Six Year Old Still Struggles One Year After Being Shot
Posted August 3, 2006 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
This week marks the one-year anniversary of a grim act that Toronto won’t soon forget – the shooting of little Shaquan Cadougan.
The then five-year-old boy was sitting outside with his family on a hot August night in 2005 when the unthinkable happened – someone let loose a fusillade of bullets outside his Driftwood Ave. home.
At least one of them struck the little boy, leaving him badly injured.
Now a year later, some of her son’s wounds have healed. But for his mother, the pain may never fade.
“I remember when I was looking for Shaquan,” Suzette Cadougan winces. “He was on the ground lying with all that blood.”
But when asked what he recalls of that horrible night, the now six-year-old has a less succinct answer. “I don’t know,” he squeaks.
Shaquan has undergone multiple operations, wound up briefly in a wheelchair and was even forced to relearn how to walk.
Amazingly, he appears to be back to normal and staying active just like any kid his age.
His mom is simply glad the ordeal is finally fading.
“We just want to give praise and thank God that he’s here,” she reveals. “He’s a comeback kid.”
“Comeback kid?” the boy asks innocently. “What does that mean?”
But anyone who knows his story is aware of exactly what that indicates.
“I’m so happy that he’s alive,” Suzette emotes. “I’m so happy he can talk, he can walk, he can run. He can get back to where he was.”
To which Shaquan responds with the innocence of youth, “and basketball!”
Both the boy and his mother are hopeful that somehow the violence that touched their lives won’t hit anyone else. But they know that’s not the case.
So far in 2006, there have already been 20 murders in the city and even more injuries to those who’ve found themselves on the wrong end of a gun.
