Five years after being shot in the head by his best friend, PAUL ROUSSEAU writes a heartbreaking letter to the man who still haunts him

A month before graduating from St. Thomas University in Minnesota, Paul Rousseau was accidentally shot in the head by his roommate and best friend Mark.

Miraculously, he survived the shooting and waited for two hours, bleeding profusely and delirious, while Mark lied to the university administration and refused to call an ambulance, fearing the consequences for his own future.

The two have not spoken to each other since then, although Paul refused to press charges.

But in his new book, Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir, he has written a heartbreaking letter to Mark for the first time, in which he tries to understand not only what happened that night, but also how a friendship that meant so much to him could be so irreversibly destroyed in such a brief moment.

Mark had purchased five guns – legally and with permits – despite a zero-tolerance gun ban on the St. Thomas campus.

“Dear Mark,

“What the hell. That was weird, man,” he begins, then imagines what Mark might have been doing in his room to cause the gun to accidentally go off—it broke through two walls and then struck Paul’s skull, permanently incapacitating him.

“You did what? Cleaned yourself? Alone in your room? To prove something?

“Look how cool I am, so big and strong, how I break the rules. I need to wipe my piece down and put it in bed. You never needed that. You were funny and popular and charming and you captivated everyone.”

During their three-year friendship, Mark had acquired a total of five guns – legally and with a permit. Paul didn’t mind. The two were inseparable. “We are best friends,” he writes. “I love him.”

But that night in April 2017 was to change both of their lives.

“They had been chatting and laughing on the couch, the TV on, when Mark went back to his room – Paul thought he should take a nap.

A few moments later, Mark bent down to pick something up from the floor – “maybe a piece of paper, a dead battery or a guitar pick, I don’t know. I don’t hear it. I don’t see it. But something is coming through the wall towards me.”

Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir is published by HarperCollins

Since the shooting, Paul’s days have been filled with painful surgeries and generally dealing with life with a traumatic brain injury.

He describes the feeling as if one had been “dipped into a puddle of cough syrup. Soaked in thick liquid and with several layers of thread on one’s body.”

As he tried to get up, Mark came running out of his room. “I didn’t know it was loaded!” he said, stopping, the gun in his limp hand.

Panicking, he played for time, told Paul to take a shower, then put him to bed and disappeared. Paul later realized that he was planning to hide his firearms in his car: the pistol he had just fired, a small-caliber rifle, a second pistol and an AR-15, “as well as enough ammunition to equip a small militia.”

As Paul continued to lose consciousness over the next two hours, the college security guard came to investigate and see what was causing the fire alarm to go off. The alarm was set off by the bullet that had penetrated the wall.

Mark lied and said he had been smoking. When questioned further, he said he had burned something in the oven. When she spotted blood on the floor, he said it was the result of a “really bad bloody nose.”

Later, Paul woke up and heard voices coming from the other room – Mark had called their friends Keith and Rachel, who were begging Mark to call an ambulance.

“I will, I will,” said Mark. “Just wait. Give me one more second…”

Paul now knows that it took Mark two hours to call paramedics. That night was the last time they spoke – although they have seen each other once since then, on a video call when he was disputing an insurance claim.

“I started hyperventilating, looking around like crazy, sitting on my hands, rocking back and forth, making little movements that a trapped animal might make. And all of this, and you weren’t even physically in the room. Afterward, my lawyer, who was mad on my behalf, told the judge that I needed a fair warning the next time you were around. A trigger warning, if you will.”

Paul says he forgave Mark the minute he was shot – but that was the last day the two spoke

But he says he still sees his old friend constantly in his dreams.

“The dreams are nearly identical… whenever we get close, this grainy, sickly aura fills the space around us, the air can feel the tension, the horror of what happened, even though it’s never explicitly stated. I don’t think the universe would ever want us within spitting distance again. In these scenarios, we would potentially bring about the apocalypse.”

He adds: “I know you’re sorry. Apologies are a thing of the past for us. I forgave you the moment it happened.”

Since the shooting, Paul’s days have been filled with painful surgeries, a lengthy, “dehumanizing” personal injury trial, lots of therapy and generally dealing with life with a traumatic brain injury.

Mark graduated from college after being briefly expelled despite the school’s zero-tolerance gun ban.

“It’s hard not to speculate,” Paul writes. “Mark may have appealed the expulsion and won. He has money. He could have hired a lawyer to challenge the university’s decision. That happens all the time.”

And he writes to Mark: “If every good memory I have of us was a lake, then April 7th dumped a container of toxic waste into it and messed up the whole body of water. Maybe some things can be filtered out, but this lake is beyond saving. Are you glad I didn’t die?”

Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir by Paul Rousseau is published by HarperCollins