Delivered From Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived by Ron Franscell

Author:Ron Franscell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: True Crime, Non-Fiction, Biography, Science
ISBN: 9781592334407
Publisher: Fair Winds
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TIM URSIN’S NATIVE KNOWLEDGE OF THE BAYS AND INLAND WATERS AROUND NEW ORLEANS EVENTUALLY MADE HIM AN EXPERT FISHING GUIDE—BUT TURNING HIS WOUNDS INTO A COLORFUL REPUTATION AS “CAPTAIN HOOK” GAVE HIM A NEW LIFE.

Courtesy of Tim Ursin

Among the many ironies and enigmas still surrounding the Howard Johnson massacre, there’s this one: An American flag is planted on Mark Essex’s grave every Memorial Day.

“IT JUST WASN’T MY TIME”

Tim Ursin had never heard of Mark Essex, never looked him in the eyes. Their paths had never crossed until that miserable January morning at the Howard Johnson hotel.

He heard fragments of the story as he drifted in and out of sedation at the hospital, but he didn’t hear the full story of what happened that day until about three weeks later. By that time, he was involved in a different kind of fight.

During his six weeks in the hospital, Tim endured excruciating pain to save his arm.

As many as ten times, his wound was debrided, an agonizing procedure to strip away dead, rotting flesh from his wound. Doctors laid moist pig skin over the mutilated tissue to protect it from infection.

Later, surgeons planed paper-thin ribbons of skin from Tim’s thigh to seal the wound permanently and to finally offer some relief from the electric ache of air hitting the exposed meat and raw nerves.

But within his first two weeks, a repaired artery in his forearm burst. Rather than repair it, surgeons simply sealed it off—a risky move. A few weeks later, as a doctor examined his gangrenous thumb, he accidentally thrust his finger through the squishy rotten tissue of Tim’s hand. So they removed the thumb in hopes of saving the rest of his left hand.

Things didn’t get better. To stabilize the remaining palm and fingers, doctors inserted a stainless-steel pin in the wrist end of his shattered radius, but the pin eventually worked its way out through the skin of his hand.

His hand was now useless.

Tim had made many difficult decisions in his life, but the next one was easy. He asked his doctors to remove his mangled left hand entirely and replace it with a prosthetic stainless-steel hook.

While he was still in the hospital, the fire chief asked him to take on the department’s public information job, but Tim wasn’t a desk rider. If he couldn’t fight fires, he didn’t want to be around the firehouse, where he’d be reminded more of his weaknesses than his strengths. If he couldn’t ride a truck, he knew he would always be on the periphery of the brotherhood.

He leaned hard on his wife, Mary, in those dark days. A daughter and sister of firefighters, she never gave him a chance to feel sorry for himself. While he tried to keep himself together, she kept the family together. When people would stare at his hook, he felt more embarrassed for Mary and the kids than for himself.

When Tim’s sick leave ended in 1975, he drifted. He worked as a concrete tester, a boat salesman, and a sporting-goods clerk.

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