LOVELAND, Colo — A woman from Fort Collins says she is lucky she can still see after she was hit in the face by a stray BB earlier this month.
Greta Cooper-Coe was driving to a concert in the Denver area on Saturday, June 11 with the windows rolled down when she was hit.
“I just felt something, like, metal hit my face really hard,” Cooper-Coe recalled. “I knew it was metal because I heard it. It made this noise when it hit my bone.”
It happened in Loveland on Taft Avenue just past the intersection of 57th Avenue, Cooper-Coe said. She believes it may have been shot from one of the neighborhoods that lines Taft Avenue.
“I had no idea what it was,” she said. “We pulled over, and blood is just coming out of my face. Luckily, I had a bunch of napkins. So I’m like, "What happened?!" I’m, like, crying because it hurts, and just searching the car for anything, like a rock or anything.”
Neither she nor her boyfriend initially imagined it was, in fact, a BB that hit her, instead assuming she had been hit by a small rock. However, in the days following the incident, Cooper-Coe watched both the wound and her black eye get steadily worse rather than heal. At the behest of her grandmother, she went to the emergency room three days after the incident.
“They did an ultrasound, and they saw that something was in there,” Cooper-Coe recalled. “They had to numb me. They were poking and prodding. They started poking it, and I could hear it. They’re like, "Yeah, it’s something metal." And then they had to cut open a little bit more to retrieve [the BB]. And then they pulled it out, and that’s when I saw it.
“I didn’t want it to be that, you know? I wanted it to just be a freak accident. Like, just a rock, you know, something innocent. But then I realized people do those things. And yeah, it sucks.”
Cooper-Coe filed a report with the Loveland Police Department and also shared her story on Reddit. Some users responded to the post, linking to headlines elsewhere in the country reporting on an apparent TikTok trend encouraging users to shoot airsoft guns at others on video. So far, there is no evidence linking this incident to the trend.
As for her other plans this summer, Cooper-Coe says she still plans to enjoy afternoon drives with the windows rolled down.
“I mean, you can’t let fear dictate your life,” she said. “Don’t be afraid, people.”
