Harrison Thorp 9:40 a.m.
Sunday, April 20, 2025 9:47 am
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ROCHESTER - When Rochester Police Lt. Spencer Williams-Hurley got a message from dispatch that a man had been shot multiple times on Summer Street last April he didn't know he was about to save someone's life.
A former Navy Corpsman assigned to a Marine Corps unit during two tours in Iraq, he just knew he had to get there stat.
"If you don't stop the loss of blood in the first two minutes, the likelihood of surviving decreased precipitously," Williams-Hurley said during an interview with The Rochester Voice outside the Rochester Police Department on Friday.
When he got to the Summer Street address, about a quarter mile from the police station, he found the victim on the ground in a pool of blood from six bullet wounds, one in the throat and five more in the back.
"I wasn't nervous," he said. "On one hand it's exciting, but on the other hand you understand what they're going through is horrible."
While serving two stints in Iraq as a Marine corpsman, he'd seen and treated scores of American servicemen suffering traumatic injuries from IEDs, car bombs and suicide bombers.
"There was no anxiety," he said. "It was just another injury in the line of what I do," he said.
When he found Kyle Violette writhing on the ground, he first turned him over so he wouldn't choke on his own blood.
"Then I was just trying to limit the bleeding," Hurley-Williams said.
He explained that a tourniquet can help stop the bleeding on an arn or a leg, but most of Violette's injuries were to his chest.
He said that to stem the flow of bleeding he stuffed gauze into the bullet hole and then affixed a kind-of medical sticker on it to slow the loss of blood.
He said treating bullet wounds in the victim's shoulder and thigh were more challenging where you often have to put your finger into the bullet hole to determine from where the blood loss is flowing.
Paramedics arrived at the scene about two or three minutes later and Violette was rushed to Frisbie Memorial Hospital, then on to Portsmouth Regional Hospital and finally a Boston hospital where he was in Intensive Care for about a month.
Violette's longtime girlfriend testified at a March trial that Violette has had several surgeries since then as he continues his recovery.
The day that Williams-Hurley testified at the attempted murder trial of Jason Levesque, Violette's girlfriend pointed out the police officer who saved his life.
"He came over and said how appreciative he was," Williams-Hurley said.
Looking back at that April 4, 2024 night, he said the hardest part of working to save Violette's life was some of the others at the scene were trying to help him but were actually crowding him.
"I was actually trying to get other people to just give me some space, like I'm good," he quipped.
Meanwhile, Levesque was spared the verdict of attempted murder, but was convicted by a jury for first-degree assault, which can carry up to a 15-year prison term.
Williams-Hurley's expertise is being taken full advantage of by the Rochester Police Department, where he teaches tactical casualty classes with officers and the county's SWAT team.
"I try to teach them to be comfortable in a medical crisis situation," he said. "In fact I'd like to see everyone get some of this training."
Asked to sum up the experience that snowy night and the fact he saved a man's life, he paused for several moments thinking about it before answering.
"Well, you're happy to hear it from a human perspective," he said, "but there is also for me a level of detachment where we deal with so many car accidents where you build a wall to separate yourself, but when I heard the next day he was surviving it made me happy."