Mike Boyce is a late-night sandwich kind of guy.

Shortly before 11 p.m. Wednesday, he grabbed two slices of white bread, a substantial mound of chipped ham, several slices of cheese and whipped up a 4-inch-thick belly-buster.

"I don't play around," the 44-year-old North Plum Street man recalled this morning. "I'm a big guy. I like to eat."

That's when the pop-pop-pop of gunfire ripped through the air.

Lots of gunfire.

Maybe two dozen shots.

"I was getting ready to go pick up my sandwich and eat, watch some TV — and DUH DUH DUH DUH, POW POW POW POW, DUH DUH DUH DUH. They weren't playing. They were shooting at each other. It was like Beirut out there. It sounded like a shoot-out at the O.K. Corral."


      Surviving bullet in head


This is where things get a little hazy for the temp worker.

Boyce remembers leaning over and peeking out the curtain of his two-room, first-floor apartment and seeing flashes of gunfire across the 600 block of North Plum, coming from groups of teens on both sides of the street.

Not one to stick his nose in other people's affairs, Boyce remembers he stood up to grab his late-night snack off the kitchen table and head to the TV. "This is happening more and more. I just stay to myself," he says.

"That's when, PAP! Blood all over the curtains!"

A stray bullet zipped through that same window, ripped through a curtain — and struck Boyce in the back of the head, spraying blood across his linoleum floor and draperies.

"I fell back, and that's when everything started to go crazy," Boyce remembered today. "Everything was messed up vertically. I could not tell the ceiling from the floor."

He fell.

"I dragged my body from the kitchen over to the phone," Boyce said. "I just crawled."

The phone was about 12 feet away, in his living room/bedroom.

He dialed 911.

"I was just crazy, yelling, 'I need help! I need help!' I said, 'Lady, I can see the bullet in the back of my head.' Then I felt it, and I freaked out. I said, 'Get an ambulance over here quick, I'm dying.'"

The dispatcher told Boyce to unlock and open the door to his apartment. So he crawled another five feet and did so.

Kathy duPlanti, who lives in the 625 N. Plum St. apartment building, behind the shooting victim, told the New Era after the incident that she heard seven or eight gunshots, a pause of a few seconds, then another cluster of shots. She estimates there were between 14 and 18 shots in all.

She called 911 and then went out into her building's hallway. Boyce's door was standing wide open, she said. "He was moaning," she said. "I kept hearing him saying, 'Oh my head, oh my head.'"

At the hospital, doctors removed the entire bullet from a spot behind Boyce's right ear, leaving only pieces of fractured bone and a half-inch-round scar behind.

One neighbor, a 76-year-old woman, later told police she saw a man in a red, hooded sweatshirt running north on Plum Street and then turning and running west on New Street. She also saw a mini-van double-parked, facing south, on Plum Street. The van sped off.

Police have made no arrests in the shooting.

Investigators are giving the case top priority, but there is no clear indication as to why the shooting started, Capt. of Detectives Peter Anders said today.

"We are not sure if it's drugs, or gangs, or over girls, or what," Anders said.

The captain said there is no indication that the gunfire on North Plum Street was related to an earlier incident that day in which a young Pittsburgh man was shot and killed during a confrontation between two groups at Penn Avenue and Green Street in the city's southeast area.

Carlos Oyola, 19, of the 200 block of Juniata Street, has been charged with a weapons violation from that shooting. He is being held in Lancaster County Prison in default of bail.

Boyce and neighbors shake their heads over the burst of violence on North Plum. They blame kids, who they says hang out on corners, make noise, toss trash, and are shooting at each other.

"It's a dark, quiet street. You can do some seedy stuff around here," Boyce said.

Boyce, who moved to Lancaster from Baltimore in 2004, said this isn't his first experience with violence. He said he thought he was going to die during a robbery several years ago, in Baltimore, when the robber shoved a gun in his face.

Boyce, who spent 2!-W days in the hospital, acknowledges that he's lucky. He's scheduled to have a CT scan in September, but doctors have told him they do not believe he suffered permanent damage.

"The speed of the bullet was slowed. Maybe it was the curtains. Something slowed the bullet. It just hit my cranium. The bullet just lodged in my cranium. And when I went to the hospital, they just cut it out."

He's surprised that no one else got shot, and that his injuries weren't more severe. He speculated that he's alive today because he decided to fetch his sandwich.

"As soon as I stood up and turned around, that's when I got hit," he said. "Otherwise, there's no telling what would have happened."

"Glad to see another day," Boyce said.


Staff writer Tom Murse can be reached at tmurse@LNPnews.com or 481-6021.