Wounded Memories Victim Of Ridpath Shooting Still Has A Lot Of Healing To Do

Ron MacDonald carries around a lot of reminders of Feb. 6, the day a disturbed old man almost killed him at Spokane’s Ridpath Hotel.

There’s the brace that covers his right arm - the arm where a bullet from 78-year-old Orville Sassen’s gun stopped after ripping through MacDonald’s back and shoulder.

There are the dreams of that cold and dreary day that sometimes disturb his sleep - of his friend Marie Van Slate being fatally shot, of having a revolver pointed at the back of his head.

There are the memories of the outpouring of support he received from the Spokane community.

People sent so many cards, flowers and plants to his room at Sacred Heart Medical Center that the staff there made him give most of the stuff away. They couldn’t move around in his room.

And there’s the bullet, “an ugly, ugly thing” MacDonald carries around in a urine specimen bottle.

The mangled .357-caliber hollow-point bullet a doctor cut out of his arm is a graphic reminder that the 59-year-old restaurant manager almost died that day.

But it’s also a symbol that he lived.

“I look in the mirror every day and say, ‘It’s good to see you, old man,”’ MacDonald said Friday in his first interview since the shooting. “I’m very, very fortunate.”

The affable manager of the Silver Grill Restaurant laughed and joked throughout the interview at a table only 10 feet from where Sassen took his own life after his late morning rampage.

“It’s just too bad his last name wasn’t du Pont, so I could’ve sued the family,” MacDonald said with a laugh.

But the pain was evident, too, as MacDonald recounted the day of the shooting and the nearly two months since.

The memories came in bursts:

Sassen introducing himself the morning of the shootings and asking MacDonald if he was the manager. Pulling one of the restaurant’s hostesses to the floor when Sassen later pulled out a gun.

Hearing the shot that he later learned killed Van Slate, a waitress.

Feeling a bullet enter his back “like a red-hot poker.” Paramedics cutting off his shirt and tie.

The cold feel of rain and sleet pelting his bare chest as emergency crews carried him to an ambulance. Asking again and again about the safety of his waitresses as he drifted in and out of consciousness - “How are the girls? How are the girls?”

The bumpy ride from the hotel to Sacred Heart Medical Center.

MacDonald said Friday he is still recovering from his wound.

He has undergone nearly two months of physical therapy to regain the feeling in his arm and fingers. He’s got at least two more months to go.

Sassen fired one shot into MacDonald’s back as he lay prone behind the hostess station. A second before, the gunman had held the silver revolver to the back of his head.

The bullet barely missed his spine and severed several nerves in his shoulder and arm, he said.

There are emotional scars that need treatment, too, he said. There are dreams, feelings that sometimes the walls are closing in and an unsettling fear of seeing an elderly person in a trench coat, MacDonald said.

“I’ve had a hard time coping at times,” he said. “I guess it’s just kind of normal that it’s going to haunt you.”

MacDonald said he’s gotten through the hard times with a little counseling and a lot of support from friends and the community.

“I’ve gotten calls from friends in Denver, Seattle, people I haven’t heard from in years,” he said.

He’s also trying hard to put the incident behind him.

MacDonald barely knew his attacker, who sometimes had coffee at the Silver Grill, and still doesn’t know why Sassen targeted him.

He said at this point, he really doesn’t care.

“You can’t live with hate. It’ll eat you up,” MacDonald said. “He was just a sick old man, that’s all he was.

“I have forgiven him, but I’ll never forget him.”

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