Before Keon Johnson could sprint away from the mortar tube, the firework he’d slipped inside was already bursting toward him.
The unexpectedly quick explosion, caused by a short fuse, pushed him backward, knocking him momentarily unconscious.
When the 13-year-old awoke in June 2015, less than two months before he was to begin high school in Tennessee, his chest and legs were burned. Bones from four broken fingers on his left hand pushed through skin. Inside the ambulance that carried him to a hospital at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Johnson said he heard paramedics question whether the hand would require amputation.