EPICured

Furthermore, the report indicates that Hall was not shot at a downtown mall, but rather in a neighborhood that, as the report says, "appears to be frequented and possibly inhabited, in part by drug users & addicts."

A Fresno police detective who investigated the case also says that some of the eyewitnesses to the shooting--witnesses he characterized as "crack heads"--alleged that Hall was there to make a buy.

Hall swears angrily that he was not buying drugs when he was shot.
"I wasn't doing nothing wrong," he says. "As many times as I have been and lucked out and nothing happened, I wasn't doing nothing wrong that day. It was Sunday at four in the afternoon. There's been a hundred times that I never got caught, when things should have gone wrong but didn't. I mean, really close calls when I was that bad. But then, that time: no."

Whatever Hall was doing, the police accounts and his account come together with him flagging down a police cruiser.

He pulled up his shirt for the police to reveal a bullet hole in his side; the bullet went through his spleen and bladder and several loops of intestine. A second bullet had lodged near his clavicle, so close to the skin that it raised a bump. The third shattered in his chin.

He paced around while waiting for the ambulance, and was so full of adrenaline that he never felt pain.

"I was higher than I've ever been in my life," he says. And as he rode to the hospital in the ambulance, he says, he could feel his life slipping pleasantly away. But then he thought about his daughter Chelsea and suddenly didn't want to die, and so he forced himself back to consciousness.

He was coming out of surgery when Stacey finally reached the hospital; he'd lost half his blood and half of his intestines, but he was alive.

Todd Hall now looks back at the shooting as a divine wake-up call, a message that maybe he hadn't gotten the point, hadn't been turned around abruptly enough when his son died, hadn't slowed down enough to think of how much his actions affected everyone around him.

He was so gravely wounded that he could not work for a year and a half, and had to spend months in bed after he was released from the hospital.

Stacey and the kids would sit at his bedside at their house in Bass Lake; his big black mongrel, Bradley, would lick his hands. Hall fell into deep depression.

"I sat after I was shot and thought, 'What the hell am I here for? I don't see any purpose to being on Earth.'"

It was sitting at his bedside.
The restaurant business can be hard on family life. Chefs get up early in the morning to get to the kitchen and set up for the day. Hall would routinely get home for a while at midday while the kids were in school, then return to the restaurant in late afternoon for dinner time and remain there until close to midnight.

Furthermore, as Hall is quick to admit--and other chefs have corroborated--chefs tend to be as high-spirited and volatile as artists in other creative fields.

To Hall's good fortune, his wife Stacey is as calm and steady as Hall is emotional; she is staunchly supportive, deeply in love.

Neither hesitated to speak openly about the emotional upheavals, even as the children sat next to them in the living room of their house.

"It's hard to make someone go to the doctor when they don't think they're sick," Hall says. "I thought I was normal. I was so far from normal, but I was in a state of denial. I didn't realize how the death of my son had affected me."

He was entitled to money through a victims of crime program in California, and he used it to get into therapy, first for himself and then for his entire family.

The therapist, Dr. Jill Schirsen, who has practices in Berkeley and Bass Lake, California, he says, helped him realize just how much he was running from the death of Cody, and further, how senselessly he had always driven himself.

While he was recuperating, Hall's daughter Chelsea confessed to him that she had always looked forward to his days off because it was the only time she ever saw him.

The psychologist took Hall to task for his controlling nature. She told Hall that he "couldn't walk around life being a dickhead," and that Stacey should make a sign to hang in the kitchen that said "I'm not one of your fucking employees."

It was an epiphany for Hall.
He realized that because of his career, he had never celebrated Thanksgiving with his family. He decided to throw a Thanksgiving dinner for the homeless, and when more than a hundred people signed up for the meal, he went to local businesses to ask for their help in supplying the food, which he and his kids cooked.

The greatest psychological burden, however, rested on the shoulders of Hall's son John, now 7, who had let his baby brother fall in the pool.