Alicia Brady never saw the shooter who fired the AK-47 across the street, through her car door and into her abdomen.
A 17-year-old boy was later arrested but released because of a lack of evidence. Brady's case was closed within a year of the October 2008 shooting.
Over three years and through 10 surgeries, Brady wanted to see that face. To tell him how he hurt her. How the University of Arizona School of Dance star had a 1 percent chance of survival after the shooting and, even after being saved by Dr. Peter Rhee and others at UMC, still battled a gut that flamed and fizzled and leaked bile.
Or how she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, needing hours and hours of therapy because of her assailant.
"I had hatred toward a person I didn't know," she said.
Brady fumed even as her life returned to some sense of normalcy.
She re-enrolled at the UA in 2009 and graduated from the School of Dance in 2010, on time, with her class.
She returned home, to Cañon City, Colo., to teach dance.
Fremont County, of which Cañon City is the county seat, is among America's prison capitals. Thirteen facilities house about 7,500 prisoners - including both the Unabomber and the Shoe Bomber - and employ about half the county.
Many of the people locked up in her town are like the one who shot her - and yet she decided to reach out to them. Once or twice a week, she goes to a prison to speak with former gang members.
The 25-year-old tells them her story and preaches her faith. Many in prison for gang violence, she said, have never met a victim before her.
Conversely, she gains a better understanding of the prisoners' backgrounds.
After she decided to visit prisons eight months ago, Brady accepted that she would never meet her shooter.
"It's almost like I have come face-to-face with him now," she said.
"I had a choice - to be bitter, or better."
•••
The house party near 36th Street and Campbell Avenue on Oct. 11, 2008, was too rowdy, so the 21-year-old student in the UA's well-regarded dance program piled into a car with friends to leave.
As it pulled away, the passengers saw a man raise a shotgun beyond the driver's side window, and ducked.
They heard pops.
Sitting in the back seat on the passenger side, Brady felt her body jerk forward.
She had been shot by crossfire from a different gunman - one across the street, aiming at the man with the shotgun.
She felt her abdomen. It was warm and swelling like a balloon.
She used her training in dance - the only thing she ever wanted to do - to breathe.
"I could see blood on her shirt," said Danielle Abril, who was in the car. "I could smell the gunpowder."
Abril, who had just met Brady that night, threw herself into the back seat and applied pressure to the wounds. She tried to keep Brady conscious.
The driver, two-time NCAA outdoor decathlon champion Jake Arnold - whom Brady didn't know well at the time - hauled toward UMC. He bypassed other hospitals in favor of the vaunted trauma unit.
"He's taught to work under pressure," Brady said. "If anyone else had been driving the car, I don't think they would have made it."
When Brady arrived at UMC in the early hours of Oct. 12, doctors discovered the bullet had pierced through her liver. She learned later she had a 1 percent chance of survival.
The aftereffects were just beginning.
"You take a rock and drop it in a pond, and it ripples," Brady said. "That's what it does to your body."
The first night, surgeons removed part of her liver and ascending colon.
Her liver began to die, and her diaphragm ruptured a week later.
She had an aneurysm in her liver, which leaked bile, so she couldn't eat.
In 41 days at UMC, she had six surgeries. She lost 25 pounds.
•••
When Brady left the hospital, she was too weak to walk up the stairs to her home. So she, along with her parents and grandparents, moved into the midtown Ronald McDonald House.
Ronald McDonald House Charities provides housing for children receiving medical treatment, as well as their families.
Months before Brady was shot, the organization's global office decided to raise its age limit from 18 to 21, "in part because of demand," said Anne Rounds, chief development officer of RMHC Southern Arizona. If not for that decision, Brady would have been ineligible.
Little girls battling anemia and leukemia while staying at the Ronald McDonald House drew pictures of Brady as a princess.
After 18 days, she was well enough to fly home to Colorado.
When she decided to return to the UA in 2009, folks in her hometown thought she was crazy.
"That was the last thing I ever wanted her to do," said her mom, Dena. "But I also knew she needed to heal and get on with her life, and get past it.
"Had she stayed home, she wouldn't have faced her fears and gotten back into the world."
Brady struggled with fatigue, digestive issues and depression upon returning to school.
"I knew I had to make a change and do something about it," she said. "For me, it was taking back a little bit of what was taken from me."
Brady danced again, with 10-inch scars across her abdomen.
She earned her degree, moved home and continued to heal.
She had her 10th surgery almost exactly a year ago.
•••
The Bradys were sitting in church last Christmastime when a speaker proposed a prison ministry.
The 25-year-old thought it might help her recovery, and she was right.
"She's much more at peace with life in general," her mom said.
Others aren't quite so easy to forgive.
Her mom admits she's "not really sure where I am, right now, on that."
Neither is Abril, who became close friends with Brady after the accident and, because of that night, began to study medicine.
"That's a part of me that's still angry and bitter," Abril said. "That she can let go of it and do all those things is amazing."
Brady - who will likely always have gastrointestinal problems - has finished a book about her ordeal titled "Thread." In cases of gang violence, hospitals give patients an alias to protect them. Thread was Brady's.
The book should be released by Oct. 11, when Brady will speak at RMHC Southern Arizona's "Chalk Talk" event, a for-women-only primer about men's college basketball featuring Sean Miller and Arizona Wildcats players.
"I think more good has come out of this than bad," Brady said. "I know that sounds crazy. But my life has really changed direction.
"I think I have a lot more purpose in knowing what I want to do in my life because of this."
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