Survivor story: Hit by a bullet, how Alana Young survived that night

“I heard shots coming from the corner of Blind Bob’s patio. I turned around and started to run into Blind Bob’s; that was the point I got shot. I felt it, I looked down, and I just ran faster. I knew he was right there.”

That’s how Alana Young describes the moment she was shot, the moment her life changed forever.

Alana told News Center 7′s James Brown about that night, and about her life has changed. (Click on the video at the top of this page to see the story)

She worked at Blind Bob’s so she knew the layout when she ran in the door, a bullet in her thigh. “It was probably two seconds from getting shot to getting inside, and I was just bracing myself for the next shot,” she says. But it didn’t feel like just a few seconds to her, as she came into what she calls a surreal moment: she’d been shot, the shots were still being fired, but inside the band was playing and people didn’t know what was happening outside.

“It felt like such a long time to me from between when the shots started firing and when I finally got inside,” she says. “I just remember telling them to run, you need to run, you all need to run.”

She ran up the stairs, with some others following her, barricading themselves in a back office. When, moments later, she opened the door, a stranger with his hands up came walking towards them. He and some others helped her get down the stairs, and helped stop the bleeding.

But one year later, the pain hasn’t stopped. She still has bullet fragments in her leg that could not be removed, and she lives the emotional scars of that night. It can be hard to do normal things, like even going to the grocery store, for fear it could happen again. “It’s like I’m living in a different world, almost,” she says.

Alana did eventually go back to work at Blind Bob’s, and for the first time since the shooting saw that hallway and office where she hid. “I was thinking last time I was down hallway, I thought was going to die. I thought that was it. I wasn’t going to get to see my daughter again, and just a lot of difficult feelings.”

Her daughter is now 5, and she say sit was the thoughts of her and her family that inspired her to keep running that night after she’d been shot. She also says her family and her fiancé have been critical in helping her learn to live with PTSD.

“I thought for certain I was going to die,” she says. “All I wanted was to see my daughter again and hug my mom again. Do the simple things I had taken for granted, and I think others had taken for granted.”

Alana’s fiancé won’t be her fiancé for much longer. They are scheduled to get married this weekend.

Cox Media Group