That is pretty horrible indeed, though i hope and suppose it hit him only one eye so he will not be actually blind, just have a hard time judging distances for a while.
With access to really good medical care your friend may have chances of partial recovery too though. As i understand in resulted in a laceration that damaged the cornea, pupil, possible lens, but not the retina.
The sort of good news about that is that most of it can be treated, whereas retinal damage often is not treatable. A damaged lens can be replaced with an artifical one (fairly common for cataracts), a cornea can be transplanted, and loss of pupil funciton could be fixed to some degree using a contact lens with limited aperture (this makes you lose dark/light adaptability to some degree, but allows sight in most conditions though painful when going into brightly lit areas).
Downside is that all of this is -very- expensive to do. In many european countries that cost would be mostly covered by (mandatory) healthcare insurance and such, but i'm aware that this may not be the case in the US, and that the cost to save vision to the damaged eye may not be coverable, despite being technically possible.
But even then, living with only one functional eye is not -that- hard. My father lost vision in one eye due to physical trauma a few years ago. He can still do virtually anything he could before, though had a fall/stumble or two shortly after due to lack of depth perception.
If you are blind in one eye it's definitly time to stop messing around with lasers though, regardless of safety precautions available i'd never build or use one again if i only had one eye remaining.
