Popular Travel Vlogger Recounts Moment She Was Shot: “Luckily, I Have A Second Chance”

Popular YouTube travel channel Damon And Jo, featuring twentysomething best friends Damon Dominique and Jo Franco, typically showcases the duo’s carefree globetrotting exploits, including trips to Thai festivals, New Orleans, and the Amalfi Coast. The latest video that they shared, however, strikes a decidedly more somber tone: during a trip to Brazil for Carnaval last month, Franco shares that she was shot.

While visiting with family in Brazil — where she is from — after the festival, Franco’s aunt and uncle were driving her to a party when, suddenly, a man with a gun appeared in the middle of the road in an attempt to steal their car. Franco’s uncle kept driving, whereupon “pops from their guns started exploding into the air,” she writes in the duo’s travel blog, Shut Up And Go. “And then I felt heat accumulate in my body, after a moment of lost breath.” She had been shot in the back.

Franco also recounts the traumatic experience in the riveting vlog below:

After finding the nearest hospital, doctors ultimately decided to leave the bullet in her body given that it had only impacted muscle tissue and was close to her spine.

If anything, however, Franco says that the experience hasn’t hampered her desire to travel — it has only emboldened the duo’s mission: to encourage young people to ‘Shut Up And Go’. (Last March, for instance, they headlined a travel show in partnership with AT&T as part of the telecommunications giant’s Hello Lab initiative titled Dare To Travel, in which the duo explored eight cities across North America).

“Luckily,” Franco writes, “I have a second chance, and you better believe I’m gonna live the hell out of that opportunity.” Franco adds that she’ll be heading back to Brazil soon enough.