Jeff Becerra, vocalist of the pioneering death metal band Possessed, has walked for the first time since being paralyzed in 1989.
In 1989, Becerra was robbed at gunpoint by two assailants. He was shot twice, and left paralyzed from the waist down. “I’ve been in a wheelchair longer than I’ve been walking,” he told Underground Metal Gamer in a 2019 interview. “It’s my normal.”
“It wasn’t so much of an accident — I got shot by two different guns in a robbery. I was doing concrete construction. I worked something like 13 hours that day,” Becerra explained.
“I stopped to get a pack of Camels and I guess I flashed a hundred and on the way out, two guys in hoods, little ninja guys came running up with guns: ‘Give me all of your fucking money.”
He continued, “I kind of resisted; I should have just given them the money, but I was fucked, I was cornered. It’s not the first time I had a gun pointed at me and I knew they meant business.
“We scuffled, there was no way out of it and I ended up getting shot a couple of times. The first guy pushed a 9-millimeter to my chest [points to bullet hole]. It broke through the ribs and shattered the lungs and stuck on in the spine, so I still have a 9-millimeter slug stuck on the vertebrate T3.”
For the first time in over 30 years, Becerra has walked again.
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The musician took to Instagram to share a video of himself walking down a hallway with the aid of robotic legs. “I walked again for the first time in over 30 years with the help of robotic legs,” he wrote.
Becerra joined Possessed in 1983 following the suicide of the band’s original singer, Barry Fisk. He lent his vocals to the band’s debut record, 1985’s Seven Churches, and the follow-up, 1986’s Beyond the Gates.
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