak.

Newly married, an amateur drummer with the rich baritone of a disc jockey, a cop who had volunteered long hours to provide encouragement to needy El Monte children, Johnston was suddenly a paraplegic who needed the assistance of two men to carry him to his second-floor apartment.

The last seven months have been a roller-coaster ride for the Johnstons, from the first awful words of a County/USC Medical Center neurologist telling them that Johnston would never walk again to the moment, a month later, when Johnston succeeded in moving his big toe, producing a twitching motion so faint that his wife had to bend close to see it.

“I think I woke up the whole hospital wing when that happened,” Ruth Johnston said.

Since then, Johnston, 35, has defied the early prognoses, teaching himself to talk in the raspy voice of movie character “Freddy Krueger” despite a shattered larynx and, through a regimen of laborious exercises, learning how to walk again.

Now, Johnston can maneuver down a sidewalk with a walker or two canes--at 13% of normal speed, according to his therapists--and he has walked up to 545 feet without pausing.

“Basically, it’s the fight of my life,” Johnston said last week, pausing briefly from a grueling series of leg exercises in the gym at Casa Colina, a rehabilitation hospital in Pomona. “Every bead of sweat takes me one step closer to my goal” of being able to walk normally.

Sometimes the worst eventu-alities produce their own rewards--good deeds from strangers and richer relationships with loved ones. Johnston has been the object of an outpouring of generosity from El Monte residents, who raised--through banquets, car washes and a truck raffle--enough money for a down payment on a house in Rialto, where the Johnstons now live.

He received a Congressional Award of Merit and, recently, the R. G. Canning California Officer of the Year Award.

“He’s been a real inspiration to all of us,” said El Monte Police Chief Wayne Clayton, who presented the Canning award two weeks ago in a Rose Bowl ceremony. Johnston “no doubt saved a man’s life” when he pushed bank customer John Flores out of the line of fire, Clayton said.

“It took a lot of courage,” said Flores, 54, of El Monte, a clerk with the county assessor’s office. “I would have run in the opposite direction.”

The injury also produced a deep, spiritual relationship with Ruth Johnston, whom he had married just four months before he was injured.

The 24-year-old legal secretary still weeps bitterly when she recalls the first sight of her husband on an emergency room gurney. “When they finally let me in to see him, it was a shock,” she said haltingly. “His whole body was bouncing in the bed from the trauma and his eyes were wide open like this.” She makes eyes wide and unblinking.

Johnston, certain he would die, managed to communicate his love to his wife. “Then we prayed together,” Ruth said.

The bullet had struck two vertebrae in Johnston’s neck, leaving bone splinters lodged near the spinal cord. The resultant swelling left him paralyzed.

“Telling a muscle to move and it won’t--that’s very difficult to understand,” said Johnston, whose alleged assailant, Nguyen Lu, was subsequently arrested and declared incompetent to stand trial. Lu, a 27-year-old Temple City man, is currently under observation at a state psychiatric facility.

Therapists at Casa Colina painstakingly taught Johnston to transfer himself from bed to wheelchair, and how to shower and groom himself. Then, as it became apparent that he had sensation in his lower body, they began the arduous task of teaching him to walk. Johnston started on the parallel bars, dragging himself along for 30 feet with most of his weight resting on his arms, then he moved to the front-wheel walker.

Three times a week now, he goes through his paces, maneuvering up a set of stairs in the Casa Colina gym or doing leg bends on a mat or just sitting down and standing up--all under the cobra-like gaze of physical therapist Berni Rogers.

Here he is, face down on a mat, pumping his left leg slowly up and down, as Rogers goads him along like a bodybuilding trainer at Muscle Beach. “OK, Don,” she said as Johnston winced with the effort. “Give me two more. Just two more.”

Rogers acknowledged that Johnston is often in pain. There is a chaotic welter of signals rushing through his legs. “His nervous system interprets something like this,” she said, running one finger lightly over an arm, “as pain. It’s as if your leg has fallen asleep and you’re feeling that burning, tingly sensation. That’s what Don feels all the time.”

But Rogers is optimistic. Six months down the road, she sees Johnston walking, perhaps with a cane, at 50% of the “normal” walking speed of 300 feet per minute. “He’s young and healthy,” she said.

The injured man already has defied expectations, said Dr. Tae-Soon Kim, his physiatrist. “He’s made remarkable gains, well beyond initial expectations.” But only about 2% of those with spinal cord injuries recover fully.

“We expect him to progress further,” Kim said, “but as far as full recovery, that remains to be seen.”

Johnston attributes his progress to his belief in God. “But you can’t sit back and expect God to do all the work,” he said.

The son of retired El Monte Detective Loren (Corky) Johnston, the injured man said he expects eventually to go back to the department--”whether at a desk job or whatever.” His son from a previous marriage, Eric, 14, wants to sign on too. “I want to follow in his footsteps,” the youth said last week.

No matter how far he progresses, Johnston has already traveled a vast distance from the time six months ago when he was a mute, troubled hospital patient, his wife said.

Ruth Johnston recalls with crystal clarity the moment when the nightmare started to dissipate. As she rested in a hotel, doctors were removing a valve from Johnston’s trachea. Until then, her only communication from her husband had been on a magnetized writing pad.

“It was the best phone call I ever got,” she said. “There was this funny Freddy Krueger voice on the other end. I said, ‘Who is this?’ and he said: ‘Hi, honey. I love you.’ ”