Maybe you've had a bad week. Maybe work sucked. Maybe your car broke down or you were dumped by your significant other or your cat died. Maybe you experienced all of that. Even if you did, you had a better week than Reginald Keith Zackery Jr.
Zackery's misery began last Friday afternoon at the Good Haven Apartments on High Hill Boulevard, not far from the Cedar Crest Golf Course. Dallas police arrived at around 1 p.m. to find the 19-year-old sitting in the front passenger seat of a silver 2007 Honda Civic, blood seeping from a gunshot wound in his leg.
Zackery kept mum when officers asked what had happened, repeating only that he needed to go to the hospital, which is where he was taken once paramedics arrived and patched him up. Meanwhile, the woman who was with Zackery, whose name wasn't released, told the cops what had happened.
The Civic, she explained, belonged to her. She'd driven it to the apartments to pick Zackery up, then moved into the passenger seat to let him drive. It was then, as Zackery was about to get into the driver's seat, that a gunman appeared on foot, fired a single shot into Zackery's leg, and disappeared between nearby apartment buildings.
There were some holes in her version of events. It didn't explain, for example, how four people who had been hanging out nearby when the shooting allegedly occurred had seen and heard nothing. Same for the two guys working inside the nearest building. And how, if Zackery was shot outside the car, the police asked, was there a fresh bullet hole in the driver's side floorboard?
The woman didn't have a good answer for that, and she confessed that she'd made the story up. What actually happened was that Zackery had accidentally shot himself. She hadn't wanted to say so because he's on probation (he pleaded guilty in March to stealing a car) and, she claimed is a gang member, affiliating himself with the Bloods. She showed officers to a nearby apartment where they recovered the gun -- a Ruger, recently reported stolen in Grand Prairie -- hidden inside Zackery's shoe.
Zackery, being interviewed at around the same time at his bed at Baylor Hospital, eventually made the same admission, saying he'd bought the gun for protection after being shot in the head during a recent drive-by.
For whatever reason -- a feeling that he'd already suffered enough, perhaps -- Zackery hasn't been arrested or charged for carrying the stolen gun. He was released from Baylor with a bandaged leg and crutches and allowed to return to his normal existence, which didn't turn out terribly well.
On Thursday night, Zackery called police for the second time in a week, this time to the 8800 block of St. Thomas Circle in Far East Dallas. He told officers that his girlfriend had stopped her car, pulled him out of her car and kicked him hard in his still-raw gunshot wound. His crutches were severely bent in the process.
A while later, police arrested 19-year-old Diamond Patdrice Ebron in a restaurant parking lot on a misdemeanor assault charge. A police spokeswoman said this was not the same name given by the woman who covered for Zackery at the self-shooting, though she, too, drives a silver 2007 Honda Civic.
