Cleveland Reporter Shot 5 Times by Her Child’s Father Has a Heartbreaking Story to Tell

In northeast Ohio, a journalist who covered the news became the news last October when her child’s father shot her multiple times. Now, the journalist, who lived through the attack, is sharing her harrowing story of survival.

We previously reported how a quiet street in Lakewood, a city just outside of Cleveland, turned into a crime scene after 19 News Reporter Winnie Dortch was shot five times by Bryant Carter, her child’s father.

The reporter, who met her eventual attacker in high school, told WGN-TV how Carter “was quite popular, a funny guy. […] Years later in 2018, we met back up again. I just fell for him all over again.” After reconnecting, they had a baby girl named Kaelie.

However, their relationship took a turn for the worst.

But Dortch, who grew up in a two-parent home, wanted to work things out despite his abuse. “I’ve been punched before, pushed, choked,” she recalled. “It was mental abuse, making me feel like I didn’t mean anything. It was physical, it was emotional, like taxing, because I did love him, and I wanted to be a family.”

In 2024, she moved “out of the house in Cleveland while he was away in Houston on Father’s Day weekend. He didn’t know anything about it.”

Fast forward to Oct. 7, 2024, Dortch, according to WGN-TV, had just dropped their daughter off at school when Carter, who had been tailing her, forced her out of her car at gunpoint.

“I remember him saying, ‘You know if you get out, I’ll shoot you,’” she told the outlet. “I’m just looking at the blood, and then I have to turn around because I’m thinking he’s coming to me after that fall. No, instead I turn around and he’s flat on his back.” Carter had used that same gun to kill himself.

She was rushed to a local hospital with life-threatening injuries, but conscious, after Lakewood police found her lying on the sidewalk.

“She could have bled to death. Bullet holes in both cheeks. Those injuries included a couple of her teeth and part of her upper jaw,” trauma surgeon Patrick Maluso told her former employer 19 Action News. “A bullet hole just under her chin that injured her tongue, part of her throat, continued through her neck.”

Dortch said she feels “grateful to be alive,” but still feels “the irony of this all. I do connect with victims, gun violence victims, shooting victims, because you were in their shoes.” She added: “There was one particular story I was covering where a woman was shot in the face, and I instantly thought about myself.”

Now, she’s working her dream job at WGN-TV, a station she grew up watching in her hometown of Chicago.

“I was always telling someone’s story. I was never the story,” she said. “This is an inspirational story for other people who may be experiencing the same thing. I’m Winnie Dortch, and I’m a survivor.”