Three years ago, Dennis Sanderson was homeless and recovering from a gunshot wound. Now he's clean, sober and no longer homeless. But he still believes that the justice system treated his shooting differently because he was a homeless man, looking for cans in an alley, when an Oregon State University student shot him Oct. 14, 2006.

Josh Grimes, 19, was a member of the OSU chapter of the Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity when he shot Sanderson in the leg with a .22-caliber rifle. Grimes maintains to this day that he was aiming for a trash bin behind Sanderson, and just wanted to scare him away.

Grimes was arrested about three weeks later and eventually pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and unlawful use of a weapon.

In a phone interview Thursday, Sanderson said that after he was shot, Corvallis police detective Mark Posler apologized to him on behalf of Corvallis. "He said, 'I'll get the guy who did it,'" Sanderson said.

In April 2007, Grimes was sentenced to 150 days in jail, 400 hours of community service at a homeless shelter and three years of supervised probation. Sanderson said the sentence was too light.

"If a college kid came snooping around my camp, and I shot him? I'd be doing 25-to-life," he said.

Angry, he went back to the AGR house a few times, yelling and intoxicated, although he knew he could end up in trouble. Then he thought of a wiser course of action.

"I figured I better get out of town," he said. "I came up to Portland, where I didn't know anybody to get in trouble with," he said.

In September 2007, Sanderson filed a lawsuit against the local and national AGR organizations, as well as Grimes. Monday, a jury awarded Sanderson $41,000 in economic and non-economic damages but said it was the local chapter and Grimes who were responsible, not the national chapter.

Sanderson, 49, said he is clean and sober and living in an apartment in Portland these days. But he said the changes in his life happened in spite of the shooting, not because of it.

"I'm satisfied with the verdict," he said. However, he added, "I think they should have held the national (organization) accountable for it."

The national Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity, which Sanderson's attorney had argued did not take necessary steps to prevent the shooting, was found not negligent.

"I thought it was all cut and dried," Sanderson said. "We connected the dots."

The civil trial was the first time Sanderson had seen Grimes since the criminal proceedings. Sitting at the same table as his shooter for several days wasn't easy, Sanderson said. That wasn't the only source of discomfort during the trial. Sanderson is undergoing interferon treatment for hepatitis.

"I felt lousy through that whole trial," he said.

How will he spend the money? Sanderson has a conservator - someone with legal authority to be in charge of his finances - who will decide how the rest of the money is used. About $6,400 of the money will go to medical expenses. The wound in his leg has healed, except for a dull ache that flares up when the weather changes.

"I just try not to think about it too much," Sanderson said.

For now, he just hopes the money can help move him out of the low-income housing where he's living. And he wanted to make it clear that he is not anti-gun.

The issue of gun safety and access to guns was part of deliberations in the trial; the jury had to decide whether the national fraternity had been negligent in enforcing its own policy, which allowed members to have guns at the fraternity house as they were locked and kept under "limited access." At the local fraternity house, police found what they said was an arsenal of weapons.

According to Robert Kerr, OSU's coordinator of Greek Life, the OSU chapter of AGR banned all guns shortly after the shooting. Every other fraternity and sorority associated with OSU already had banned firearms.

"That wasn't my goal, to ban guns," Sanderson said. He hunted as a young man himself, but said it's essential to handle guns responsibly. Shooting out of a fraternity window, he said, isn't responsible.

"If he'd of hollered out the window, 'Hey, get out of here,' I'd have left," he said. He feels the shooting revealed a "culture of animosity towards the homeless" at the fraternity.

"If I'd have died, no one would've even known what happened," he said. "But I lived; and I wouldn't let go of it."