On Thursday, October 8, 2009 at about 12.15pm EST, Stevie Christopher “Christopher” Caldwell, the eldest child of Jaime and Stevie David Caldwell was stabbed in a Home Economics class at Madison Central High School. This story has made state wide headlines for the last two days straight. At the last time of reporting, he was stated as being “stable” and recovering well at the University of Kentucky Hospital in Lexington, KY.
Christopher is one of my nephews, being the eldest of Jaime’s sons, Jennifer’s older sister. The most surreal part of this whole story is that we were up in Richmond, KY on Tuesday, October 6 and had visited the family. I even spent about 20 minutes teaching Christopher about Composite functions for his Pre-Calculus honors class. Why were we in Richmond? Because I had a couple of job interviews in Lexington, which is just down the road from Richmond.
The way we’ve been told, Jacob Hamblin, the kid who stabbed Christopher, was in Home Economics with Christopher. As it turns out, this kid is constantly in trouble at school and didn’t get on particularly well with Christopher in the first place. While Christopher was using a knife in class, Jacob demanded to have it, to which Christopher responded “No!” Jacob repeated the demand and Christopher responded “Come and get it!” Apparently, Jacob punched Christopher a couple times and elbowed him in the face. Christopher promptly proceeded to beat the snot out of Jacob. (Did I mention Christopher is a very skilled Ju-jitsu practitioner and a member of the Wrestling team at Madison Central?) Somewhere in the melee, Christopher was stabbed in the chest.
The injury went unnoticed until the fight was over, when Christopher realized he was bleeding. As it turns out, the blade was a mere 1/4″ (6mm) away from his heart and had punctured his lung. The doctors had to insert a couple of chest tubes to drain the blood from his chest. The last thing we heard was that he was going to be fine but surgeons might have to go into his chest with an endoscope and deflate his lung so they could drain the blood.
All I can say is that considering how close the blade come to his heart, we are extremely lucky to have him with us still. A matter of a 1/4″ and we would have been burying our nephew way before his time.
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