Glancing across their cozy couch-lined living room, all decorated for Christmas with running pine, hung cards and blinking colored lights framing the front window, Ramona Bautista looks at her husband, Hector, and then at her youngest son, Richard, in his black wheelchair. The Whittier family is explaining to a visitor what ten years later they refer to as "the incident" --- an act of random urban violence so horrendous that it radically changed each of their lives, along with the lives of two older sons, Hector Jr. and Anthony,

On the evening of Sept. 22, 1995, Richard was in a car with his cousin and her friend on the Harbor Freeway, returning home from a night baseball game at Dodger Stadium when a van with five gang-bangers pulled up to them. Police would later describe the incident by that all-too-common L.A. ubiquitous term: "drive-by" shooting.

"I remember hearing what sounded like a car backfire," 22-year-old Richard recalls. "Then I remember hearing the glass of the car break in the back. And I remember putting my head down. Then I remember hearing everything stop for like five seconds. And I remember that maybe I could get a look at who was doing this.

"So I tried to pick my head up and take a peek over. And when I did, I'd seen the person who was doing this, but it was really too dark to get a good look at him. And I'd seen him pull a gun out. But by the time I tried to put my head back down, it was too late.

"Then after that," he adds, "all I remember is blacking out and hearing my cousin's friend in the back saying that 'He's dead! He's dead!'"

Actually, the seventh-grader at St. Gregory the Great School was barely hanging onto his then-12-year-old life. When his parents arrived separately at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, they found him on a stretcher in the emergency room. A white strip of bandages was wrapped around his head, with blood trickling down his face.

Doctors told Hector and Ramona the bullet had gone through the left side of his head and exited the right, shattering a wide path of his skull. Richard had "zero" chance of survival; and even if he did, he would be a vegetable. So in the hectic triage environment of King's ER, the parochial school boy would have to wait in line for surgery.

Ramona realized the only thing she could do was pray to God to save her son or let him go freely without suffering. She frantically called family members, asking them to do the same.

When she came back, she and Hector took a hold of Richard's hands.

"We were praying real profoundly and he was unconscious, when all of a sudden these huge teardrops started coming down his eyes," the mother remembers. "But they were red and full of blood. I'd never seen such teardrops in my life. And all of a sudden, the one side of his head just slowly stopped bleeding. It was like a miracle before our eyes, and we just could not believe it."

Struggles and more miracles

That was the first of many miracles, as well as struggles, during the next ten years, according to the Bautistas.

After 14 days, Richard came out of his coma, muttering, "I'm hungry." But the bullet had torn through the part of the brain that controls motor skills, so he had little use of his legs and practically no control over his arms and hands. The devastating wound also affected his eyesight, memory and even the ability to control his body temperature.

Seizures were (and continue to be) another major consequence. During these episodes, his airways were cut off and he had to have CPR. Moreover, anti-seizure medications have damaged both his liver and kidneys.

Most recently, the curved plate spanning Richard's head shifted, causing his jaws and teeth to grow crooked. When reconstruction surgery was finally done last January, he was accidentally given too much anesthesia and did not wake up until 90 minutes after the operation.

"Thank God again," Richard says. "He spared my life."

Therapy has been a constant in that damaged life since he started to recover --- at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood, Children's Hospital in Los Angeles and Miller Children's Hospital in Long Beach.

When those resources were exhausted, Hector and Ramona continued working with their son at home. Since Richard was 18, in fact, his mother has become his paid home-health caregiver. Every day she uses a special tilt device that helps him stand, which increases his circulation and improves his joint movements.

The Bautistas have cemented over and covered the backyard so their son can exercise his leg muscles using a walker-like device. It simulates the therapy he received in a hospital, where he worked out in a pool.

Since Richard came home more than nine years ago, Hector has gotten up every two hours at night to turn him so he won't develop bedsores. After years of this nocturnal ritual, the father, who works for the U.S. Postal Service, just wakes up automatically without having to use an alarm clock. On a good night, he might get four hours of very interrupted sleep.

"A tragedy like this affects you in many ways," says Ramona. "It affects you financially, emotionally, physically. I mean, it just wears you out. It's a 24-hour job, around the clock. He absolutely can't do nothing for himself. We have to help him with the restroom, bathing, brushing his teeth, his hair, his shaving.

"It's difficult because, you know, we tried to get our house equipped the best we could, but it's so costly. There's more that we wish we could do. And every year we try to do something, even if we do it on our own. But everything is for Richard. He's our life for now."

They talk about things that would help their son progress faster and ease some of their caregiving burdens. A pneumatic hospital bed that automatically inflates on one side, then the other, would let them get more sleep and be fresh for the next long day. But a new one costs $78,000, and the best deal they have seen on a used bed is still $48,000.

Both parents admit they worry a lot about getting older and how are they going to keep meeting their son's special needs. Hector tears up while explaining that most of Richard's former friends stopped coming around long ago. He understands they have lives of their own, but it still hurts him. His son is not mentally retarded, he stresses. In fact, he graduated from California High School in Whittier with a 3.8 average. He also attended Cerritos Community College and hopes to return there soon.

Ramona says, "I wish the individuals who take a gun or whatever violence they do understand what they caused," shaking her head. "Because they only hear the beginning. But they don't really know the whole impact of what happened --- what one has to live through day by day, and how it affects so many people.

"It's a tragedy at both ends," she points out. "The young man who shot Richard got 27 years in prison. But I see it as him giving my son a life term. That's what he gave him. But we're not going to dwell on that because we can't."

A forgiving heart

What the Bautistas have focused on is prayer.

"I'm sure it's God's work," Hector says, looking at his son. "God kept him alive this long for a reason. Because with that hole in his head, as big as the rim of a water glass, he could have bled to death very easily. But then it just clogged up, and he only lost half a pint of blood. So, to me, that's God. And he knows God's been with him this whole time."

"Yes, I believe that God's kept me here for a reason," Richard agrees. "I'm pretty sure it's to do his work and to spread his word." And a small grin creases his face. "But I'm still working on that."

He is keeping a journal on his voice-activated computer, which he learned to operate at UCLA, and would like to publish a book about what he has gone through. He hopes that it will help people who have also experienced life-changing events in their lives and are trying to find God. When he returns to college, he wants to study foreign languages so he can translates his words into their native tongues.

Richard prays for others, including all his doctors and therapists; people who have come into his life and inspired him, like Cardinal Roger Mahony and Msgr. Kevin Kostelnik, pastor of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels; his family, of course.

And Leo Javier Burgos --- the then-17-year-old gang member who shot him.

"Yes, I pray every day for the man who did this to me," he says. "Through God's will and with his strength and love, I found it in my heart to forgive him."

Ramona reports that prayer has not only brought her family through the crisis, but actually brought them closer to each other and to their creator. "When we married, we built a foundation from the ground up, and we built it with the Lord in our lives," she says. "And we taught our children that: moral values and the respect you give one another.

"When this tragedy happened, all that could have easily been destroyed," she notes. "But you just ask God for his help. He's guided us through this and that's made our family stronger. And we're still here together."