Gord wasn’t sure where he stood on the violence option. The moral logic was unavoidable: Hey, you kill babies, you set yourself up for bad things to happen to you. But could he bring himself to hurt a doctor, attack him, shoot him, even? He wasn’t against it in principle, but no. He was a loose cannon, but not stupid. He did not want to go to prison for good. The interview spooked Gordon Watson. He stopped going to the States after that.
In the summer of 1994 a man stopped at a post office-box in Maryland. He’d been living in a trailer in Delaware of late, but it was a short drive across the state line. He opened the box he had obtained under the name “Kevin James Gavin,” date of birth June 8, 1951. The papers had finally arrived, from the sportsman club in Maryland. A membership application. The club had a shooting range. The man wrote on the form that he wished to join the club in order to use the range for “personal practice.” The man’s real name was James Charles Kopp.
On August 2, Jim Kopp turned 40. His parents were dead. The rescue movement was finished. He had no possessions, little money. He was a legend in the movement, Atomic Dog had pro-life friends across the country—but few connections of any depth. The one person Jim respected above all others was Loretta Marra. He would never talk about it with anyone, but those who knew him, and saw the two of them together, knew that Jim loved her. They had been through so much, arrested together far and wide, including in Italy (“Eleven Rescuers Blitz Abortuary in Bologna,” a headline had screamed in Life Advocate magazine.) They connected on many levels—except one. Loretta had a boyfriend, and it wasn’t Jim.
It was Dennis Malvasi. In the spring of 1994, Loretta turned 31, Malvasi was 44. Loretta married him in a ceremony performed by a Catholic priest. They did not register the marriage with the state. One of the conditions of Malvasi’s parole was that he not associate with pro-life activists, and Loretta was in the hardcore of the movement. In choosing Dennis, she had married a man with a fiercer reputation within the radical fringe than Jim’s, a former Marine who bombed abortion clinics.
On October 17, 1994, just before 10 p.m., an old tan-colored Datsun bearing the license plate 330JLL crossed the AmericanCanadian border at the Peace Arch crossing at Blaine, Washington, into from British Columbia. The car was legally registered to Lorretta Marra.
Vancouver, B.C.
Monday, November 7, 1994
Early morning, cold and damp, raining, like just about every November day in Vancouver. Phone ringing at the house on West 46th Avenue.
“Hello?”
Silence.
Sheila had picked up the phone. She hung up. A short time passed. Breakfast time. It rang again. Again the caller hung up. And shortly after that, Sheila’s husband, Dr. Gary Romalis, finished his breakfast and went to work. He had a serious, reserved demeanor, spoke in a deliberate, scholarly manner. He lived with Sheila and their daughter, Lisa, in a residential area, a ten-minute drive in good traffic across the Granville Street bridge to downtown Vancouver. The house was Tudor style but not nearly as palatial as some of the newer ones on the street.
Dr. Garson Romalis was one of about 25 physicians in the Vancouver area who performed abortions, although few of them let that be known. He had been a second-year medical student at the University of British Columbia in 1960 when he was asked to conduct a pathological study on a woman who had died after inducing an abortion on herself with a piece of elm bark. He learned that the bark was meant to expand upon entry and encourage infection that would abort the fetus. A postmortem revealed overwhelming sepsis—widespread infection—causing multiple abscesses in the patient’s brain, lungs, liver and abdominal cavity. He never forgot her, nor did he forget his experiences on the front line in the mid-sixties, when he served his obstetrics/gynecology residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. Each day, he would recall in presentations and an interview with the Canadian Medical Association Journal years later, there were patients admitted with infections from self-performed abortion.
Chicago became legendary in pro-choice circles in the years before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal. It was the home of “The Jane Collective,” or simply “Jane,” an underground abortion service. Women were quietly referred to Jane nurses by police, social workers, clergy and hospital staff. Operating out of apartments in the city, Jane provided abortions for an estimated 11,000 women. When Dr. Romalis returned to Vancouver in the 1970s, abortions became a part of his practice—even though the operation still bore a stigma to many people, even among his colleagues. Some would leave the doctor’s lounge when he entered. Ultimately, while Romalis said he did not plan to be a crusader on the issue, and did not intend to become a poster boy of the pro-choice movement, that’s what he became. Pro-life protesters scattered nails on his driveway, picketed his house, passed flyers to his neighbors with the message “Do you know who your neighbor is?”
The night of Monday, November 7 it had rained steadily, and continued off and on overnight. Just past 6:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, Dr, Romalis rose. By 7 a.m. he was downstairs in his bathrobe in the kitchen making breakfast, alone. As he did every morning, he walked over to the counter, placed bread in the toaster, and sat at the table. He opened some mail. Quiet. Waiting for the toast to pop. He leaned forward, just slightly, perhaps to reach for something or to look more closely at a letter, or for no reason at all.
An explosion, glass breaking. The kitchen chair jerked out from underneath him as the bullet tore through the back of it. The round had missed him. He jumped to his feet, and then he felt a blow to his leg, his thigh, the impact of the second shot like a cannonball, his body falling, crashing to the floor, facedown. 7:10 a.m. The time on his watch glared at him as he lay there, the numbers burning into his memory. He looked down at his left leg. He saw a hole the size of a grapefruit, and a geyser of blood as thick as his finger pouring out. I am—going to die, he thought. Blood everywhere, coating the floor. Where did the shot come from? He didn’t know. He felt at his left leg, the wound. “I’ve been shot, bleeding heavily call 911!” he shouted. He knew there wasn’t much time. His thighbone was shattered, a major artery, the femoral artery severed. Stop the blood flow, or die, he would bleed out in minutes. “Stay upstairs!” he shouted to his wife and daughter. The shooter might come into the house to finish him off. The shooter was an abortion sniper, he had felt it instantly. He reached for his bathrobe belt, yanked it out, began tying it tight around the thigh above the gushing wound. He dragged himself across the floor to get out of the room, blood painting the tiles. His daughter called 911. “Someone’s shot at my house and my dad. Can you please come?”
“What?” asked the operator.
“I think someone’s been shot in my house!” the young woman repeated.
“Possible shot fired,” relayed a dispatcher. “Victim just yelled that he’s been shot.”
Dr. Romalis felt his consciousness fading, his tight grip on the tourniquet weakening. Outside the house, the shooter was on the move. He had been there in a laneway behind West 46th Street, a narrow, hidden roadway where the garbage was collected. The rain started falling again. The wind picked up. Two hours and 45 minutes after the shooting, 72 kilometers from Vancouver, just before 10 p.m., the tan Datsun, license plate 330JLL, crossed back into the United States at the Peace Arch Crossing.
The ambulance and police reached the Romalis house within five minutes. The doctor was placed on the stretcher, unconscious, his skin gray. The attendants were doing all they could to keep him alive. A nine-hour operation followed. Eight units of blood. The lead story on local TV news that night: gynecologist Dr. Garson Romalis in critical condition, unconscious, images of his daughter, Lisa, pacing the ER.