ADEL – The text read, “I’m ready to tell my story.” It was February 22, 2019. Not even a month after being shot seven times.

Keairra Rockmore, 28, had survived.

No one knew whether she would make it. Her family and friends, and total strangers, prayed for her.

“I was in a coma from Thursday till Monday, “ Keairra said.

She underwent surgeries to piece her body back together. Two bullets were not removed.  Surgeons hoped her body would reject them, one in her side, the other deep in her pelvis, according to Keairra.

On February 9, 2019, Keairra and McKenzie Rockmore would have had their fourth wedding anniversary. And since they’re still technically married, you could say that it did happen.

But it was far from celebrated.

“The love was already gone,” she said.

Keairra spent it in the hospital, recovering from seven gunshot wounds she sustained on January 24, and he spent it in the Cook County Jail.

The couple had been separated for about two months, according to Keairra, but he had not backed off. During their stormy relationship, she claims to have called the law on him “too many times to count,” even catching a charge of her own. This, she said, prevented her from defending herself, which made everything that much worse.

The day she was shot she had decided to slip over to the trailer where she and McKenzie had lived together on Glendale Drive in Adel.

“I had been staying with my sister at her apartment,” Keairra told Valdosta Today. “And the morning I went over there, I was going to get my tablet and a red folder that I use to do my income taxes with that had my bank account information in it.”

Her father, Kenneth Miley, called her as she was walking in the door.

He asked how she was doing. She told him she was doing okay. He asked where she was, and she told him she was at the trailer.

He asked, “Do you think you’re there by yourself, and I said ‘yeah, daddy I don’t hear anybody, don’t see anybody.’”

Everyone who knew Keairra and McKenzie knew of their troubles. Her father was rightfully concerned.

He told her, “Okay, I was just calling to check on you, I love you, bye,” and she said, “Alright, bye, I love you, daddy.”

And that’s when it happened.

According to Keairra, “McKenzie popped up from under the bed and already had the gun drawn. I was at the back door, not even a good five feet from my bedroom door…He said something, but I don’t recall what he said, I think, something like, ‘this how it’s going to be.’”

Keairra’s voice is strong, with a slight shiver.

“I said ‘really McKenzie, you really going to do this to me?’ and that’s when he shot me the first time,” she recounted.  “I paused for a couple of seconds and I couldn’t believe it. That’s when he shot again. That’s when I started struggling to get the back door open because it sometimes gets jammed. He was still firing at me.”

At first, she said, she didn’t feel it.

“But once I got the door open I could feel the wetness on my clothes,” Keairra said. “But I wouldn’t look down because I was afraid see it. I could feel the blood squirting down my leg.”

According to Keairra’s account, McKenzie came out a “minute or two” after she did. The trailer park, she said, is usually busy, people outside, driving past.

“That day was like a ghost town,” she said. While she was still able to run she went to her neighbor’s house and saw McKenzie run past. She began banging on her neighbor’s car.

Keairra said she didn’t have the strength to go up the neighbor’s steps.

“So I started banging on her steps,” she continued. “I had already lost too much blood at that point and was too weak to run then. She came out at that point and she was screaming when she saw the condition I was in, but then she said ‘you don’t have to run anymore.‘ Once she said that I just curled up in a fetal position at the foot of her driveway.”

Keairra’s recall is sharp and her words are clear.

“I was lying on the ground and I could still see down past my trailer and the rest of the trailer park on that end,” she said. “I saw him run by, and my first thought was that he might come stand over me and finish me off, like you see in the movies.

Keairra saw him run straight across and never did look over where she was.

“The police showed up and asked if I knew what had happened, and they asked if I knew who (did it) and I said yes, McKenzie Rockmore, and they asked if I knew where he had run and I said yes, he had run across the trailer park.”

Keairra said she knows some of the shots must have been fired while she was outside, too, but she was trying to get out the door and her memory of this is not clear although she says she was alert the whole time – and continued to be.

“The police came and tried to cover me with a white sheet, thinking I wouldn’t make it so I told them not to cover my face,” Keairra said. “That kind of scared me even more. There were a lot of cops, and a lot of people there by that time.”

On February 21, Keairra went back to the hospital to have one of the bullets removed from her side. “The other one is still in there,” she said.

What now?

“Since I’ve been out and got my phone back from detectives he (McKenzie) has been calling me, everyday, a couple of times a day,” she said. “But I’ve never accepted one.”

Keairra has a lot of healing, physically and mentally.

 “I kind of try to suppress it so I don’t think about it too much,” she said. “I can tell it makes my blood pressure go up because I get kind of jittery.”

Keairra is still coping. Staying with her mother in Adel, Christine Carter Austin, she tries to keep her mind busy while her body heals. She refuses to take medication unless absolutely necessary because she feels that her mind needs to be clear.

“I don’t hurt much these days,” she said. “Just my stomach from time to time. But even when I hurt I try to walk around the house a little and it helps to ease my pain. I hate taking medicine so I try not to take it unless I just absolutely need it. I was refusing pain medication in the hospital. It’s like I know I was injured bad but I also knew I had this beat. When God spared me, I knew he had favor over my life. The way I see it, I have walked through the fire and I owe my live and everything to God. I’m just happy I survived. Maybe my story will help someone else involved in domestic abuse.”