By Paula Day

It took only a moment, a split second, and J.J. Biello’s life, the lives of his wife and his two sons were irrevocably changed.

On an April night two and a half years ago, the 15-year veteran detective of the Atlanta police walked through a door at Provino’s Restaurant on Roswell Road and came face to face with a 17-year-old robber who shot him three times, once through the neck. The high cervical injury left Biello a quadriplegic.

“It happened so quick – in the blink of an eye,” Biello recalls. “I always felt that when I opened that door, I entered the twilight zone. I was introduced to hell.”

After six months in Atlanta’s Shepherd Spinal Center, Biello returned to his beige with red trim frame home at the end of a cul-du-sac in Cherokee County, his life changed forever. He can no longer feed himself, dress himself, even scratch his nose. He can’t play catch or checkers or cards with is two sons. He can’t enjoy a quiet, private dinner in a restaurant with his wife.

“It gets to the point where it’s really silly,” Biello remarked, his saving sense of humor surfacing. “I’m normal from the head up; I think like I thought before. I think, ‘I need to do this; I need to do that,’ but when I go to move the parts, then I realize I’m paralyzed.”

The Biellos’ home has been marginally modified to accommodate his wheelchair existence. Biello designed the completion of the unfinished basement into sleeping quarters for himself with an accessible shower and an area where the family can be together. An inside elevator and outdoor ramp give him access to the first floor. He has not been on the second floor since the shooting. Barbara Biello recounts her husband’s words: “The bottom floor is hell; the second floor is purgatory; to be on the top floor with Barbara would be heaven.”

Biello had a history of insomnia before the shooting and so the couple has hired a nighttime attendant, allowing Barbara Biello to get needed rest.

They have made no major modifications in their home. For her, to do so would be to admit that her husband’s condition is not going to get better. That would seem to deny the possibility of the miracle she wants. She tells God she understands He has His plans. “But do I have to keep reminding You of what I’d like?” she asks Him.

Biello also prays for a medical cure for spinal cord injuries, a research break-through that would not only benefit him, he pointed out, but also the more than 500,000 people in the U.S. with this injury.

“If I lived to be 70 years old and this tied me up for seven years, well, that’d be only 10 percent of my life,” he observed optimistically.

He is able to breathe on his own, unlike another Georgia quadriplegic, Larry McAfee, who needs a respirator to breathe. McAfee recently obtained a legal judgment giving him the right to turn off his life-sustaining ventilator himself.

Biello admits McAfee’s medical situation is dire, but McAfee is single and Biello thinks it would be easier to live with a spinal cord injury if he were single. He is constantly aware of the effects of his paralysis on the lives of his wife and sons. However, he admits it was their love and need for him that gave him strength and the will to survive.

“I did ask God to give McAfee a reason to live. I prayed for that every night,” Biello's said. Recently McAfee expressed interest in efforts to establish a group home for Georgia ventilator patients.

Transplants from New Jersey, the Biellos are members of St. Catherine of Siena parish in Kennesaw. They regularly attend the 11 a.m. Sunday Mass.

Biello, who was 39 Oct. 7, admits, “I always had a hard time with faith. I never took God seriously. I thought bad things should happen to bad people; bad things didn’t happen to good people. Being crippled opened my eyes.”

While he claims a weak faith, God is not far away and unconnected to him. He recounted how he prayed, talking to God man-to-man and telling Him, “Please come up with a cure for this injury for everyone.”

At times God seems distant and inattentive. One is reminded of the “dark night of the soul” written about by Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. “As long as He tells me He’s doing it,” Biello said, “I can take it. It’s when He doesn’t speak to me – that’s hard to take.”

His wife is his source of strength, he says. Immediately after the shooting he wanted to die to free her and his sons, but that was “exactly what they didn’t want,” he recalls. Now he calls her his mentor in faith.

“Everyone draws strength from someone in a family,” he said in tribute to the woman he has known since she was 16. “Barbara is our strength. She’s lost the most – her husband, the father of her children. Before I got hurt, I was the source of energy. Now she’s the source.”

Barbara Biello, who was interviewed by The Georgia Bulletin a few months after her husband’s shooting, welcomed another interview because she wanted to talk about the way her faith has been important, something that she hadn’t felt comfortable doing in other media.

“My initial reaction,” she said, “was to let down in faith. It’s always easier to believe when everything is going well. I expected God to give a quick remedy; I thought if we had enough faith, we’d have a miracle.”

Now she recognizes a change in her approach to God. “An injury like this knocks down the barriers and you get to the point of telling God, ‘I want him well. Are you there? Do you care?’”

She adds emphatically, “I don’t just believe, I know God is present. I know He can cure J.J.”

At this point in their journey she finds her prayers answered in other ways. “Now, I think the miracle is in getting closer to God and that we’ve been able to stay together as a family.”

She sometimes wonders if before the shooting they were becoming too busy, and she credits the crisis for refocusing their lives.

“We’re going in a good direction now. Something has been taken, but our faith is deepened. Not that you ran to God before because you had nothing else to do, it that you were blind and now you see. That’s the gift.”

Biello’s present condition is exactly that predicted by doctors at Shepherd Spinal Center. He has regained use of injured vocal cords and speaks in a husky, somewhat high-pitched voice. He has use of his right biceps muscle to the elbow but has no wrist movement, no grip. He can adjust the wheelchair and give himself some shift in posture.

The loss of mobility and the loss of privacy are two of the more apparent deprivations. For anyone, these losses are monumental. To the onlooker, they seem even more intense when an energetic, independent-minded, athletically-built man in his 30s endures them.

“I was a very independent person. I didn’t want to depend on anyone,” Biello said. “Now that’s changed so drastically. I have to depend on God. I have to depend on other people.”

The Biellos admit to anger toward the man who injured J.J.

“I don’t want to hate,” Barbara Biello said. “I have forced myself to pray for him.” If his assailant were to repent and be saved, Biello says, “Me and him would have big-time problems in heaven.” The couple disagrees with the U.S. bishops’ stand on capital punishment, believing there is indeed a place for the death penalty in the country’s justice system.

His assailant was convicted of armed robbery, aggravated assault and aggravated battery and is serving a life sentence plus 40 years in a Georgia maximum security prison. Since his imprisonment he has stabbed and killed an inmate. He pleaded guilty and has received further sentencing, according to Biello.

Sergeant Louis Arcangeli of the Atlanta Police Department’s Criminal Analysis Unit is a 15-year personal friend of Biello’s “J.J. is a powerful human being,” he said. “He has a lot to share with folks. If anything, the injury has inhibited his mobility but not his mental capacity. He’s still a great motivator. His foremost mission is to be a father but he misses his work. It’s not his style to give up.”

Biello has been working for the last year in a limited way for the department. He has served on the Commendation Review Board which meets monthly to review documents for service awards to officers. As a certified instructor at the police academy he has taught in the areas of robbery investigation, informant management and officer survival. “We’re delighted he is able to come back,” Arcangeli said.

Family closeness and being a good father are very important. Biello says the family was close before the injury and it has not brought them any closer. A counselor at Shepherd Spinal predicted they would become better parents as a result of the tragedy. They say, not so, just more creative as parents.

Ten-year-old Ross is an avid soccer player and Biello attends his matches regardless of distance or weather or accessibility. Recently they asked the boy’s coach to drive the family’s specially equipped van to a game in Columbus, Ga. so Biello could also go. He will stay up later than usual to watch a televised sports event of more interest to his son than to him in order to “replay” the game for the boy who had to go to bed. “My main objective is for life to be normal,” Biello explained. His wife is able to keep up regular tennis games with friends, her work with St. Catherine’s St. Vincent de Paul conference, and her participation in weekly Bible study.

But for life to be truly normal would require a miracle.

Barbara Biello wistfully acknowledged she noticed a neighbor cleaning his gutters and wished he would ask to clean theirs. Ross has frequent nightmares that someone will break into the house. His mother reassures him, “That doesn’t make any sense that Daddy got shot.” Thirteen-year-old Alex, who Biello describes as “a typical teenager,” received help from a counselor after his father’s brush with death.

The couple admits their relationship has changed and that was not what they wanted.

“He was always the doer, the giver, and I enjoyed it,” Barbara Biello said. “Now he’s the receiver and I’m the giver. We hate it that way. But there’s nothing we can do.”

Possibly most painful, “a knife in the heart” J.J. Biello calls it, is the fact that his sons must check before they go play to see if they are needed to help “keep an eye” on their father.

But Barbara Biello claims a “real sense of accomplishment and pride.”

“We’ve made it. We’ve remained a unit. That’s a good example for the kids. It shows that marriage is forever. We live that example.”