Mark Fahey
Assistant Editor
clarion@sinclair.edu
Sinclair student Chris Voudris was already suspicious as he drove through the dark Trotwood neighborhood with a $4,000 racing dirt bike in the back of his truck.
It was Dec. 23, the day before Voudris’ large family was meeting to celebrate Christmas. He had just returned from a vacation in Miami and had received a call from some potential buyers interested in the bike he had posted on Craigslist.
Voudris had been listing items on Craigslist for years. He had expanded his sales, starting off slow with an XBOX 360, moving to a broken-down motorcycle, and working his way up to a $5,000 truck.
“People sort of knew me as the guy who could sell their car for them,” said Voudris. “I used Craigslist because it’s the only local classified that you can list for free. You can meet up where you want to meet up, and there’s no shipping charges. It’s up to you to really set up everything.”
Voudris knew that people were sometimes robbed in Craigslist transactions and was usually careful to take proper precautions, such as having the buyer come to him or to a public place to make the transaction.
“I was very hesitant to meet up with them, because I know about all the stuff on Craigslist,” said Voudris. “But I had my eye on the prize…I really needed the money, so I took the risk of meeting where they wanted to meet.”
The meet-up
With his girlfriend in the passenger seat, Voudris drove to the meeting place. It was about 5 o’clock and it was already dark. He said that if he had arrived at the scene and seen an intimidating group of people, he would have simply driven away.
But what he saw was reassuring: two men, one on his own decent dirt bike, standing in front of a house adorned with Christmas ornaments and inflatable characters. It was a nice neighborhood, and the buyers seemed serious. He relaxed some.
“When I got there I felt more comfortable because his friend was on a bike,” said Voudris. “I actually said to him, ‘sorry for assuming that you could possibly rob me.’”
Still, the men’s strange behavior continued to play on his nerves. One didn’t shake his outstretched hand, and they didn’t seem very interested in the specifics of the high-quality racing bike.
The robbery
Voudris was glad that he had asked his girlfriend to stay in the truck, where the limousine-tinted windows hid her. The man on the bike kept asking if he wanted to race as the pair’s body language began to change.
“I could tell that things were about to go down, and I wanted to somehow signal to [his girlfriend] to take off in the truck, and I’d take off on the bike,” said Voudris.
Voudris started hinting that he wasn’t sure about selling the bike, that maybe it wasn’t what the men were looking for. He rested the bike against his truck. The men moved closer.
They asked to hear the bike idle, and Voudris said he knew at that point that he was going to be robbed. The men had already heard him drive the bike. One of the men pulled a handgun out of his right coat pocket and pointed it at Voudris.
“I’ve never seen so much rage in someone’s face,” said Voudris.
The shot
The man was yelling at him over the noise of the bike. He kept pulling the slide back and pulling the trigger.
“The gun was jamming,” said Voudris. “He had pulled that gun out immediately and went to shoot me three times.”
Voudris threw the bike down and backed up into another gun.
“Let me go home. Just take it,” he said.
The first man bent over to pull the bike up off the ground. In the process, the clip fell out of his gun. His back was turned to Voudris as he climbed onto the bike.
“For some reason, when you have adrenaline pumping through your body like that, you don’t know why you do things,” said Voudris. “All your training…everything that you thought you would do goes out the window.”
Voudris suddenly threw his arms around the man on the bike. Even as he did it, he said he knew it was a bad idea and that it wasn’t worth the risk. He backed up against his truck.
“Shoot this [expletive], kill him. Take your gun out and shoot him,” said the man to his partner.
The man pointed his gun at Voudris, at point-blank range, and started pulling the trigger again.
“One of them went off,” said Voudris.
Getting to the hospital
“All I remember is so much light, it’s very, very bright. And it was really loud,” said Voudris. “Once the bullet hit me in the face…I remember hearing both those bikes take off down the road and it was the loudest thing I’d ever heard, echoing.”
Voudris was in shock. He could hear his girlfriend screaming from inside the truck, but couldn’t find his way inside.
“I’m stuck outside yelling, and all this blood is shooting from my face, it’s all the way up the side of my white truck,” said Voudris.
The bullet had entered his cheek and was lodged in his jawbone, the strongest bone in the head. It stopped right by his ear.
Voudris’ girlfriend called the police. She moved him into the passenger seat and drove to safety.
Voudris’ step dad, a Dayton police officer, was on duty when the call came for his son. He immediately rushed to the hospital and was there to meet him when the ambulance arrived.
“Throughout my whole life, 42 has been my favorite number,” said Voudris. “I woke up, and I was in room 42.”
Surgery and recovery
For months, Voudris couldn’t eat or swallow. His face was swollen “to the size of a football,” and the bullet fragments in his face ground against his jawbone, causing extreme pain.
Still, he said, “I couldn’t have been any more lucky, if it had to hit me in the face.”
The doctor told him that only millimeters away and the bullet would have killed him.
They had to wait for the swelling to subside before they could remove the fragments.
“It was amazing to get that operation, but I went through some horrible, horrible months before that,” he said.
Voudris attended class, which started the first week of January, but did so highly medicated. He suffers from Post traumatic stress disorder from the incident, and would stay up all night just thinking about what happened. He continues to have nerve damage in his neck and face from the bullet wound.
“The pain sucked for me, but what was worse was what it did to my family,” said Voudris. “I have so many siblings that all of them had to go to school thinking about their brother being shot. That is not something that an eight-year-old or a 10-year-old, any of my family members, should have to go through.”
The trial
The police eventually caught Keron Simpson, the man who shot Voudris. He was convicted of killing two people, as well as 13 aggravated robberies and some felonious assaults.
It took a year and a half for Voudris’ case to go to trial, in April. The experience has given him insight into his criminal justice training as he completes Sinclair’s intensive five-month Police Academy program.
“We’re learning about the court system, now I’m doing it first-hand,” said Voudris. Testifying in court was one of the best training aspects I could get into, because it’s what I’m going to be doing as a police officer.”
The trial took about two weeks, and required Voudris to testify for six hours.
“Over a year and a half, every single day and every night, I’ve daydreamed about this event,” said Voudris. “I had waited a year and half to see this person. I wanted him to acknowledge what he had done.”
Voudris gave an impact speech to his attacker, asking Simpson to look him in the eyes as he described what he had done to him and his family. Aside from the defense attorney’s nerve-racking efforts to trip him up during his testimony, Voudris said that he was not nervous as he finally had the opportunity to confront his attacker.
“I just thought about my family,” said Voudris. “How could I possibly be nervous when I know how much greater I am than this person who shot me. It was so easy, because I knew that I have so many positive things ahead of me, and he has nothing.”
Now that the trial has ended, Voudris is allowed to talk about the ordeal. He said that although he will receive notifications about Simpson for the rest of his life, the trial has brought some closure.
Looking to the future
Now that the trial is over, Voudris has plans for what he will be doing next. In a month he will complete the Police Academy at Sinclair, and is hoping to continue his education by transferring to a local 4-year school.
Voudris has been working on a book, a collection of “thoughts and stories, and the first chapter of my life,” that he hopes to get published by the end of the year. A writer since an early age, Voudris also uses some of his material for his stand-up comedy act.
“At about 14 or 15, I started writing, just thoughts in a book. I got the courage to actually say some of these thoughts to people and my friends said, ‘man, you’d be really funny if you just said some of those things on stage.’”
After he turned 18, Voudris tried out at an open-mic night at Wiley’s Comedy Club in Dayton, and has been honing his comedy over the last three years.
Voudris would eventually like to become an entrepreneur, but recognizes that he must first build up some capital to get started. He encourages everyone to take proper precautions when selling to strangers online.
“For people out there who don’t think things like this can happen to them: they can,” said Voudris. “One guy can impact so many people. One guy can shatter the families of so many people. This is something I will live with for the rest of my life…but to tell you the truth, it made me a lot stronger and a lot smarter.”