He took 8 bullets and survived. Now he’s refusing to squander his second chance at life

PHILADELPHIA — It was supposed to be a triumphant moment. Bruce Nash would return for the first time to the busy North Philadelphia intersection where eight bullets ripped through his body, shredding the muscles in his legs, piercing his lung, and throttling him to the edge of death.

It had been more than four years since May 2017 when he was ambushed by two men near 22nd and Fox streets, and he’d come a long way. Now, he thought, he’d go back to that place and conquer it. He would kneel to the ground and thank God for sparing him.

But as Nash sat in the passenger seat of a vehicle that approached the intersection on a warm evening this year, his heart fluttered. He was agitated and nervous, then panicked.

Who are the people hanging out at the corner? he wondered, his eyes darting from one side of the street to the other. Could one of them know who shot me? Could one have pulled the trigger?

He couldn’t bring himself to get out of the car.

The terror that led him to turn away is but one of the results of the unrelenting gunfire in the city. Philadelphia’s shootings crisis reached unprecedented heights this year, leading to a record number of homicides, but the uptick started to build in 2016, the year before Nash was gunned down.

Plenty of survivors are traumatized, their lives touched repeatedly by shootings in a city where they are intensely concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods. Nash, 39, has lost six close friends in the four years since he was shot.

And many have significant physical challenges. Nash’s legs — his right still has a bullet lodged in it — contract in pain when he walks just a few blocks. For months after the shooting, his fiancee was his caregiver, forced to juggle both a baby in a car seat and a husband with a walker. Today, he has massive scarring and a mark on his throat from being intubated while he was comatose.

A father of three, including a newborn, Nash has been stirred by the shooting spike to open up about his story. He’s using social media to cultivate a community of gunshot survivors who talk openly about post-traumatic stress and violence prevention. His survival, he says, is a second try at life and a mandate to be a mentor.

“I had to reinvent myself to survive the survival,” he said. “Now that I got shot, it’s like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do.’”

Nash’s story is at once extraordinary and commonplace.

It stands out for the sheer volume of bullets that tore into him. On that spring afternoon, he was walking near the intersection when two gunmen jumped out of a Pontiac Bonneville and began shooting in a burst of gunfire that was partly recorded on surveillance video.

The footage showed Nash trying to run away from a gunman, then tripping over a bicycle, doing a midair somersault, and landing on his back in the street. While he lay there, one of the shooters leaned over him and pumped at least three more bullets into his body before sprinting back to the Pontiac and speeding away.

Nash remembers looking up at the sky, praying la ilaha ill-Allah, asking God for forgiveness as he bled.

“He was just laying there and had his eyes open,” recalled Eric Bigelow, his 60-year-old cousin who was a block away when he heard the shots, then saw Nash wounded in the street. “He was looking up at me, and I was telling him, ‘Cuz, stay with me.’”

Investigators found 25 shell casings, from two guns. Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said it was a “horrific” scene and that detectives still hope for a break. No motive has been determined, but Vanore said it “appears to be a very targeted incident.”

No one has been arrested.

In Philadelphia, shootings go unsolved far more often than not. It means Nash is riddled with anxiety, often worried someone is following him or trying to kill him. His family has since moved away from the North Philadelphia neighborhood where he lived his whole life.

Nash grew up just blocks from where he was shot. Born amid the crack epidemic and the gun violence it fueled, he was raised partly by extended family while his mother was in addiction. It was lonely. Sometimes he talked to the stars just to feel heard.

He was 9 when his grandfather was fatally stabbed in the basement of the family home — the room where Nash would sleep for years after. He memorialized him by taping a copy of his mug shot on the ceiling.

Those years were turbulent; money always a problem. Nash says he started moving drugs unknowingly when he was a child and an older man in the neighborhood offered him lunch money to run bags to the corner. It evolved from there.

Life in the game eventually caught up with him. He served two stints in prison in the early 2000s, once on a drug-dealing charge and again on a count of illegal gun possession. In 2014, he again pleaded guilty to drug charges after police found him with marijuana and a small amount of crack cocaine.

Nash said he was always aware he could land in prison, but he never expected to be gunned down. He’d been working a stable job in construction for several years before he was shot, and even before that, he was never some big shot, he figured — just a low-level dealer trying to make a living.

“This is generational. This is inherited,” he said. “I was born into this society where it’s like, I had to survive and do things at a young age that I would never want my son or daughter doing.”

Today, he thinks a lot about how the children will perceive him. Earlier this year, he had his shirt off in front of his 4-year-old son, who noticed the scars.

“Dad, you’re a superhero,” said little Zachary, who is obsessed with Spider-Man.

Tears welled in Nash’s eyes. He explained that, no, he was shot.

“Somebody tried to hurt your dad,” he told him.

Zachary pointed to the marks and winced.

His fiancee, Dynnae, has played an enormous role in his years of healing, holding the family together while he went through bouts of traumatic stress or torturous pain. Sometimes she felt like she suppressed her own sense of self to be mom, partner, support system.

Once, during an argument, she let her husband have it, telling him: “The shooting didn’t just happen to you.”

Despite the many challenges, she said, it’s gratifying to see the man she fell in love with when she was just 18 opening up about the worst experience of his life “for a purpose” — to help others who’ve traveled the same path, and to be a model father.

“I just want my kids to have a better life,” she said.

The 2-week-old baby is a son Nash prays will see his father as strong and resilient — a fighter who refuses to squander a second chance at life.

And so a few days after he couldn’t get out of the car at 22nd and Fox streets, Nash went back. He knew the trip could emotionally break him, that it might not be triumphant. But at least it would be real.

He rode up to that corner again. Heart beating fast, he looked over both shoulders and assessed the scene.

Then he inhaled deeply, and he stepped out of the car.