He Got Shot Helping a Woman He Didn’t Know. Now All He Wants Is a Food Truck
After being shot while intervening in a domestic violence dispute between two strangers, Ryan Doyle says now is the time to follow his dream of starting a food truck.
As he lay on the floor of his Tempe, Arizona home, bleeding out from a gunshot wound in his leg, Ryan Doyle thought about food.
He thought of other things, too — his parents, his siblings, his friends, the 21-year-old stranger who shot him, and the girl who the stranger had been hitting until Doyle intervened. But he realized he could die then, at age 31, without ever having accomplished his dream of owning and driving a food truck across the country.
Just moments before, on that warm Sunday evening in November 2013, Doyle had been grilling steaks in his backyard when he heard a scream. He hurried to the front yard, where he says he saw Jeremy Cartwright hitting a woman. Police would later identify her as Cartwright’s girlfriend. Doyle says he’d never seen Cartwright or the woman before.
“Hey, what are you doing?’’ Doyle remembers yelling. “Leave that girl alone.’’
Cartwright shouted back. Doyle believes it was something along the lines of “Mind your own business.’’
Doyle got closer.
“You’re involved now,’’ Doyle remembers Cartwright saying before reaching into his jeans and pulling out a handgun.
Doyle backpedaled, his hands held out in front of him, eyes wide, heart pulsing. Cartwright stalked toward him, the gun held out, his finger on the trigger.
Doyle says he crouched behind a palm tree in his yard as he begged Cartwright not to shoot. Cartwright came closer. Doyle says he was less than 20 feet away when he began to run.
Cartwright fired.
“You f—ing asshole, you just shot me,’’ Doyle says he yelled. He tried to take another step to continue running, but, as his foot touched the ground, he heard his bones crack.
The bullet hit Doyle in the main artery of his left thigh. It destroyed his femur and his knee. As he lie on the ground, Doyle believed Cartwright would shoot him in the back, so he did his best to crawl away.
He didn’t get far. Blood soaked his pantleg, and pieces of his muscle and tissue fell onto the clay soil. Cartwright ran back across the street, and neighbors who overheard the commotion called 911.
Doyle says he stayed alive by taking off his belt and tying it as a torniquet around his leg. He remained conscious until he arrived at the hospital, where he received a blood tranfusion and multiple surgeries to reconstruct his leg. Because he was between jobs, he was uninsured and had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of medical bills.
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In February 2014, Cartwright pled guilty to aggravated assault and misconduct with weapons. He was sentenced to nine years at the Arizona Department of Corrections.
Doyle moved back to Massachusetts, where he grew up, because he couldn’t care for himself. He spent his days lying in bed in his parents’ house in Webster, unable to walk.
It would be six months before Doyle would be able to step out of his wheelchair and start to walk with a cane. Now, more than a year after the shooting, he has a different first step to take.
“People always talk about karma, and how if you do something good it will come back to you,’’ Doyle said. “And, yeah, I was kind of a punk kid, but I always try to help as many people as possible. But now I don’t want to invest in someone else’s dream. I don’t know how to make the food truck happen because I don’t have the funds, but I have to try. I guess I’m still waiting for karma to come back to me.’’
Culinary Roots
Doyle learned how to cook, not in a culinary institute, but in his mother’s kitchen.
When he moved to Arizona in 2005, Cindy Doyle sent her kitchen to her son. She shipped coolers filled with dry ice, and around 50 pounds of Maine lobster, along with steamed clams and haddock. Ryan also asked his mom to send Snapple bottles because he said there wasn’t enough variety in Arizona, and also marshmallow fluff, which he says he had a hard time finding.
“I would cook up all of the food and bring it in for my coworkers,’’ Ryan said. “I once made lobster and brought it to work in this big cooler. I was so excited about it I was also wearing a lobster hat. They started calling me ‘lobster man’ after that.’’
Before he was “lobster man,’’ and well before news stations in Arizona started calling him “Good Samaritan gunshot victim,’’ Ryan was a fifth-grader who made his own cookbook filled with his family’s New England recipes.
Ryan Doyle prepares a meal in the kitchen of his Worcester home.
By age 15, he set up his own hotdog cart just off I-395 in Oxford, which catered to car dealers driving their vehicles to the Central Mass Auto Auction. He also instilled a marketing team, and had his younger sister, who was captain of the cheerleading squad, draft her friends to stand on the side of the road and hold signs.
“I still have the first dollar I made from that hot dog stand back in ’96,’’ he said.
Although he had great success selling hotdogs as a teen, Ryan now wants to sell New-England-type foods in the food truck, most of them from the cookbook he made more than 20 years ago. When he talks about the idea, he goes into salesman mode, his dark brown eyes lighting up, his hands moving in circles.
“I’m thinking fish sandwiches, fish tacos, lobster rolls, the best clam chowders, and of course everything’s fresh,’’ he says. “But then, depending on where I stop, I’ll have local favorites using local ingredients. So Cuban sandwiches in Miami, galumpkis in Chicago. But everything has to be cohesive. I want to bring the taste of New England from coast to coast.’’
The Road Ahead
To drive a food truck across the country, you need a truck, which Ryan doesn’t have. Starting one can cost from $50,000 to $200,000. To raise money, he created a Kickstarter page.
This isn’t the first time Ryan has used the Internet for fundraising. Last year, his siblings set up a Go Fund Me account to try to help him with his medical bills because he was uninsured at the time he was injured. This is the first time, however, he set up a crowdfunding account himself. He says he was inspired by episodes of Shark Tank, where many of the contestants use Kickstarters to fund their ideas.
The message on his page begins: “Please read all of this. You won’t be disappointed. This means more than you know to me.’’
It is both a sales pitch and a pep talk to himself.
“I know I can do this,’’ it says. “Please help make this possible … I will not let you down.’’
Being labeled a hero doesn’t set you up with a bank account full of millions to finance your dreams. It saddles you with expectations.
“I spent all of my savings on surviving,’’ he said. “Getting shot changed my life and people will say, ‘Oh that’s a cool story; it’s amazing that you did that.’ But now it’s like, I have a second lease on life and I could fail.’’
Ryan doesn’t want to let any potential food-truck funders down, but he also doesn’t want to disappoint himself. He says he doesn’t regret intervening in the dispute, but it has given him a sense that he doesn’t have enough time.
“The guy who shot me is in jail, and I haven’t heard from the woman,’’ he says. “But I would do it again. It was a double-edged sword because I lost everything, but I have a new chance now. I would get shot again, well, as long as I live.’’
A chalkboard on Ryan Doyle’s spice cabinet reads “Today I am grateful and happier.’’
The food truck is in the dream stage of planning. It’s not quite real, and Ryan admits he’s almost afraid to get his hopes up. But looking forward to it continues to give Ryan a purpose.
“I always knew people talked about depression, but I would say, ‘how can you be sad when the sun’s shining?’’’ he says. “I guess I didn’t know it was a real thing until I found myself lying there in my bed not able to move and fighting within my own brain. And, man, it’s a fight to get out of that funk.’’
Ryan has a long way to go. He still feels pain in his leg, but the old sensation — like his leg is burning with the flames of a hot fire — has been replaced with an ache like the pain that comes the day after a tough work-out. And, he’ll need a truck. He’ll need more people to believe.
“It’s always been a dream of his to do, but it’s a very difficult thing to get the funds for,’’ Cindy said. “I said, ‘Maybe it’s something you can do way down the line, maybe when you’re 50 years old, and maybe it’s not going to happen right now. But, being shot, he feels that life is too short.’’’
The Kickstarter ends on May 4. As of April 9, Ryan’s raised $50 out of the $50,000 goal.
Ryan knows he’s running out of time, but he’s hoping people will take a chance on his dream.
He’s hoping that, this time, karma will come around to him.
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