Ann O'Neill/CNN

He didn’t see the gun, didn’t know the bullets were coming. Dookie was walking away when he was shot, but something made the 15-year-old turn his head.

That probably saved his life.

One bullet caught him in the backside. The other, the one that forever changed a life just as it was getting started, entered behind Dookie’s right ear, grazed his brain and came out through his right eye.

“If he hadn’t turned, the bullet would have gone straight through his head, and it would have been a different story,” said his mother, Kimberley Snowden.

His 12-year-old cousin was shot in the leg. In all, Stockton police said, the shooter fired nearly a dozen rounds with a handgun. The shots came from inside a cream-colored sedan. The boys were walking down the street, easy targets.

The gunfire followed an escalating series of confrontations that, according to some witnesses, may have begun over a dog -- the kind of neighborhood dispute once settled with bare knuckles.

Because Dookie is younger than 18 and the man who shot him on July 12 is still at large, CNN is choosing to identify Dookie only by his childhood nickname. (His last name is different from his mother’s.) At first he did not want to tell his story; he said he was afraid. But with encouragement from his mother and grandmother -- two strong, church-going women -- Dookie decided to talk with a reporter for the first time about what happened and the challenges ahead.

He turned 16 in September. He should have been starting his sophomore year in high school but was getting his lessons at home. He missed the sports and busy social life he enjoyed as one of the more popular boys at school; he felt like the one who was sent to prison.

He couldn’t go anywhere because doctors feared that he might fall. A section of his skull was removed to reduce pressure from his swelling brain; he underwent surgery earlier this month to put it back.

Dookie was in a medically induced coma for more than a week. He lost his right eye and is deaf in one ear. Instead of spending the summer learning how to drive, he learned how to walk and talk.

He wears a protective helmet, and he hopes to regain some measure of independence after he recovers from the surgery. He removed the helmet in September to show what the bullet and the surgeons had left; his hair had grown back, but the top of his head was flattened, the shape of a waning gibbous moon.

Stockton Police Department

Another surgery gave him a prosthetic eye. He no longer wears a patch to cover the weepy spot where the bullet found its way out.

Dookie is healing, and he isn’t hiding.

He lives in a neighborhood where speaking out or cooperating with police is not the popular thing to do. But he and his family say it was wrong for an adult to hassle and shoot kids over something so petty. They are tired of being afraid.

The shooting of a child strikes a nerve anywhere. And in Stockton, a city of 300,000 in the San Joaquin Valley, it is particularly sensitive. Dookie lives just minutes from Cleveland Elementary, where in January 1989 a mentally disturbed man named Patrick Purdy opened fire on a playground during recess, killing five children. He wounded 30 others before turning the gun on himself.

Those shootings sparked a national debate over the availability of assault rifles, an argument that continues to this day.

The collapse of the housing market in 2007-08 hit Stockton hard, drying up the city’s coffers and forcing it to lay off 20% of its police force. It made the list of the most dangerous cities in America and topped Forbes magazine’s list of Most Miserable Cities in 2011.

Voters approved a new sales tax to bring Stockton out of bankruptcy, and the police department recently started hiring again.

Within a day or two of Dookie’s shooting, police found surveillance camera video of one of the neighborhood fights and used social media to post a screengrab of the man involved. That led investigators to a clearer photo and a suspect.

Ann O'Neill/CNN

Police are seeking Alfonso Martinez, 20, but believe he fled to Mexico or may be hiding out in Reno, Nevada. Martinez also is being sought on a warrant for a drug charge.

Dookie wants police to catch the shooter.

“I want him gone,” he says -- meaning off the streets, locked up, convicted of attempted murder. Dookie is ready and willing to face the man in court. He is determined to testify.

He says he doesn’t know Martinez, but his cousins and friends reported having problems with him. They called Dookie for help on July 12; they needed backup.

Dookie lost a chain he wore around his neck in the scuffle and went back to look for it. He remembers running, but he doesn’t remember being shot.

Stockton police responded to a report of a shooting at 1:07 p.m. The first officer to arrive, Randy Huffman, found Dookie covered in blood, his right eyeball dangling from the socket. Huffman ran back to his patrol car, grabbed his first-aid kit and tried to hold the eye in place.

There was no saving it.

“Dook’s been shot in the head!”

Some mothers of teenage boys live in fear of a call like that, but Snowden had no reason to be afraid for Dookie. He was a good kid who played football and basketball. He had a steady girlfriend and more friends than she could count. He was the class clown.

“He was a 15-year-old, you know; he had his days,” she says. “But he never got in trouble with the law. This is the first time we had police in our lives like this.”

She got to the hospital before the ambulance. Nothing could prepare her for what she saw when Dookie was wheeled out. She thought her firstborn was gone.

“Blood was dripping all over the floor. I broke down right there. All the blood and all the towels and his face, everything was swelling up. It was just crazy.”

Dookie was taken by helicopter to the UC Davis Medical Center outside Sacramento. He immediately went in for brain surgery. The family was told it would last four hours. It took 14.

Snowden, her fiance and Dookie’s uncle and dad camped out in the waiting room, sleeping in a corner. It became their home away from home for two weeks.

“They told me it was going to feel like a roller-coaster; you’re going to have your ups and downs,” Snowden said. “And that’s what it was, up and down and all over the place.”

Her mother, Demetria Carruthers, watched the other kids, prayed up a storm and kept everyone in the loop with a series of lively Facebook posts:

July 12: “Please say a prayer for my family. We could really use it right now,” she began. She condemned the violence: “Whatever happened to fighting with your fists? This so crazy and stupid, I’m sick to my stomach.”

Dookie ate and breathed through tubes for two weeks, lost 24 pounds. (And he wasn’t big to begin with.) His mother first knew he was coming back to her the day she brought his phone into the hospital room and she saw his finger twitch over the screen. He was checking out his Facebook page.

What was it like, being locked inside your head, unable to communicate? Dookie gives a 15-year-old’s perspective: “It was boring. I just wanted to go home.”

There was talk that he’d never walk again. But once he came out of the coma, Dookie was back on his feet within a day or two. His balance was off, so he started off supported by a harness. He was determined to walk on his own. By the end of July, he was strong enough to go to rehab.

The day he was released, August 18, somebody set up a portable basketball net, and he shot hoops on his way out. He hopes to go back to school in January.

For now, his routine is limited. He can’t go outside unaccompanied. Somebody has to stand behind him to catch him if he falls over. He once relished his independence; now, he can get frustrated and angry.

“He was an outside type of kid,” Snowden says. He woke up, went to school, came home, did chores and spent time with friends. Now, “he gets his medicine, takes his shower, and he’s on the phone all day long,” she says. On good days, his friends come over when they get out of school, and he gets to sit on the front porch for a while.

He has participated in a couple of anti-crime programs in Stockton, and his mother and grandmother are staunchly against guns. The family does not own one.

By Halloween, he had recovered enough to go trick-or-treating in the neighborhood. His grandmother posted a photo on Facebook showing Dookie smiling broadly and showing off his haul of candy.

The hearing loss in Dookie’s right ear and the loss of his right eye are permanent. But his family is relieved to recognize the old Dookie; they say they’re glad to see that the bullet did not take away his personality or his intellect.

His mother and grandmother believe there must be a reason why Dookie almost dodged a bullet. He is alive, and there must be some purpose for it.

Dookie knows he’s been given a second chance, but he’s not sure what to do with it. Like most teenagers, he lives very much in the moment.

“I want to be good,” he says slowly. “And be with my girlfriend. I’m going to stay calm, and I’m going to go work.”

He thinks he might want to have a gun some day for self-defense, but then he reconsiders. Maybe a pit bull and a police dog would provide enough protection. He ultimately rejects the idea of owning a gun.

“None of it,” Dookie says with a slow shake of his head.

It’s a hard lesson to learn at 15.

Update: Police arrest suspect in Stockton, California