DATE: Wednesday, November 26, 1997          TAG: 9711260522

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LOUIS HANSEN AND SUSIE STOUGHTON, STAFF WRITERS 

DATELINE: SUFFOLK                           LENGTH:   70 lines

SHOT MOTHER RECOVERING, BUT BULLET TEARS FAMILY APART

The beige couch in Vernon Morings' Wilson Pines apartment is unscathed by the handgun blast.

The pictures of his smiling wife, Elaine, and their two teen-age children are still displayed in the tidy living room.

The only thing that did not survive the blast, Vernon Morings said, was his family.

Early Friday morning, Elaine was sleeping on the sofa, waiting for her 16-year-old daughter, Tenille, to come home.

The teen-ager placed a pillow over her mother's head, put a .25-caliber handgun to the soft cushion, and squeezed the trigger, police said. Elaine Morings survived.

Vernon Morings said he does not blame his daughter. ``She has to commit a crime'' to escape, he said Tuesday afternoon at the family's apartment on East Washington Street. ``There could have been a dead body.''

For months, he said, Tenille and her mother, a strict Jehovah's Witness, fought over the pretty and popular Nansemond River High School senior's decision to date a 22-year-old.

``My wife and kids are preaching Jehovah,'' he said. ``But you see where they are.''

Tenille Morings is being held in a detention center, accused of aggravated assault and firearms charges.

Vernon Morings, a former scrap metal worker who is now disabled, said his 14-year-old son is staying with family friends.

With improbable good fortune, Elaine Morings suffered little injury from the gunshot wound. She was released Tuesday from Sentara Norfolk General Hospital.

But she did not return to the apartment her family had called home. Her husband said she was staying with relatives in Portsmouth. She could not be reached for comment.

Elaine Morings called Suffolk police at 3 a.m. Friday, complaining that her arms tingled and that she thought she had been electrocuted. Emergency workers took her to Obici Hospital, where doctors discovered she had been shot in the head.

``The injury . . . did penetrate into the skull, but it did not penetrate far into the brain,'' said Dr. L.D. Britt, chief of surgery at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, where Elaine Morings was taken later Friday morning.

The bullet struck the 42-year-old woman in the forehead, and her skull absorbed most of the force, doctors say. Her skull fractured, and the frontal lobes of her brain were bruised. Fragments of the bullet were removed from her brain.

Dr. Jeff Riblet examined her Monday and found her up in bed. She told him that she ``really feels great.''

Riblet said she appears to have suffered no lasting damage. ``She is, essentially, neurologically intact,'' he said.

Depending on the type of bullet, its trajectory, and where the impact occurs, doctors say, a person can survive a gunshot to the head. But ``she's still very fortunate,'' Britt said.

The shooting was not the first sign of trouble between mother and daughter.

Loud fights between the pair frequently brought police to the apartment, Vernon Morings said. ``She (the mother) had the cops up here almost every weekend for something (Tenille) had done.''

He believes the violence was a sign of the ``last days'' predicted in the Bible, when children will rise up against their parents, he said.

But he promised to support his daughter.

``I'm going to stick with her,'' he said. ``It's the only way I can show her I love her.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

JOHN H. SHEALLY II/The Virginian-Pilot

Pictures of Vernon Lee Mornings' family... KEYWORDS: SHOOTING INJURIES

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