“I just remember, you know, laying down and as I was laying down I just saw the blood just pour out of my head at that moment. I was like, ‘Well, you know, in my mind I was like this is probably it, you know, this is probably when I’m going to die.”
Like many aspiring musicians in Nashville, Joshua Rowe had several side hustles, including one as an Uber driver. On the evening of December 30, 2020, he turned on his Uber app. “I logged in about six o’clock and my first ride was over on the west side of Nashville,” he says. “And right before I was getting ready to drop them off at their restaurant, I got a ping for the second ride and I was like, ‘this is going to be a good night.’”
But it was not a good night for Josh. In fact, it would be the worst night of his life.
I picked up the passenger, second passenger of the night and he got in the car. It was an uneventful ride. Nothing really threw any red flags or anything. Anyway, when I got to where I was dropping him off at, he said, ‘drop me off behind this car on the corner.’ So, I pulled over and as soon as the car stopped, it just went black. I remember just kind of waking up and this sick, flu feeling in my stomach and I remember looking over and seeing my driver window shattered ––the glass broken, seeing a bullet hole.”
Josh had been shot point-blank in the back of the head with a 9-millimeter pistol. The passenger took his wallet and stole his car and left him on the street to die.
“I just remember like, grabbing my face and just feeling where the blood was coming from,” Josh recalls. “I just remember just lying on the ground, and, breathing, just deep breaths.”
Amazingly, he mustered up enough strength to stand and go for help. He also put pressure on his neck to keep from bleeding out. “It was like God was guiding me in the right direction, and I ran into this fenced-in area and there were two gentlemen that were in this gated area, and I ran straight in there. And they just said, ‘stay right there. Stay right there. We’re calling somebody.'”
Josh, who had recently re-committed his life to Christ, remained conscious until an ambulance arrived. “I remember just praying to God like, and I just remember God giving me, this peace and comfort.”
Josh was rushed to the ER. Despite the huge loss of blood, he clung to life. The next morning his mother received a phone call from a nurse at the hospital.
Josh’s mother remembers: “I answered the phone and I said, ‘Hello, and this is Donna Riordan, how may I help you?’ And she introduced herself as a case manager at Vanderbilt in their Trauma Unit. She said, ‘Do you know a Joshua Rowe?’ And I said, ‘Yes, that’s my son.’ She said, “Well, he’s here and he’s been shot in the head.” And that’s all I heard, and I started screaming. We have friends all over the world. Everybody just, we sent out a blast and prayers went up all over the world for Josh.”
Dr. Ashish Sharma is the surgeon at Vanderbilt who worked on Josh. He was stunned at the path the bullet had taken. “I saw his images and the first thing that came to my mind was, ‘He’s very fortunate.’ If you visualize the trajectory of that ballistic object, he had some small fractures, in the upper jaw and the maxillary, even the lower area of his orbital floors, but none of them were damaged,” he says.
Later that morning, Josh’s mother arrived at the hospital. “When I turned the corner, and got up there and saw him, his eyes lit up,” she says. “He gave me the thumbs up. He wanted me to know he was OK. He went like this, which meant to get him a piece of paper and something to write on. And he wrote to me when I got there, ‘I love you, Mom. I forgive him.’”
Miraculously as the bullet fragments passed through his skull they did not hit his brain.
“There was only a small opening and a small exit wound,” Dr. Sharma says. Anything could have gone wrong. It can deflect in any direction. How it entered, the bullet and the fragments, and how it ended up, it missed most of the structures. It just gives me the feeling that, someone was watching out for him.”
Despite the fact that he was shot in the head at close range, Josh made a quick recovery. Today, he is even back to singing again. Donna says, “Most people who have a gunshot wound like that, they die because they bleed out. It shakes your faith a little bit. But we saw God everywhere, in everything. He ran in the right direction. He ran right to where people were. Vanderbilt being a mile away, they got there right away. That was not a coincidence.”
The young man who shot Josh was convicted of multiple charges and sent to prison, but Josh still prays for him. He and his mother know that what the enemy meant for evil, God is using for good.
“I just know that God loves me, and He loves all of us,” Josh sys. “He loves the man that shot me. He loves Him just as much as He loves me. God’s not done with any of us. He’s not done with me and He’s definitely not done with the man that shot me. I pray that God can heal him, and that God can use him and bring love and joy to this world, you know. I couldn’t ask for more than that.”
