A Michigan man hobbled into a Chicago hospital. His injury: a week-old gunshot wound from the Syrian civil war
CHICAGO - The emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital was packed with flu patients when Caleb Stevens hobbled through the doors on crutches one evening in January, his leg pulsing with pain from a week-old gunshot wound.
The clerk at the intake desk was unfazed when Stevens said he had been wounded in Syria. She took his passport and told him to join the rest of the people in the waiting room.
So he sat with his mom for 20 minutes, his right leg wrapped in a cast, a splint and bloody bandages. He was still wearing a red-and-white Christmas sock someone pulled over his foot when he was rushed to a Baghdad hospital for surgery.
As he looked around the ER, Stevens, 23, said he thought some of the other patients "seemed more at risk than I was."
A week before and 6,200 miles away, Stevens was on the roof of a house in the small town of Abu Hamam near the Euphrates River, he said, battling Islamic State as a volunteer fighter with a Kurdish militia group. The Chicago Tribune confirmed much of Stevens' unusual account through travel documents, medical records, emails and interviews with others who said they fought with him. The militia did not respond to inquiries.
On the day he was shot, Stevens was running to retrieve a rifle, he said. A sniper's bullet tore into his calf. "There was blood spurting out. I definitely knew I had been shot but a part of me refused to believe that."
He underwent several surgeries at military hospitals in Syria and Iraq before arriving at O'Hare International Airport, records show. As doctors at Northwestern examined the jagged wound, word made its way to Chicago police that Stevens was somehow connected to Islamic State. The next morning, three officers walked into his room, he recalled. Four more waited in the hall.
"They kind of barged in the hospital room," Stevens said during a recent interview
