Whitney Austin says Fifth Third shooting changed the direction of her life

CINCINNATI (WKRC) - Whitney Austin has spent the last year healing her physical and mental wounds. The horrific experience has changed the direction of her entire life.

Shot 12 times, Austin's recovery has been nothing short of a miracle.

“I have that limitation no my right hand, so it's not perfect, but when we started all of this, it was really more at a 90-degree angle, so a ton of progress there. I have a little bit of limitation in my right arm, so can't get it to go back quite as far as my left arm will."

The 37-year-old former vice president at Fifth Third bank started the morning of Sept. 6, 2018, at her home in Louisville.

“Both of my kids were feeling a bit more clingy. I'll say, and they wanted an extra kiss from me as I was trying to get out the door, so I indulged them, and myself for that matter. I stopped and gave everybody an extra kiss as I was hectically getting out the door to get in the car. And as I was descending into Cincinnati off 71, I joined another conference call and that's the conference call that I was on when I walked into the building,” Austin said.

She walked into a nightmare. A gunman was inside that building.

“What memory I have is I came up upon that revolving door and the sheet of glass in front of me was shattered, but it was still fully intact and so I thought, 'Well, that's kind of weird. Maybe somebody threw a rock at the door,' but not weird enough that I stopped because I just kept on going and I pushed with my right arm on that door, and, instantaneously, that's when I was hit with the first barrage of bullets, which primarily got me on this side but then came across my chest and then over into my left arm," said Austin.

The twelve bullets caused a broken rib, bruised lung and a fractured right arm. She spent five days at UC Medical Center. As her physical wounds were healing, she was already thinking about how to deal with her emotional ones.

"From the very beginning that I needed to share my story and I needed to take all of this amazingness, this amazing outcome that had been given to me. I don't know why and I won't ever know why, but use it to pay it forward and, for me, it's very obvious. It's fighting gun violence. It's trying to end gun violence," she said.

Whitney Strong is her organization. She started creating it as she laid in the hospital bed. She decided not to go back to her job at Fifth Third. She is spending her time championing tougher gun laws in a bipartisan way -- putting suicide prevention materials in gun shops and pushing for better mental illness support.