Living Reporter
Peering into a mirror, Deborah Winter uses both hands to trace the damage on her face done by one gunshot fired through her front door three years ago. The physical wounds have healed – though some shrapnel remains – but the emotional trauma lingers.
Winter's life changed just before midnight on May 12, 2004.
Her son Mark, then 20, had arrived home earlier that night, after a confrontation at a park near their townhouse in Brampton. A group of teens followed him.
As Winter was answering the doorbell, someone sprayed the door with bullets. Glass shattered, hitting Winter in the face.
The force of the shot made her face look as if it had holes all over: fragments of shotgun pellets and shattered glass dug into her scalp and forehead, around her eyes, down the bridge of her nose and cheekbones toward her chin.
"We've gone through hell, our family. There are times I wish he would've killed me," Winter says in her first interview about the shooting. "My life is ruined."
Without the six-figure salary she had been earning as a 30-year sales representative at Bell Canada, emotionally exhausted and faced with few financial options, she was forced to sell her house. Her whole family, she says, has been traumatized by the attack.
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