Savion Byrd jolted out of bed to someone banging on his door at 3 a.m.

He was not in the mood for this.

Byrd, then a middle school student from Atlanta, Georgia’s West End neighborhood, had gotten into a fight the previous day and was suspended from school. He already suffered the wrath of his mother. Now what?

He answered the door to the frantic girlfriend of his older brother, Jerrel Clark.

“Hey, you have to help. He’s been shot.”

Wait… shot? What? Why?

Panic ensued.

Jerrel hadn’t just been shot one time either. Nor two, or three or four times. He’d been shot 12 times, including one to the back of the head.

Fortunately, Savion’s mother is a nurse, so she arrived on the scene and was able to assist in keeping Clark alive. Every second mattered.

“We didn’t know who [the shooter] was, if they were going to come back,” Byrd said. “So I had to stay with my older sister for a while. I didn’t know he was alive until two days after. He would die and then come back, he would die and then come back. They wouldn’t let us see him.”

Clark lived and the person that shot him ended up shooting himself in Clark’s attempt to survive, flipped his car while fleeing and was found unconscious. But the scars of that moment were enough for Byrd’s mother and stepdad to scoop up he and his sister and head to Texas in search of a better life.

“The reason we moved from Texas is because it was, it was tough down there, you could say,” said Byrd, who was in eighth grade when they moved. “Nothing is handed to you down there. It’s definitely a rough environment. You definitely have to stay to yourself. You can go to events, but you’re not supposed to go to events, you know? There’s a lot of hate down there.

“We came down to Texas and still had things that followed us from Georgia.”