An employee at a rec center for people with disabilities eventually told Whitmore about the state Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, which has funding to perform badly needed renovation services for disabled residents. He reached out to the agency and applied. “You have to make sure you stress to them that you’re looking to work and do something with yourself,” he said.

OVR agreed to install a wheelchair lift outside Whitmore’s house and modify his bathroom in 2002 — two years after he submitted his application. Sometimes the lift breaks down, but Whitmore still has to get out of his house. On those days, he tilts his wheelchair backward, and in a nerve-racking feat of balance, grips the railing while he slowly slams down the concrete steps.

OVR served more than 70,000 Pennsylvanians in 2015, the most recent year for which it has data available online. The state also offers vouchers for home modifications through its Office of Long Term Living, but that process is managed by a for-profit company, Maximus, which advocates say takes months to review and process claims. The company declined an interview.

Philadelphia’s Housing Development Corp. has an Adaptive Modification Program that makes similar modifications to a disabled person’s property. But applicants have faced three- to five-year waiting lists for services, and the agency caps its improvements at $25,000. (City Council has committed to spending $100 million to erase the backlog for ADP and other housing programs.)

Government and nonprofit officials argue that there is plenty of assistance available — Philadelphia even has a Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities — but more than a dozen paralyzed gunshot survivors the Inquirer and Daily News interviewed said they were unaware of many of the programs that are cited.

Nancy Salandra, the director of independent living services at Liberty Resources Inc., a local nonprofit that advocates for and assists people with disabilities, noted that no standard policy governs how agencies respond to people who find themselves paralyzed from some horrific twist of fate. “Every state is different,” she said. “It’s all piecemeal.”

JOSE F. MORENO / Staff Photographer When Whitmore's wheelchair lift — which was installed and paid for by a state agency — breaks down, he tilts his wheelchair backward and lowers himself down his front steps so he can get to work.

In Philadelphia, where the poverty rate remains stubbornly stuck at 26 percent, gun-violence survivors resort to improvised solutions. Some save up what little money they can, and enlist handymen like Ty Shoemake — himself a gunshot paralysis victim who attained viral fame thanks to videos of him doing pull-ups in his wheelchair — to cobble together makeshift hand controls, made of discarded pipes and crutches, so they can still use their cars.

Others find themselves on the receiving end of unexpected kindness.

On Feb. 15 — a day after the Parkland, Fla., high school shooting — Troy Harris felt the seams of his world tear apart when he learned his son Azir had been shot five times while walking to a store with some friends in South Philadelphia.

At 17, Azir was paralyzed. “My soul,” Harris said, “left me.”

Courtesy of the Harris family Among the 1,250 people who have been shot in Philadelphia so far this year was Azir Harris. The son of a beloved Penn cook was shot and paralyzed steps from his home.

Harris is a chef at the University of Pennsylvania’s Hillel Falk Dining Commons, where he is adored by students, and his wife, Debra, worked at a rehabilitative nursing home. The couple have four other children, and quickly burned through whatever personal and sick days they had to be with their son, who lay unconscious in a hospital for three weeks after the shooting.

Penn students who knew Harris from the dining hall banded together and raised $20,000 to help him with his son’s medical expenses. It was a touching gesture. But everyone involved knew the money would cover only a tiny fraction of Azir’s medical needs, which will be constant and ever-growing. Harris and his wife don’t know how they’ll solve that puzzle.

They live, for now, in a Philadelphia Housing Authority building that isn’t handicapped accessible, forcing them to repeat the same motions that Ralph Brooks’ family made 30 years ago, carrying their boy from one room to another, until he grows too heavy for their arms.

HELEN UBIÑAS / Staff Michelle Lyu, a Wharton junior, started a fund-raiser to help Penn cook Troy Harris and his wife, Debra, with medical expenses after their teenage son was shot in February.

‘What does our government owe?’

Survivors of mass shootings that received round-the-clock media attention have learned that charitable donations are an imperfect way to address medical debt, and that they, too, must scramble for resources and guidance.

Joshua Nowlan, a Navy veteran, was watching a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater on July 20, 2012, when a gunman opened fire on the audience. Nowlan used his body to shield his friend’s wife, and was shot in the leg and arm; a dozen people were killed, and 58 more were wounded.

ANDY CROSS / The Denver Post Joshua Nowlan, wounded in the 2012 Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting, recently had his leg amputated.

Nowlan was hailed as a hero, but left with unrelenting pain in his left leg from the bullet damage. Last year, his doctors recommended that Nowlan have the leg amputated. It was another bit of trauma in the 37-year-old’s life, but what proved to be even more troubling was that his friends had to start a GoFundMe to help cover the costs of his medical expenses.

“This is hard for me to ask for help,” Nowlan wrote on his Facebook page, “but this will [be] another huge challenge in my life and every little thing will help me recover.”

Camille Biros has worked with Washington-based attorney Kenneth Feinberg to mediate settlement agreements for survivors and relatives of victims of the most infamous mass casualty events in recent history, including 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing, and the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla.

“At the end of the day, these individuals don’t get anywhere near the amount of money they need to cover their medical expenses throughout the rest of their lives,” Biros said during a recent interview. “We come up with an allocation that’s fair and reasonable, considering the amount of money that’s collected. In Boston, they raised $62 million, compared to $6 million for Aurora.”

“At the end of the day, these individuals don’t get anywhere near the amount of money they need to cover their medical expenses throughout the rest of their lives.” – Camille Biros

Connie Michalik, Richard Castaldo’s mother, said her family spent much of the donations they received after the Columbine massacre on his ever-evolving needs. “You don’t think that your child is going to get shot or hurt or injured, and then you’re thrown out in the cold,” she said.

Medi-Cal, the Medicaid program offered in California, recently denied Castaldo’s requests for quality-of-life equipment, Michalik said, such as a $3,500 commode chair and a $1,500 wheelchair cushion that he needed because of an ulcer that developed on his backside. She and Castaldo’s 82-year-old grandmother had to buy them.

“There should be more resources, because a lot of these people that were shot in these mass shootings, it wasn’t their fault,” Michalik said.

Jami Amo, a Columbine survivor who lives in Montgomery County, has a more pointed question: Why isn’t there a national clearinghouse that gun-violence survivors could consult to find all of the resources — state, local, and federal — they could be entitled to, with a clear explanation of how to navigate the application processes?

JOSE F. MORENO / Staff Photographer Jami Amo, a Columbine survivor who lives in the Philadelphia area, believes a tax should be added to gun purchases to help cover medical expenses for America's gun-violence victims.

Casey, who was recently elected to his third term as senator, believes there could be bipartisan interest in creating the database that Amo envisions, as long as it doesn’t require new funding. “I mean, at the core of it,” he said, “it’s ‘What does our government owe to someone with a disability?’ ”

“You don’t think that your child is going to get shot or hurt or injured, and then you’re thrown out in the cold.” – Connie Michalik, mother of Columbine shooting victim Richard Castaldo

His Republican counterpart, Sen. Pat Toomey, said the idea “makes a lot of sense.” The Department of Justice already shares information about funding, he noted, but informing victims that they might qualify for Medicaid or other resources is “probably an improvement that could be worked into the system.”

(The federal Office for Victims of Crime does collect some information about services available in Pennsylvania, but it is incomplete.)

Toomey is one of the few Republican senators who have staked out a position resembling a middle ground on gun-violence issues. Earlier this year, he introduced, for a third time, a bill to expand background checks for gun purchases to include online sales and transactions at gun shows. It previously failed to clear the Senate, even in the aftermath of the horrific 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE / AP Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) has introduced legislation to expand background checks for firearms purchases at gun shows and from online sellers.

“It’s very frustrating. I still feel really strongly about it,” Toomey said. “It would be a modest but very constructive step.”

Amo offered another suggestion, one likely to rankle the NRA. Since the country seems all but incapable of stemming the tide of gun violence, why not tax firearms sales to fund resources for current and future victims of gun violence?

“It would make people think a little harder when they purchase a gun: ‘Oh, this is a deadly weapon. This could kill or maim somebody,’ ” Michalik said. “I think that’s a great idea.”

“That’s where you’ll run into some opposition,” Casey said dryly.

The Senate would be unlikely to even consider such a bill, he said, because “the gun industry has to push a narrative that there’s an effort to remove guns from people. Because if they don’t keep up that narrative, which is soaked in fiction, they won’t be able to sell enough guns, and their business model starts to unwind.”

ALEX BRANDON / AP Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) believes there could be bipartisan support for a national clearinghouse for gun-violence survivors to consult when they search for financial assistance.

While solutions remain elusive, gun-violence survivors continue to strive to reclaim elements of their old lives — dignity and self-reliance and hope.

Jalil Frazier thought he lost all of that when he was shot in the barbershop. In stark Facebook posts, he still struggles with his new reality.

“Sometimes I think surviving was the wrong choice,” he wrote in one post.

But in May,he felt his spirits lift thanks to an unexpected development. Friends, relatives, and complete strangers had quietly donated more than $40,000 to a GoFundMe campaign that had been set up for him.

The money offered his family something that seemed unlikely earlier in the year: a chance to start fresh, in a house that Frazier could easily navigate in his wheelchair. It seemed unlikely, after all, that their narrow North Philadelphia neighborhood could ever fit a wheelchair ramp and the other accommodations he needed.

But for all their gratitude, Frazier and his wife, Tamira Brown, felt torn by this new opportunity. Their hearts and roots were in the city, in the streets and shops and faces they’d known for years.

Could they really leave it all behind and move someplace else?

If they stayed, could they withstand the constant inconveniences, and the bursts of gun violence across the city that offered a daily reminder of Frazier’s brush with death?

A few months ago, after much deliberating, they made their choice. They relocated to New Jersey, and settled into a one-level home. It’s not a happy ending, not exactly, because they will spend the rest of their lives contending with the things Frazier can’t do, with complications and challenges they never anticipated.

“We would have liked to stay in Philly,” Brown said. “But we just couldn’t.”