Trauma: A Head Full of Lead

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"I've got a little headache," Dr. Ralph B. Williams told San Francisco Sur geon Dudley J. Fournier. And well he might.

A state health department bacteriologist in Juneau, Alaska, Williams, 57, said he had come to San Francisco on business. The evening before, to kill some time, he decided to see Gone With The Wind. When he left the theater in the city's tough Tenderloin district, he was jumped by two young muggers who beat him unconscious. Coming to, he hailed a cab to his motel. Next day, when the headache did not go away, he went to see Fournier.

Williams' eyes were black, and there was clotted blood on his face, on his scalp and inside his mouth. Dr. Fournier, thinking the blood covered abrasions caused by a blackjack or brass knuckles, sent his patient to be X-rayed for possible skull fractures. The radiologist took one look at the X-ray print and gasped: "This man has a head full of lead." He had found five low-caliber, low-velocity bullets. Beneath the clotted blood were wounds that could hardly have been caused by anything but bullets.

One (No. 1 in diagram), said Fournier, entered the top of Williams' skull, bounced off a bone near the pituitary gland and stopped in the temporal lobe of the brain. Another (No. 2) entered below the left eye and came to rest between the carotid artery and the jugular vein. One centimeter's deviation in almost any direction and this bullet could have caused fatal hemorrhaging. A third slug burrowed from the corner of the right eye into the jawbone. The fourth traveled from a point under the right nostril into the hard palate. The fifth bullet went through the roof of Williams' mouth, then to the base of his skull, coming to a halt beyond the pituitary.

Williams, taken off the "serious but not critical" list at San Francisco's St. Mary's Hospital last week, is suffering only from a damaged tongue nerve that is making it difficult for him to swallow and speak. He still cannot remember being shot, but guesses that the hoodlums did their dirtiest work in frustration when they discovered that he had very little money in his pockets. Fournier and the San Francisco police still find it all a bit difficult to believe.

"Any one of those bullets could have killed him," said the doctor. "There are so many vital things in the head, and those bullets missed all of them."