On the morning of September 4, building contractor Nick Klipa was repairing the shower tiles in one of his rental apartments near 20th Street and Indian School in east-central Phoenix when he heard what sounded like firecrackers. When he walked out to investigate, he saw two police cars parked on either side of his property. Officers shouted: "Get down! Get back!"
Klipa didn't know there was a man with a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle in the house across the street. He turned to run away, but a bullet struck his right leg, knocking him to the ground. A second shot entered his left thigh and exploded. He tried to adjust his leg to ease the excruciating pain, but every time he moved, the sniper shot him again. He says he lost count after the third bullet pierced his groin.
Klipa recalls thinking: "`I am an open target. And there's nothing I can do.'"
He remained conscious throughout the hour and a half he lay propped against a chain-link fence in the driveway on the west side of his property.
He never did see the gunman, who shot Klipa a total of eight times from a house across the street. What Klipa remembers seeing is the blood spurting from his own legs before rescue workers dragged him to safety behind an armored truck.
During gunman Barry Kaiser's five-hour siege, Phoenix police officer Leonard Kolodziej and tourist Jane Finney, a bicyclist who just happened to ride by, were killed. Klipa was the most seriously injured of six others wounded by Kaiser in a second round of shooting. When police stormed Kaiser's house hours later, they discovered that the gunman had shot himself to death.
Almost three months later, Nick Klipa still finds himself trapped. His physical injuries have been devastating and he has had plenty of cold-sweat nightmares. And he and his family are miffed at city officials, who they say are ignoring the family's pain.
Bullets shattered bones in both of Klipa's thighs, punctured his groin, punched holes in his bladder and destroyed most of his colon. One bullet remains lodged in his buttock, another in his pelvis. Bullets severed his jugular vein and carotid artery, separated his vocal cords and busted both clavicles.
Last week, for the first time since the shooting, Klipa was able to put enough weight on his legs to stand, and he was able to move back into his west Phoenix home. He's confined for now to a wheelchair, except for brief strolls with the aid of a walker.
He talks about his injuries in a raspy whisper he calls his "Godfather" voice: "People say, `You look good. You look good.' I'm still the same guy. I can't walk. I can't talk. I can't go to the bathroom. I need braces on my feet. Other than that, I'm still the same old Nick."
Klipa says he doesn't hold a grudge against Barry Kaiser, a man he had seen in the neighborhood but had never met. "I was not mad from day one," says Klipa. "Even if he had lived, as long as he didn't bother me again, that's all I wanted from the man."
Klipa does question how police responded to Kaiser's rampage. He asks: "How could that guy kill a police officer, a woman and shoot another officer--then an hour later shoot me and the others?"
Since the shooting, Klipa says, he and the other victims have been tossed aside like "little pieces of garbage."
Klipa fled his native Yugoslavia 27 years ago, when he was 21. He's built a solid life in Phoenix, where he's president of Saint Nikolas Serbian Orthodox Church. The attack on his life strikes his family as a bitter irony.
"We escaped 30 years of communism for freedom, and look what happens here," says Klipa's cousin, Betty Alksic. "You are working all your life, paying your bills, and one day this idiot changes your life."
Last week, Klipa received what he says was his first contact from police: an invitation from police chief Dennis Garrett to attend a ceremony honoring police officer Michael Wheelis, who was wounded in the leg by the crazed gunman.
Klipa says he was surprised by the invitation. "Nobody ever called or inquired if I was in the hospital or alive or well," he says of police officials.
It's nothing personal, he says, but Wheelis is recovering on a police disability pension and the self-employed Klipa has no such benefits. "I don't think anybody should be shot," Klipa says. "He gets paid for his pain. I don't get paid for mine. And I get to piss in a bottle."
His family has questions for the police. Lorrie Klipa wants to know why her husband had lain in a pool of his own blood for an hour and a half. "We don't have all the facts yet," she says. "We never got a phone call from the police, we never got the police report. I want to see why it took so damn long. If it were proven that they did everything they could have done for him, my mind will be at rest."
