Disabled advocate Gilbert Smith, a former police officer, works to spread awareness and equality for the disabled. The disAbility Resources Center recently presented him with a lifetime achievement Award. (Photo by Tyrone Walker)
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Even sitting in a wheelchair, his hands not fully functional, there’s a physical presence about Gilbert Smith, the former police officer who was shot on duty and left paralyzed from the waist down.
Maybe it’s left over from his rough-and-tumble days as a bouncer in his dad’s bar. Or maybe it’s just the force of his spirit.
“He’s left his stamp on a little bit of everything here,” Gwen Gillenwater, executive director of the disAbility Resource Center, said last week when presenting him with a Lifetime Achievement Award for making Charleston more accessible to the handicapped. “He’s one of the real giants in our community.”
Smith will be 63 in December. He was paralyzed Dec. 12, 1970, nearly 40 years ago.
“I’ve outlived the statistics,” he said.
Before he became a police officer, Smith worked as a bartender and bouncer at his dad’s nightclub. It was called the Coconut Grove on Pittsburgh Avenue in North Charleston. Smith also collected loans for his dad.
“I was big and strong back then,” he said.
His dad died in a tractor accident when Smith was 20. He went to work for the Charleston Naval Shipyard before joining the police department.
He took a test in the morning and was given his badge, gun and handcuffs that evening. He spent the first two weeks riding around with an older officer, who was also shot on duty but survived without any permanent damage, and then was sent out on his own.
Fewer than four months on the job, Smith got a call that a man was passed out in the middle of the road in rural Charleston County. Smith loaded him in the back of the patrol car to take him to the jail. He didn’t handcuff him because the man didn’t have a right hand.
Smith would learn later that the man lost his hand in a shootout. He previously had served time for robbing a bank.
The man woke up in the back of the car, grabbed Smith’s gun, shot him in the back and pushed him out of the car. The man later said he saw the devil.
Smith would never walk again.
As a result of the incident, the department installed cages in all the patrol vehicles and instituted a training program … Continue reading this article
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“When you become a paraplegic and are in a chair, physically your world changes. You’re looking up all of a sudden,” he says. “(The class) was a great way for me to get to know my body again, to get comfortable in the chair and to build up a sense of confidence.”
