Will Barton, hospitalized in a coma with his family about to pull the plug on his life support after he’d been shot in the head and neck, recalled the aftermath of the unprovoked street assault that forever changed his life.

“The thought was I was going to die and never wake up and by some miracle, if I survived, I would be in a permanent catatonic state,” said the now 30-year-old Barton from his home art studio in Sherman Heights.

Barton remembers his mother bending over him saying, “Hey, I love you. Before we let you go, I just want to ask you one question. Are you in there? We have to let you go if you’re not.”

Barton somehow responded. “I was barely able to communicate by squeezing my eyes to say yes,” he said adding, “A teardrop came out of my eye. Then my mom said, ‘No, we can’t kill this kid: He’s still in there. He’s coming back. OK, we’ll give him a week.’ Then I started responding, more and more.”

Ten years later Barton, a Point Loma High School alum, has found expression and some sense of renewal and healing through painting using his mouth to compensate for partial arm paralysis. He said the recent spate of national mass murders has brought him back to that defining moment when he was in limbo between life and death – and chose life.

“Looking forward is the only way I can maintain my sanity, my life, and my lifestyle,” said Barton who has found painting to be therapeutic. “When I came out of the coma I didn’t’ know what happened, had to be told. I saw the light of the gun blast – and then it was just darkness. Now I can speak very coherently about what happened to me and what I’m seeing in society right now, which is really mirroring what happened to me. It (mass shootings) makes me revert to that situation.”

Barton discussed escalating gun violence and what he feels needs to be done about it. “Anyone who wants to buy a gun should go through a psychiatric program to see what they have going on their mind, why they want the gun,” he said. “This is tough because it’s in our Constitution. We can arm ourselves. But it’s clearly working to our detriment, not in our favor. I heard that 2022 is going to go down in history for having more public mass shootings than days in the year. That’s a scary statistic.”

As of Tuesday, May 24, the 144th day of this year, there had been 212 mass shootings in the nation, according to the nonprofit organization Gun Violence Archive. A mass shooting is defined as a shooting injuring or killing four or more people, not including the shooter.

Why is gun violence so prevalent? “There is an overabundance of weaponry in our country,” answered Barton, noting he heard of a recent shooting where a 41-year-old Florida woman was gunned down by a 10-year-old boy with a semi-automatic weapon. “How does a 10-year-old even get access to a semi-automatic weapon, or know how to shoot it?” he asked, pointing out there is an ongoing mental-health crisis.

“Some people are just seething inside, with their weapons, wondering what they’re going to do with them,” he said. “And then the stipulations are so loose with gun control. They have their gun: They can do whatever they want with it.”

Added Barton, “Why does anyone need to buy a semi-automatic that can be modified into a war weapon that can shoot a large group of people in a neighborhood? That should be red-flagged. They’re obviously planning something that could be very detrimental, and have a very treacherous agenda.”

Barton’s parents are both artists and he’s been doing art himself since age 3. “I would consider it abstract interpretive art,” he said of his work. “Because I have to paint with my mouth, I had to learn a whole new way.”

During his rehabilitation, Barton became frustrated by therapists who tried to get him to paint by the numbers, as some similarly impaired people were doing. “I was painting outside the lines and changing colors and using triangles and stars and all different stuff, and my therapist said, ‘If you want to do that, I can give you some blank canvases,’ said Baron. ‘I’ll tape this paintbrush to a tongue depressor, and you can bite the tongue depressor and just go at it and do what you want.’”

Looking up at one of the walls in his home art studio, Barton has an abstract painting titled “Rebirth,” with colors dripping red vertically down the canvas. That, he said, is emblematic of his work. “That’s definitely about my shooting,” he said. “It felt like I came through the womb a second time.”

Barton added his art became the initial focus of his recovery and continues to be. “Art is my voice,” he concluded. “If you make an art piece, that might speak volumes for 100 years. So I like to make a lot of art about what I’ve gone through. It’s a catharsis, and narcissism as well. I want to perfect it and I want people to like it. I hope they take something from it, are affected by it.”

SHOOTING OF WILL BARTON

Point Loma High School grad Will Barton was enrolled at City College in 2012, studying art, illustration, and photography. The day he was shot he’d gone to work and then out with a female friend. He walked her home across the Robinson Street bridge over State Route 163 and was headed home when he was shot three times in his head, shoulder, and throat.

Barton, without a wallet, was taken to Scripps Mercy Hospital as a John Doe. He had been shot by Philip Hernandez, a 39-year-old firefighter for the California Department of Forestry who was traveling with his 16-year-old girlfriend Cindy Garcia. They’d gotten married at Lake Tahoe, but he was fleeing from the police having been charged with four counts of unlawful sex with a minor.

At about 1:45 a.m. the day Barton was shot, the couple, who had been engaging in a crime spree, was in a white Crown Victoria mid-size car parked on Upas Street in Hillcrest, talking about what to do next. Then Hernandez saw someone walking on the sidewalk, talking on a cellphone. “Looks like an off-duty cop,” he told Garcia while grabbing a .45-caliber pistol and getting out of the vehicle before shooting Barton.

Police ultimately caught up with the pair, dubbed “Bonnie and Clyde” by TV news, who were driving in a van on Harbor Drive when police stopped them near Cesar Chavez Parkway. Hernandez got out of the driver’s side, shooting a rifle. Police returned fire and killed him. Under his body, they found the pistol that ballistics would show was used to shoot Barton.

Garcia, carrying two handguns and wearing a bulletproof vest, was ordered out of the passenger seat and arrested. She was charged with 15 counts of conspiracy, carjacking, robbery, arson, assault, and attempted murder.