'Nothing's ever stopped John': Oxford High basketball player, shooting victim up for courage award

The nights are the hardest part.

Sometimes, John Asciutto will be in bed and he’ll hear a sound, and it will send a shock through his system. He’ll freeze up. Lying there. On his back. On the ground again. Momentarily paralyzed with pain and unspeakable terror.

Just like after he was shot during the Oxford High School shooting in Michigan.

“I don’t feel safe, even when I’m safe,” he says. “I don’t know — it’s weird.”

But during the day?

This 17-year-old boy has recovered from his physical injuries and he’s back at school, back on the Oxford basketball team.

Showing uncommon courage.

Even if he doesn't realize it.

John doesn’t understand why he is up for a prestigious national award, or what he did to deserve it.

“I feel like because I got shot, I’m getting an award,” John said to his mother, Nicholette.

John has been named one of 10 finalists for the Jersey Mike’s Naismith High School Basketball Courage Award.

“Part of that is coming back from being shot and showing up on the court and being able to do it,” Nicholette told her son. “That's part of the courage.”

Yes, that’s courage, even if he doesn't realize it, even if he can't process it, showing incredible strength in the midst of pain and grief.

The Atlanta Tipoff Club, which administers all Naismith Awards, will announce a female winner and a male winner on April 12. Jersey Mike’s will make a donation to the players’ high school basketball programs in honor of the two winners.

“John and the entire Oxford community have been in our thoughts since Nov. 30,” Eric Oberman, executive director of the Atlanta Tipoff Club, said in a release. “We can’t imagine what they have had to endure. Their courage is beyond incredible.”

All of them.

'We both knew it'

John and his best friend, Marco Vackaro, were walking down the hallway in Oxford High School on Nov. 30. They planned to work on Marco’s truck, which had a tire problem.

“We walked past the main bathroom in the building, the Wildcat bathroom,” John said. “I got like 10 yards past it and I heard gunshots.”

John and Marco are hunters and recognized the sounds immediately.

“Me and my buddy looked at each other,” John said. “We both knew it.”

The gunshots echoed through the hallways: “It was loud as (heck),” he said.

John was shot from behind. A bullet hit him in his buttocks, went through his leg, narrowly missing the femur by about an inch and exited through his thigh.

He collapsed to the ground, his leg went numb, and saw the shooter probably 10 yards away.

“I just got up like sprinted out of the school,” John said.

Maybe, hobbled is a better description. He was moving on adrenaline. Football player strong. Oxford strong.

When he got outside, he realized that so much blood had gone down his legs and collected in his shoes that he feet were slipping inside them. He got into Marco’s truck and they headed to a hospital.

John was losing a lot of blood. Marco gave him a shirt and John tied it around his leg to try to stop the bleeding.

“Marco was stressed out,” John said.

The hardest part

Nicholette works in the Oxford High cafeteria and was getting ready to clean tables.

"Somebody ran through and said, 'there's a shooter in the building,’” she said. “And then I looked over to the janitor and his face was completely white. And I was like, 'Oh, my God, this is real.'

"Because he had a walkie-talkie on him.”

She had just seen John and Marco and knew they were headed to the section of the building she heard the shooter was in. 

“That's when I was panicking, like what do I do?" she said. "I'm thinking, they are athletes they will get out of the building.”

The building went into lockdown. She got on the floor in the office and called John's phone but he didn’t answer.

She called Marco’s phone and John answered, as Marco was driving.

“He said, ‘He got me in the leg, mom, I'm bleeding bad,” Nicholette said. “John said, ‘He just missed my head.’”

John said that he had already called his brother Anthony, Nicholette’s younger son, who also attends Oxford.

“John called his brother and told him, ‘There's a shooter in the building, you need to hide, run, get the heck out of there, because he's coming,'” Nicholette said.

She called the hospital to tell them her son was on the way.

But she was worried because Marco is an inexperienced driver.

“Marco is a new driver,” she said. “I'm freaking out that he's doing 100 miles per hour and his best friend's bleeding in the truck.”

Friends were texting Nicholette, trying to figure out what was going on, trying to check on their own kids.

“You don't know how real it is until I got outside, my hands over my head, and there were (police) guns everywhere, pointing at me,” she said.

John came home two or three hours later, wearing blue hospital clothing.

“The FBI took his clothes,” Nicholette said.

Rumors were flying on social media about who was shot.

Tate Myre, 16, Madisyn Baldwin, 17, and Hana St. Juliana, 14, died within hours of the shooting. Justin Shilling, 17, would survive an additional day, before dying in a local hospital.

“I think the hardest part for me is when John got home," Nicholette said. "He said, ‘How is Tate? I heard he got it in the leg.' 

"And I had to look him in the face and tell him, 'Tate didn't make it.'”

Nicholette went to Marco’s house and helped Marco’s mother scrub her son’s blood out of the truck.

The wounds are still healing

Nicholette was not surprised when John rejoined the basketball team.

“I think that's who John is,” she said. “Nothing's ever stopped John."

Not when he popped his shoulder out of the socket playing a game.

Not when he broke his growth plate in his foot in football.

"That's John," she said.

And so this story continues to play out on countless levels.

There is the legal side: Nicholette is suing Oxford High School staff and administrators on behalf of her sons.

And then, there is the personal side: All these kids are dealing with the unspeakable and no one is the same.

"There's a lot of kids who witnessed a lot and they are suffering," Nicholette said. "There's a lot of suffering going on, with a lot of people in this town. They'll never be the same just from what they have seen.”

Despite all of that, John goes out on that basketball court to be with his friends that he’s known his whole life.

He might look at the crowd differently now. With an air of suspicion. Afraid of the unknown.

Not sure what is a safe place anymore.

But he’s out there, because that’s John, dealing with unimaginable pain and grief.

And that’s pure courage.

The whole school is showing it. All these kids. All these parents. All these teachers.

Just by going to a basketball game.

Contact Jeff Seidel: jseidel@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @seideljeff. To read his recent columns, go to freep.com/sports/jeff-seidel/.