Second in a three-part series.

It’s taken two years, but finally, the Burgess family is moving on.

The biggest shift is this: They’re all focused on being thankful, on letting their anger go.

There was no shortage of fury in the aftermath of the shooting in downtown Coeur d’Alene shortly after midnight on Dec. 27, 2009, when Brandon Burgess, 27, of Moses Lake, was seriously wounded by gunfire from Coeur d’Alene resident Adam Johnson.

The Burgesses were angry when the charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery against Johnson were dismissed in January 2010 following a grand jury hearing. It didn’t sit well with them that they thought some media were portraying them as troublemakers or gang members, while Johnson was consistently granted the status of a respected businessman.

Even now, they can’t shake the idea that a hometown advantage played a factor in the decision — an assessment Kootenai County and Coeur d’Alene prosecutors flatly deny — and they were upset again when Johnson received probation for unrelated drug possession charges recently.

But the family is only focusing on what it can control, said Holly Burgess, Brandon’s mother.

A SECOND CHANCE

The family was ready to move on only after Brandon was ready, and only in the last few months has he made that transition, she said.

“He’s not talking about the shooting and everything bad that happened from it,” his mother said. “He’s talking about why God gave him a second chance and what he’s here for now.”

In those two years the Burgess family has grown closer.

Holly, who works as a marketing consultant in Coeur d’Alene, talks to both of her sons on the phone every day; they spoke once a week before. She thought of moving to Washington to be closer to them, but her life is here. She doesn’t hate Coeur d’Alene. She knows her sons won’t visit her as often, but she understands.

“Really, I don’t want them to,” she said. “I don’t want them to have to go through the thoughts of it.”

She’s grown more spiritual in two years, and her faith keeps her focusing ahead. When your son is shot before your eyes, life is given a whole new value, and Holly has since pledged to finish everything she ever started, which is why she’s taking piano lessons again, and enrolled at North Idaho College. She no longer drinks alcohol.

“All we can do at this point is be thankful he’s alive,” she said. “That’s all we have. That’s good enough.”

After the shooting, it would take nine months before Holly would be able to walk down Sherman Avenue again, even though she lives only a few blocks away.

Nearly every morning after the shooting, on her morning walks along the hiking trails of nearby Tubbs Hill, she’d circle around the heart of the main thoroughfare, crossing the avenue on Sixth or Seventh streets, circling back the same way when she’d finish.

She couldn’t face it, she said.

It took nearly a year before she could walk down the main street again in broad daylight and stand in the Painted Chair’s gallery doorway, just to face it.

That’s when she noticed a bullet hole in the store front’s black tile about 3 feet up, roughly the same height her head had been as she lay on Brandon that night.

But it still helped to recognize everything.

Embrace it, in a strange way, and every time she drives by the store front she looks at the fractured tile, the bullet hole concealed by a black patch, but visible gray cracks running from it like the long, skinny legs of a spider.

“Now,” she said, “it’s getting better.”

But it’s the lights, the glare, the Christmas season, she doesn’t know will ever improve.

She hopes so.

“Last year was awful,” she said. “This year was a little bit better.”

SLOW RECOVERY

Now, Brandon Burgess’s right leg falls asleep on a whim.

It tingles; it dulls. Blood and oxygen have a hard time getting to it. If Brandon walks 50 yards, even drives 50 miles, it feels like he’s carrying a waterlogged stump not truly a part of him.

When he woke, he thought of his job. He didn’t know much of what had happened.

“I got to buy a tow truck,” Brandon said after he woke, his mother remembers. “Unplug this, I got to get to work.”

All of it would register later. The manager at Basin Automatic Transmission in Moses Lake would spend eight days at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, having to return to receive a catheter, the result of a post-surgery bladder infection.

Now, Brandon is concentrating on being thankful. Thankful for what he’s left with — life, friends, family, recovery. The anniversary of the shooting passed quietly three weeks ago, and his family took him to dinner at the Moses Lake Golf Club.

ROAD TO ACCEPTANCE

Only in the last few months has Brandon’s anger subsided.

Initially, it was at its worst the nights when Brandon couldn’t sleep and he’d stare at his bedroom walls in rural Grant County, Wash., and his mind would trigger and every thought would spin out of control.

Anger was why Brandon would post retribution posts on his Facebook fan page, things like “an eye for an eye,” and some of his hundreds of “friends” would comment about payback for Adam Johnson as well.

But that was just venting, Brandon said.

Even if litigation failed him, he said he never considered revenge.

“I think over time it’s just less animosity and anger,” he said recently, seated at a table at the roadside hamburger spot off Interstate 90, Barbara Ann’s Burger, in Moses Lake. “It doesn’t spur up so fast.”

“I just deal with it and move on,” he said. “There are a lot of better things out there.”

He remembers Johnson walking toward his group of friends that night, and Brandon turned around to see what the discussion was about. It was a discussion at that point, he said. Then it escalated.

“Go your way, we’ll go ours,” he remembers the group saying.

Then he stepped up to the curb on Sherman Avenue and saw the gun and heard the shot.

“Guys, I’m hit,” he said, and tightened his belt, reaching his hand down and feeling the blood.

He would wake up in the Seattle hospital bed.

A surgeon at Kootenai Health had tied off Brandon’s punctured iliac artery, the vein that supplies blood from the upper body to the legs, before he was life-flighted to Harborview.

That some people perceived the boys as troublemakers still bothers him, he said.

“They kind of made us, everybody from out of town, basically a gang,” he said. “I thought it was actually funny because four out of the seven of us, all are management or run our own companies here.”

Now, Brandon’s right leg falls asleep without warning. It requires him to take blood thinners so the blood can flow around the clots in his right leg. Doctors told him his leg would feel normal again one day.

“But I don’t know if I believe it,” he said.

When Johnson declared bankruptcy last year, Brandon’s civil claim against him was dropped.

He can’t afford the $200,000 in medical bills he owes so he’s planning to file for bankruptcy. He thought of suing his attorney for bad advice, but won’t.

“I’m going to do something with it,” he said, on growing from the incident. “I just don’t know what that is yet.”

That’s part of the transformation, looking ahead.

It’s hard for Brandon to not to feel differently about Coeur d’Alene. He visited family in Hayden for Thanksgiving and left a couple hours later, just after dinner. Walking down Sherman Avenue, as he did last year just like his mother, was surreal.

“I have a different feeling about it,” he said.

But Brandon is concentrating on being thankful, even when he lies awake at night haunted by the past.

“The hardest part is, just like with anything, you get alone laying in bed staring at the ceiling and you start thinking about it,” he said. “I hate to say it, but there’s not really a day you don’t think about it, you know?”

Tomorrow: The road to recovery for Adam Johnson and a look at downtown Coeur d’Alene’s crime statistics.