This week’s issue of the Chicago Weekly includes a Perspectives piece by University of Chicago alum Ryan McCarl about an attack on the UofC Men’s Cross Country team that left one student permanently injured. At press time we still didn’t have all the details on the attack, but since then we’ve found out the whole story.

Two weeks ago, on Friday, October 15, 15 members of the Men’s Cross Country team were running west along Garfield Boulevard, a route they’ve often run before. At about 3:50, when they reached Garfield and State, an eastbound green Buick sedan drove by and opened fire with paintballs. Second-year Andrew Wong turned to look at the car and was struck on the bridge of his nose by a paintball, which ricocheted into his right eye. His cornea was scratched and his iris was partially (and permanently) detached, allowing bright light into his inner eye. Wong went to the ER that night and has seen an ophthalmologist several times since then.

In an email today, Wong wrote, “Worst case scenario, I’ll be 20/40 in my right eye and 20/30 with glasses in my right eye. Best case scenario, I’ll get to 20/20, but its quite certain that I will have some sort of abnormalities in my vision despite being able to read small text. My slightly detached iris likely means that I am going to see weird shadows, and I am told that my corneal abrasion, which was near my visual axis, has scarred, which I am told I’ll notice.”

Although Wong is the most recent University of Chicago student to be the victim of a paintball drive-by, he isn’t the first. Fourth-year student Tiffany (who asked that we not publish her full name) reports that two years ago, in mid-October of 2007, she was waiting for a bus at Garfield and Halsted when a white car with about four black teenagers drove by and opened fire with paintballs. “They just opened a window, slowed down, and shot at everyone,” Tiffany recalls. “I thought I was going to die because I thought they had real guns instead of paintball guns.” She was hit in the back, but a teenage girl also waiting for a bus was hit in the eye, although Tiffany says she was not seriously injured.

In October of 2003, three men in a car went on a paintball shooting spree in Hyde Park and Kenwood, according to the Chicago Maroon’s crime report. They shot three men over the course of 45 minutes before being apprehended by the police and charged with two counts of battery and one count of assault.

Why does this kind of nonlethal violence happen? Do a bunch of kids just pick up paintball guns and go out shooting strangers for fun? In last month’s Chicago Magazine, John Conroy wrote about his attempt to find out the motives behind a seemingly random act of brutal violence against him, which he originally suspected might be some kind of gang initiation. Conroy didn’t manage to get the full story, but in the end it appeared to be just a teenager acting on a whim. For Conroy, like for Wong, it meant an injury that will stay with him for the rest of his life; for the kid, it didn’t mean much of anything.