Christopher Pryce, hit by a stray bullet early Sunday while sitting at his home computer, is recovering from his wounds but said he's quitting Anchorage.
Along with an injury to his right ear and head, whoever fired the bullet gave the 24-year-old Pryce something he never had before: a sense of mortality.
So, he said in an interview Tuesday, he's going to move back to Palmer to be a bit closer to his parents and 12-year-old sister, who live at Fort Greely, southeast of Fairbanks. That will mean a long drive back and forth between home and his job at Lowe's of South Anchorage. But Pryce is used to that.
He had been living in Palmer until last week, when he moved in with a woman friend who lives in the 10-unit apartment building at 111 Muldoon Road, at the corner of Boundary Avenue.
Saturday night, he said, he and his roommate enjoyed an evening out with another friend. They dropped her at her home in the early-morning hours and returned to their apartment at about 3:30 a.m.
They were in the woman's bedroom at the front of the apartment, with Pryce sitting at his computer facing a corner. He had gotten off the phone with another friend and was playing a game.
"You come home and let go of the day. We were just chatting in general," Pryce recalled. "Then we heard six shots."
While some neighbors reported hearing as many as 16 shots, Pryce was certain he heard only six, with the final one ringing at a higher pitch. He guessed it was about 3:50 a.m.
He wondered, he said, what was going on, but before he could even mouth the words, a bullet came through the wall 2 feet from his face.
"The next thing I know, it felt like somebody hit me on the side of the head with a baseball bat," he said.
The bullet had been fired in a gun battle at a mini-mall parking lot across the street, according to police. It struck Pryce first through the right earlobe and then "right behind my ear, at the highest part of my neck and the lowest part of my skull," he said.
He grabbed his head and fell out of his chair.
"It burned, and then it stung, and there was nothing, and I was on the floor wondering, 'Am I going to die?' "
He said his roommate "saw me grab my head and go 'Ow, ow,' and groaning and realized I had been shot."
The room was lit only by a single lamp, Pryce said. "She was expecting to see my brains splattered all over the floor." His roommate quickly called 911.
She turned on more lights. "I moved my hand (away from the wound). My hand was covered in blood, and she told me to keep my hand there." Dispatchers soon spoke to his friend, and police and paramedics arrived within five minutes, Pryce said. But before that, while lying on the floor, he had some dark thoughts.
"Most kids nowadays believe, 'I'm going to live forever,' and somewhere in my brain I thought exactly that," he said. "But that (shooting) brought it home pretty quick -- I could die. 'Oh, God, I don't want to die.' "
While lying on the floor, he called his parents, waking them at 4 a.m. "Dad," he said, "I've got something bad to tell you. I got shot."
"Excuse me, Christopher?" his father replied, according to Pryce.
Police called Pryce a "blessed man," he said. He was able to walk out of his apartment and into the ambulance.
At the hospital, a nurse checked him and found the bullet lodged in the fleshy part of his head behind his ear. Police told him it was a .45-caliber slug, he said. He was released an hour later.
Police said they have no suspects in the shooting.
Daily News reporter Peter Porco can be reached at pporco@adn.com or 257-4582.
