Survival of Lindsay Smith

Left for dead after a horrific shooting, a sailor defies all odds to return to the water. Story by Wendy Mitman Clarke for SAIL magazine:

“You will be all right, my child.”

The words came from a place she didn’t know. They didn’t so much come into her consciousness as flow through her whole being. She thought: “Is that God?”

And then Lindsay Smith waited for something unknowable, slumped on the pavement outside the Doyle Sails loft in Salem, Massachusetts, while the man who had shot her three times in the head and left her for dead moved off and killed himself. She heard the sound of violins, which she only realized later were sirens. – Full report