I have no idea whether Broderick Roddy did it. He should still, though, be forced to walk with me to Room 346 at Denver Health Medical Center to take a look inside. A lot of people should.

Is it just me, or is it really becoming way too easy these days to just grab a gun at the slightest provocation and pull the trigger? In Denver this year, you could just start at New Year's Day and Darrent Williams. Go ahead. Count them up.

What gets me most are the triggermen, whether they escape forever into the mist or are bunny-hopped in shackles into jail, they almost never have to see the result of their handiwork.

It is not a pretty sight.

You go into Room 346 and pretty much forget all about lunch.

Ali Bashir abu Zama, 37, sits propped up in a wide hospital bed, connected to a bird's nest of wires and tubes. He is, quite remarkably, holding forth in Arabic with two friends, when one of them finally invites me inside.

You probably don't recognize his name.

He is the clerk at the 7-Eleven on the 16th Street Mall who on Sunday afternoon was shot once in the head after he twice told a man that he could not loiter inside the store.

Broderick Roddy, 22, has been charged with attempted first-degree murder. Police allege that he returned with a gun and opened fire when Ali Bashir ordered him out a second time. Horrified patrons and other onlookers led police to the suspect.

Ali Bashir abu Zama, a tall, skinny man with graying and receding hair, shifts and angles his head, which is wrapped in a breathing tube, to take a look at me, a move required because his badly swollen left eye will not open.

Just above the eye, maybe a millimeter above the brow, is the inch-long gash where the bullet entered, and the one doctors have since stitched up. Trails of blood seep from the closed eyelid.

The left side of Ali Bashir's face and head remains ghastly swollen, the result of reconstructive surgery doctors performed.

What you notice most are the nearly two dozen tiny silver staples that run from the top of the man's head to the top of his left ear, a glinting roadmap of the long incision neurosurgeons made to get inside and put the man's head back together.

Ali Bashir is remarkably lucent, given his ordeal. His only concern, at this moment, is his two boys, Hali, 11, and Alexander, 8. They have been in the custody of the Department of Human Services since Sunday's shooting.

His estranged wife, Tatiana, had left him only weeks ago, returning to her native Russia with their youngest child, 5-year-old Max. She does not know, he said, what has happened.

Ali Bashir, for the first time, groans when he tells me this, and sinks deeper into his pillows. He has no extended family in this country.

All that the shooter likely saw was a nuisance 7-Eleven clerk. How dare he kick him out? He would take care of him.

Idiot.

Here is what he - or you and I - would not have known about the 7-Eleven clerk:

Ali Bashir abu Zama fled war-torn Sudan 17 years ago, taking the Russians up on their offer of asylum and citizenship. He immediately enrolled at Moscow State University doing research work and earning two degrees in electrical engineering. For eight more years, he was a professor at the university.

In 2004, seeking greater freedom and opportunity, he arrived in the U.S. on a refugee visa. He wanted a better life for his family. He agreed to leave Tatiana and the baby behind at first, while he and the older boys set up a home and he would look for work.

Without U.S. citizenship and additional study, though, no university would hire Ali Bashir.

"Maybe it was the language," he said from his hospital bed. "They saw me as nothing."

With a family to feed, he went to work at 7-Eleven.

"I had to work to take care of them," he explained through his pain. "Until the day we are all viewed as men, I will never get the job I need. We are all human beings, but as outsiders, we can hear others, but we are never seen."

He will not speak of the events of last Sunday.

"I was just trying to help people," is as much as he was willing to say.

In the days since the shooting, Jok Chvol, 26, has rarely left the man's bedside, leaving the hospital only to travel to Denver International Airport where he works in customer service.

He met Ali Bashir that day in 2004 when they both arrived on refugee visas, two Sudanese men all alone in a strange land. They became immediate friends. They now call each other "brothers."

Jok Chvol, who for four months worked alongside Ali Bashir at 7-Eleven until the repeated robberies and assaults finally got to him, says he knows the responsibility for taking care of his friend will soon fall to him.

"He would do it for me," he said, nodding his head rapidly. "Definitely, yes."

"I will write home," he said, his eyes now locked on his friend. "I hope that maybe some family there will somehow help me."

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

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