INDIANAPOLIS — For victims who survive gun violence, the impact lasts for years.
Jasmine West is living with multiple bullets in her body after getting shot nearly 20 years ago.
“The phone's ringing. They want to make sure, we’re still opening tomorrow,” West says as she pulls on gloves, ready to scoop banana pudding into little Styrofoam containers.
She is getting ready for Thursday’s customers at her restaurant, Muva’s Kitchen, on Indy’s near west side.
West, or “Muva,” as most folks know her, loves to feed people.
“It’s like family in here. We cry. We laugh. We eat. We have a good time,” she said.
Just inside the lobby of the mostly take-out soul food restaurant are pictures that tell a story. One hangs above the takeout window.
It’s of a little girl with big brown eyes and a smile that almost hesitates - a little girl who would grow up to be a survivor.
“Sometimes I look in the mirror in the morning and I’m like, ‘Somebody really tried to kill me,’” West said, almost still in awe of the events of June 1, 2002.
That’s the day - almost 19 years ago now - that the boyfriend of West’s best friend and roommate broke into their west side apartment and shot them, along with two men who were there visiting.
Only West, who played dead, lived to tell the story.
“I can see everything that happened that same day, over and over and over again,” said West, who was shot six times. “I was shot in my face, three times in my chest, my hand and my arm."
Almost 20 years later, two of the bullets are still inside West’s body.
“That’s a bullet,” she said, pointing to a raised area on her hand. “They don’t dig them out... I have one more in my shoulder."
The healing, both physically and emotionally, has taken years for West and she said it’s still ongoing.
“I couldn’t even take a shower with the shower curtain closed, because I was afraid of who was on the other side,” West said of the early years after the shooting.
Today, she still doesn’t do well with fireworks on the Fourth of July. They remind her of the gunfire from that terrible day.
Every time West hears about another shooting in the city, deadly or not, it all comes back.
“It’s personal for me. It’s not just somebody on the east side died or this person was killed out west,” she said. “In my head, I instantly go to, ‘Oh my God. That family. Or those children.'"
She thinks about her friends, too. Their pictures hang in her restaurant.
“This was Miranda, this was my best friend,” West said pointing to a picture of her roommate, who left behind two kids when she died.
“Then there is Kevin. He was there with us and there is Fred,” she said, pointing to pictures of two men, both just 22 when they were shot and killed that day.
“This the one I remember the most vivid was him because he was the first one that got shot,” she said, pointing to Fred’s picture on the wall.
“They were good people. They didn’t deserve what happened to them and to me,” West added, tears filling her eyes for a moment.
The man convicted and sentenced for the killings, is in prison for the rest of his life. Two years ago, West wrote him a letter.
“I really just wanted to know why,” she said. “I got an apology and I feel like it was a genuine apology. I’ll never be OK with what he did, but I don’t have that hate in my heart."
Forgiveness has been a process, though.
"Every time my hand hurts, I’m mad. If my shoulder’s hurting, I’m mad. If I can’t get my thoughts together, I’m mad,” West said. "I have to tell myself, ‘Jasmine, you walk in love and forgiveness. You got to let it go. You got to let it go.'"
When West opened Muva’s Kitchen last year, the father of the man convicted of shooting her and killing her friends, was there to help her cut the ribbon.
“We opened up on June 1, the day I got shot,” said West, who now has her own son, 8-year-old Juda.
He’s one of the main reasons why she keeps telling her story.
“Every time my son leaves the house, I pray over him, and I ask God, ‘Please watch over him.’ Because I don’t know what can happen,” West said.
“People don’t understand. When you take someone’s life, you don’t just hurt that person,” she said. “You hurt the people that are left. The mother. The father. The sister. The brother. The cousins. The best friend. They long and they hurt for years."
She doesn’t want that pain for anyone else, not as a mother, not as a survivor.