The family has requested prayer....

Justin Hartley, age 20 (May), graduated from Westside, resides in Bono.

Injured 10:00 pm (our time) Saturday night (06/02/07) in a roadside bomb. He told his dad that he has been the machine gun man (on the top) for quite a while. Monday, on the news, they announced that 3 were killed in a roadside bomb Sunday (which, I believe they are ahead of us in time). We are ‘assuming’ those 3 were with Justin.

Richard, my son-in-law, got a visit from the Sheriff’s department Sunday morning to let him know that Justin was injured and he would be receiving a call from a Colonel to let him know what was going on. All they told him was that he was injured with massive injuries to the left side of his body and his face and that he was not yet in stable condition.

Monday they flew him to Germany after they finally got him stable. He lost a lot of blood in transit, so they were unable to operate until Tuesday, our time, to repair damage to his intestines. They had to give him transfusions and some platelets, etc. to build up his blood. Thankfully, they only had to remove about 2” of his intestines and repaired the rest.


They removed a section of skull from ‘ear to ear’ to relieve pressure from the brain swelling (that was done in Baghdad before he left). He is still heavily sedated with an ‘amnesia’ drug. He is not responding to voice commands, although he does lightly squeeze the nurses’ hand. The nurse told Tricia that his face would not have bad scarring, but he is bruised pretty bad now. They are not sure about his left eye, could possibly be blind but they are leaving that up to the doctors at Walter Reed.

He can move both arms (no damage to the arms) and both legs but he has massive injuries to his left hip and left thigh (a lot of muscle and tissue loss), although no bone injuries that they know of. He is kind of vacuumed sealed to keep bacteria, etc out. They take him down to the sterile room and wash out his wounds – they said antibiotics can only do so much and the wash really helps with infection.

His other organs seem to be working properly. They were going to put him on dialysis, but his kidneys started filtering correctly so that didn’t have to happen. He has been on a ventilator to help relieve stress, although he didn’t ‘require’ one.

He will be moved to Walter Reed Hospital today [9th] – arriving about 7:00 p.m. His dad, aunt and cousin will be flying tomorrow [10th] to be with him.