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Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing, and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show
police officer, author, and member of the Operation Enduring Warrior team, Jeremy Sharlow.
Now, in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from Jeremy's journey into law enforcement,
working within the SWAT team, the officer-involved shooting that left him with life-changing physical and mental injuries,
his powerful mental health story, the tools he used for post-traumatic growth,
the power of community, Operation Enduring Warrior, and so much more.
Now, before we get to this incredibly powerful and important conversation, as I say every week,
please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show,
leave feedback, and leave a rating.
Every single five-star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of almost 900 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories
so I can get them to every single person on planet Earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Jeremy Sharlow. Enjoy.
Well, Jeremy, I want to start by saying firstly, this is a long time coming.
You and I have known each other and gone back and forth,
and we're at the operation during Warrior Gala together a couple of years ago.
But the universe has a way of just putting someone in front of me when it's supposed to happen.
And obviously, this is now. So I want to welcome you onto the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thank you, sir. Yeah, we have been going back and forth since what, 2020?
Something like that, yeah, I think.
So where are we finding your planet Earth today?
I'm in Bay City, Michigan. Yeah, I move around a lot.
But for the time being, I'm in Bay City.
So I would love to start the very beginning of your story.
I mean, you have some pretty powerful chapters when it comes to your time in uniform
and then out the other end, but let's start at the very beginning.
So where were you born? And tell me a little bit about your family dynamic,
what your parents did, how many siblings?
Okay. Well, my family, I got a crazy family, but I was born in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina,
military kid, obviously.
Right away, my mother, my sister and I moved up to Michigan when her and her dad,
my sister's dad split up. And I basically lived in Michigan all my childhood.
I lived in different parts of Michigan, Bay City area, Saginaw, Everett, Reed City.
Standish is where I went to high school.
I finished high school in Standish-Stirling Central, which is about 45 minutes north
to where I'm living now.
And then, yeah, I ended up making some poor decisions in high school,
ended up getting my girlfriend pregnant.
And that led me down to Illinois, where I started college.
And how old were you when you became a dad?
I was 18. Yeah, I was 18.
When you look back now, what were the pros of having a child so young
and what were the cons?
I'm going to put the cart ahead of the horse a little bit.
And being retired, I'm not in a relationship or anything.
So no kids in the house at age 42.
That's kind of nice.
So that's definitely a pro of having your kids early.
You know, I think also I had the energy to keep up with my daughter.
You know, I still wanted to play.
You know, I wasn't sitting on the couch exhausted from being at work.
I had energy.
So, you know, I got to play with her a lot.
I enjoyed that.
And what about cons?
If you look back now, is there anything detrimental?
Yeah, there's a lot of detrimental.
I don't necessarily recommend it.
Obviously, you know, in raising my daughter, I tried to get her to do better than I did.
That's the goal for all of our children, I would think, you know, do better than we did.
And, you know, I always explained to her, you know,
you don't want to go the same route we did because of the struggles.
And, you know, finances were one of the major ones.
You know, we both still, my ex and I both still lived at home with our respective parents.
When this occurred, we had nothing of our own.
You know, we, you know, we ended up moving out onto our own and getting our own apartment
and tried to be a family.
But, you know, we were 18.
She was 17.
She was a little bit younger.
And, you know, we didn't know what we were doing and not that anybody does.
But we weren't done growing up ourselves.
So that even made it more difficult, I would say.
It's interesting.
I was just talking to my son about this literally a day or two ago that a lot of more ancient cultures,
we were having children, you know, when we were about 16, 17, 18.
But now we've leaned into this career element and getting stable and homes and jobs.
You know, it shifted it way back to where the idea of having a child at 17 or 18
seems way too young to us now.
But it actually goes against what we did probably for most of the human resistance.
Well, I'd even say that the physiological aspects of our bodies are geared towards that as well.
It's a cultural thing that's moved us away from it.
You know, the way we live is through making money.
So in order to have a job, you know, these things, it's not the manual labor.
It's not going out in the field.
You're not cutting your you're not hunting your own food.
You're not building your own house with your hands.
And, you know, when we were generally having the children at 14, 15, 16 years old, that's what was doing.
I mean, a 15 year old with the right tools can go build a house.
You know, that's not that's not a problem.
A 15 year old signing a contract is a whole other thing.
Yeah. What else is that whole concept of it takes a village?
I think it doesn't matter how old you are trying to find childcare now,
trying to afford childcare when you are, you know, one two person household slash income.
I mean, there's so many people that literally by the time they pay childcare,
they may as well not be working because it's literally that expensive to put a kid in care.
Back in those days, you had a village and obviously, you know,
there was a kind of sharing of overseeing children while, you know,
hunting was done, while gathering was done and all the other things you needed to make a community thrive.
Absolutely. And the children were always under somebody's care.
And at that time, if you messed around and you did something wrong,
your neighbor would put you in your place.
You know, now, if you tried to yell at your neighbor's kid,
you know, the cops would be knocking on the door within 10 minutes because Karen is upset that little Bobby didn't get treated right.
Absolutely. We're going back to your childhood again for a second.
So what about sports? What were you playing back then?
Oh, man, all sorts of sports. I was always I was big into football.
I was actually pretty good. If it wasn't for my size, I'm not a very big individual.
And even then, I was smaller, maybe weighed 150 pounds,
soaking wet, but I played on the defensive line.
But yeah, I did football, wrestling, track, long distance running if I could,
you know, just just the normal high school sports.
And what about career aspirations? Were you dreaming of law enforcement then?
Or was it something else?
So I decided I wanted to be a cop.
You know, this sounds cliche and they even recommend you don't say this when you're interviewing to become a police officer.
But I actually wanted to be a cop since I was about six.
There is an incident that occurred in the apartment building we were living in at the time and the building caught fire.
And the police were the first on scene and they were helping get people out, et cetera.
And that had a very big impact on me.
You know, in addition, with some of the early stuff with my mom,
I felt like I was the protector of her and my sister.
And so that resonated with me as well.
I see, you know, I'm seeing these events. I'm the protector.
I decided the police officer is what I wanted to do.
I wanted to continue to protect and make a difference in my community.
So since the early age, I decided that was what I was going to do.
And I did it.
As I progressed through this podcast, as I learned more and more and spoke to more and more people,
the impact of early life on us in uniform became more and more apparent.
And so many, especially people that struggled later on wearing the uniform.
When you look back, a lot of them had significant trauma when they were younger.
It's not a conversation that we have, you know, Jeremy, oh, he's having struggles because he had that shooting.
Well, they're not talking about, you know, the 18, 20 years before you put the uniform on the first place.
So now with this, you know, wise mental health lens that you've created now,
when you look back at your early life, were there elements of that you think that contributed to struggling later?
I would say no. And the only reason I would say that is simply because I'm not saying I didn't have any traumas.
I'm just saying that I don't believe they had anything.
I don't think there was an effect on the things that I've dealt with later in life.
I mean, to become a police officer, and actually, it's funny that you even mention that through my proceedings,
the city, the workman's comp with the city tried to claim that I didn't have PTSD for my shooting.
It was because of childhood trauma. And they tried to deny me services because of that.
So, but to answer your question, no, I don't think that it did.
And I passed a psyche valve to prove that, you know, like in order to become a police officer, I had to take a psyche valve.
I'm sure you're familiar with them. I'm sure you've had to take them as well.
And then, you know, when I don't pass the psyche valve later and then they tell me it's from childhood trauma, that just doesn't it didn't make sense to me.
Yeah. Well, first, I mean, those evals are absolute crap anyway.
I've spoken to numerous people in that field now. It was never meant to select someone in uniform.
It just wasn't. It's just it's a usually it's one of what should be many tests that when you put them all together, give you a profile of an individual.
But when I think about childhood trauma, I'm not thinking that you're coming in already with PTSD.
It's more so when people have trauma and it's addressed, I think you come in with more tools.
It becomes a strength. It really does. But there's a lot of us that had trauma that was kind of buried down,
that just didn't rear his head and was amplified by the job.
So, yes, 100 percent, the job was a big part of what happened.
But if you're trying to get to the bottom of someone's struggles and you're missing those formative years,
a lot of times that can cause the frustration of people not understanding why they're not healing us.
Because what happened to you when you were eight was absolutely a contributing factor to why you struggle when you were 38.
I mean, just logically, that would make sense to me.
And I'm not saying because I didn't experience that that that isn't the case.
You know, that would be too anecdotal. The sample size is way too small, obviously.
But I mean, just logically, that would make sense, you know, almost as if the job was the trigger to a pre-existing trauma that maybe was underlined.
And I can see that being a thing, you know, especially with some of the things we see on the job.
You never know. I mean, one minute you're shaking somebody's hand, the next minute you're in a fight for your life.
And then there's everything in between.
So the opportunity to be exposed to a trigger for something that you didn't even know is very high.
Absolutely. Well, you said that you wanted to be a cop since you were six.
Walk me through your journey into police academy and then your first department.
So obviously, you know, being a young father, I needed to start making money right away.
And so I started I went to a community college and at the community college, I started out in computer sciences just because at the time, 18 years old, I wasn't eligible to be a police officer.
You had to be 21 and most and most everywhere in order to have a firearm and whatnot.
But so I started in the computer sciences and I was going to be a computer network administrator for a while.
And then I changed majors and ended up at the University of Illinois in Springfield studying computer science as a bachelor's.
And I kind of that transition is actually what catapulted me into the police police world.
So while I was a student worker at the community college, I was working on their computers.
Like I got hired as a student worker.
So in order to have the job, I had to be going to the school.
Well, because I changed my majors and I wasn't the best student in the world, I ran out of credit hours versus financial aid that you can use at a community college.
And they told me either they're going to cut me off financially or the financial aid would cut me off financially or I had to go to a university.
So I transferred to the university. I mean, the progression isn't a bad progression.
I just probably should have done it without that motivation, I guess.
But at that time, though, I was a student worker.
So I lost my job as well because I couldn't I had to be a student at the community college in order to be to work there.
While I was a student worker supporting their computers, I was one of the areas I supported was the police department.
So in doing that, I had to get a couple of different certifications for some clearances for the state, you know, to access NCIC, things of that nature, reads and stuff like that.
And to support their computers, I needed those certifications as well because of the privacy issues, et cetera.
So when I explained to them, hey, I'm no longer going to be serving, you know, working on your computers, they were like, oh, cool.
Well, we have a part time position open as a dispatcher.
So I took it, you know, paid a little bit better, got me into the police department.
And, you know, I was a dispatcher and this was a dispatcher at a community college.
So we handled all of our own calls.
We didn't if 9-1-1 got a call, it was disbatch.
It was routed to us and then we would dispatch our officers.
It was also a public safety department.
So they were required to be an EMS as well.
They were all the MTBs.
So fast forward about six months of doing that part time, I'm still working on my bachelor's in business, or I'm sorry, in computer science.
And a police officer position comes open.
And of course, I've told these guys that I've been talking to them for six months.
They all know I wanted to be a cop, et cetera.
So they talked me into testing.
I test, I end up getting one of the positions and I start out at the community college.
That was my first policing job.
They sent me to the police academy.
They paid, my wage was paid while I was there.
It was a pretty good gig.
And what I was making part time as a dispatcher compared to what I was starting out as a police officer was like $32,000 a year or something like that.
I just thought it was great and more money than I'd ever seen at that point.
Were there any areas when you actually got into professional policing where you look back at your time in dispatch and it gave you a different perspective on a call?
Because it's very easy in police and fire and EMS to have the kind of them and us mentality when it comes to the voice behind the radio.
Yeah, I mean, just the way I interacted with my dispatchers was different.
You know, I made like one of the things that I hated as a dispatcher was dispatching a call and then not knowing how it turned out.
You know, you hear something and you might hear something bad on their phone and then you don't know what happens and you might never know what happens.
So that that as a dispatcher for me would sit with me a little bit like I didn't like that.
I had the benefit of those all those officers would come back to our department and I could debrief with them and find out if I so chose.
But even that period of time where I was left there wondering, I didn't enjoy.
So I can only imagine that would be amplified at a 911 center, for example, where they're dealing with much higher volume, much, much more serious calls than we were taking at a community college.
You know, so when I got to the point where I was a police officer full time,
I ensured that even if it was just a message over the NBC or even a quick phone call or just stop by the 911 office,
if it was something major that I would have wanted to know about, I'll let my dispatcher know how it ended so they don't worry.
They don't have that hanging on them.
That was, I think, the biggest takeaway I took from that.
Yeah, I love that. I've had a few dispatchers on here, a handful.
And I think one of the things that most people don't realize is they're firstly more often than not, they're not even seeing daylight.
You know, they might come in 6 a.m., leave at 6 p.m.
So if anything, they're seeing sunrise, sunset, but that's about it.
They're in a dark room, you know, obviously barely any windows or computer screens.
But then they're getting these calls. They're getting the choking baby.
They're getting like I had Beth Bauer Sox on.
She was a dispatcher who lived in Paradise, California and was also working when that wildfire killed numerous members of her community.
And they were calling her screaming before they got burned over.
But they're sitting there.
You know, if you have a foot pursuit, if I have to, you know, throw a ladder to a building and make entry,
at least as a physical offload for some of that stress, a dispatcher is simply sitting there.
So not only they're not getting closure, they're not getting any real physical offload of their own trauma.
Yeah, and that makes sense.
And I've actually heard a couple of different dispatching centers where they're bringing in service dogs and such to help with that kind of thing.
I mean, I mean, it's putting a bandaid on an open wound, but at least it's something they're trying.
Yeah, yeah, I think just getting them outside, getting them moving, you know, there's a way of rotating people through so they can literally,
you know, yeah, be exposed to sunlight, get their blood pumping offload, some of that stuff.
You know, it's important because a lot of dispatchers, sadly, I mean, they're not they're not in great health.
A lot of the ones that I've seen, at least it's a very detrimental physically and mentally to a lot of them.
And I mean, unless you work in the field, a lot of people don't even think about a dispatcher.
They don't consider the person behind that phone.
They don't they don't consider them at all.
So what was your experience?
You wanted to be a police officer.
You had this kind of campus policing that you'd been a part of.
Where did you find yourself?
And was it a big culture shock for you?
So, yeah, I went into this thinking, you know, I'm going to be a police officer.
This is going to be great. Turns out at a community college, they don't want police officers.
They want armed security guards.
Essentially, they don't want you to do anything proactive because if you do anything proactive, it can skew, you know, statistics.
And then all of a sudden, they're looking at federal funding issues or something of that nature.
You know, so they don't want policing on a community college campus.
Me at 20, I think I was 23 at the time, 23, 24 at the time, I wanted to be a police officer.
And so I found myself in the chief's office a lot.
You know, I got I think I'd written the.
The only two do I that had been written in 10 years at that college, like they didn't even have do I packets.
They didn't have the paperwork in the office because it didn't happen.
Like I had to go. I had to borrow it from a neighboring agency type thing.
So I was after about a year and a half, almost two years there.
It was suggested that I might not make probation and that I should look for policing in a different environment.
And so I quit. I you know, I it was a Friday night and I my I received an email earlier that day and my boss was like, hey.
I know your last day is Sunday. We worked for for tens at the time and I know your last day is Sunday morning.
I need you to hang over so we can come in and talk like, why the hell would my chief come in on a Sunday to talk to me that that didn't add up.
So I made a couple of phone calls, found out what was going on, you know, talk to my sergeant and whatnot.
And he told me that, you know, it probably is going to get fired.
I just said, well, you know, I have my daughter this weekend.
We had a joint custody agreement, my ex and I. I have my daughter this weekend and I'd rather spend time with my daughter than sit here to get fired on Sunday.
So here's my gun. Here's my badge. And I walked out.
I don't recommend that very bad, very hard to get a policing job after that.
Very difficult. But luckily, the chief of police who was going to fire me happened to be friends with the neighboring chief of Mohammed, Illinois.
They both retired from the Champaign Police Department and were now chiefs of these other departments.
My chief at the college heard that I was applying for the Mohammed Police Department and he actually gave me a reference for the Mohammed Police Department.
And so the guy who was firing me essentially got me my job at the other police department.
He told me I was a great cop, just not in the college environment.
OK, well, that's good, though. So he realized that you were a bad fit because you were so proactive and aggressive in a positive way.
So it wasn't that you were a terrible employee.
No, no. And it was never a terrible employee thing.
It was, you know, stop taking a little bit of weed off these kids in school, man.
Like that kind of thing. You bring a weed to school. Stop it.
And here we are now. Right.
Laws have changed. All right.
Well, then walk me into your journey into the actual police force.
All right. The actual police force.
It's funny how when I was at the community college, I would have taken offense that we are the police.
But when I went to the actual police department, I saw such a huge difference.
You know, and this isn't to downplay any of the work that they do at the community colleges.
The work there is important. And, you know, college environment is just a different type of policing.
There's no other way to put it. It's just different than being a municipal or a state or county officer.
So I end up going to Mohammed Police Department.
I go through their FTO program. Don't have any trouble.
Make it off probation. And the moment I make it off probation, I go and hit up the chief.
And I asked to get put on the county SWAT unit.
So he gets me the interviews I need, fill out the paperwork I need.
And next thing I know, I'm going to SWAT school and I end up on the countywide SWAT team.
And I stayed there for pretty much the rest of my police career.
I mean, I just I don't know how to describe it.
It was just a kind of got into this rhythm. You know, I work nights most of the time, you know,
and with a small department like that, we didn't have a whole lot of turnover.
So there was not a lot. I'm sorry.
I should explain the Mohammed Police Department was a small police department.
We had maybe I think it was 10 swarm total.
So we had enough to where we were working full time around the clock and we weren't a part time police department.
But we you know, there are shifts where there was only one of us on duty and we would rely on county for a backing officer.
So describe the city to me, you know, when you talk about one police officer, you know,
what is the what is a 24 hour or 12 hour shift most likely going to be for a police officer at that time?
It depends on the day. I mean, when you go to police, when you get in there,
you usually arrive early, get your squad car together, that kind of thing.
You go out and do patrol. Usually there's emails from the chief telling us to do some directed patrols in some certain areas.
The area that we were covering was upwards of about 14 square miles. It was huge from tip to tip.
You know, it was some places it was the size of a county.
But this was our town. You know, when you drove one end to the other, it was 13 miles across.
So, you know, you do go out and you start doing your directed patrols.
You had your areas that you'd want to check that, you know,
where common where you knew criminal activity was common usually, you know, that some of the parks and we had believe it or not,
Mohammed actually had a heavy drug use issue.
And whereas some of the local towns, you know, they they were dealing more with weed and some of the more less expensive drugs.
And Mohammed, they had access. It was kind of the rich suburb to the larger city champagne there.
And all the kids had money.
So they were rolling around with like cocaine and stuff like that that you wouldn't normally found, you know, on your just in that environment.
I wouldn't think but so, you know, they had their drug issues.
And so there is if you wanted to be busy, you could be proactive and I could be busy all day writing do eyes, you know, doing drug interdiction.
And then at the same time, you're answering calls as well.
So, you know, any any calls that come into the city, if you're working by yourself, obviously, it's your responsibility.
Most of the time, we were able to cover it where we had two officers for most of the shift
where there might only be like a three or four hour period where you're by yourself.
And we would arrange that. So it was like at the beginning where it was like two o'clock in the afternoon where you're not getting any calls.
But at seven o'clock where it's busy, you got two officers type thing, you know, like a power shift situation.
So, yeah, just every day was different, man.
And that's kind of what I loved about the job.
I never would I go to work and expect the same thing.
You know, I had my places. I like to run traffic, but I really wasn't into writing tickets.
I use traffic more for interdiction than anything else.
When I told people in law enforcement and bearing in mind, this is a firefighter observing your community from the outside looking in.
One of the things that seems to be insanity to me is riding one to a car, no matter one to a whole city.
So, you know, because, you know, the the false multiplier effect of a second person is way more than two people.
It becomes, you know, much greater than that.
Did you feel vulnerable at those times, even if there was two of you, especially if you were on your own?
Because, I mean, literally, you had no one watching a six at that point.
So, yes and no. I can think of specific times, even when we had two officers, but we knew a county backing officer was still an hour away or 40 minutes away.
You know, there are times that, you know, we weren't doing something proactive.
For example, there's a traffic stop I made and there are four individuals, obviously gang members.
And there I saw open alcohol in the car.
Well, there's two of us and five of them and our backup's 40 minutes away.
I have all the reason in the world to pull them out and start searching.
And but again, the force multiplier there.
So I call my partner over, she comes over and she was like, no, we don't have the manpower.
We don't have the ability, if this goes sideways, to do anything about this.
So maybe we just let this one go.
And so I wasn't happy about it, but I kind of agreed with her at that point.
And so instead of pushing the issue, I kind of said, hey, I see the beer, dump it out and they dumped it out.
I checked her of the traffic issue that I originally stopped him for, but I didn't pull them all out to search the car.
Specifically because we were outnumbered out and I guarantee you had to search that car. There was guns and drugs in it.
I mean, it was writing as if it was a, you know, they'll place people in certain positions and a gang car when they're moving stuff.
And that's what it appeared to me.
Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting way of looking at it, you know, with the whole defund conversation, like minimizing the ability to just simply make an arrest.
You know, that's the person that, you know, killed someone's child minutes before. And now you've only got two of you and you physically don't have the option, you know, in that case, to overpower five people.
You know, I mean, obviously, if it was guns drawn, it might be a different story.
But up until that point, if they're not resisting and all of a sudden it kicks off.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes you see this even in some of these horrific videos that we're seeing at the moment in Mexico.
And I think Ecuador just happened where gangs are literally coming out and kidnapping police officers and corrections officers, and they just simply outmanned them.
That was it.
Yeah, so a hundred percent. And because we were always at the risk of being outmanned, we we learned to talk a lot.
Like instead of fighting, you know, I'd rather talk to somebody for an hour than wrestling for 10 minutes, you know, just because you 10 minutes of wrestling somebody.
That's that's a fight like you're going to be winded after that.
But imagine having to do that by yourself with no backup now.
So if I can sit there for an hour talking to you and then talk you into the handcuffs, that's what I'm going to do.
We relied a lot of I call it gerbil voodoo, but verbal judo.
I'm sure you're familiar.
I like the first name better though.
Right. I mean, because it is it's kind of like a voodoo. If you do it right, it works.
I don't know why, but it does. But so yeah, you rely a lot on talking and communicating and trying to reason with people.
And so I think that's a that's a huge difference of policing in a small community and a larger community where you roll up with five deep to a traffic ticket.
Absolutely. Well, you talked about wrestling.
You were testing for SWAT. How much did all the athleticism of your early life factor into not only succeeding physically just in regular police uniform, but SWAT selection as well?
Yeah, so. I think it helped give me that no quit that that I think the sporting as a child helped develop me into that type A personality, I think.
And if you're going to be successful in SWAT, you're going to be a type personality, type A personality.
They're actively looking for that type of an individual because generally speaking, type B personality don't want to run towards into buildings with gunfire and whatnot.
So at any rate, not to say they can't, but that's just a generalization.
That's what they're looking for in those tests that they made us take.
They're putting us into those categories so they can see which direction that we would likely go.
But at any rate, I feel like I really learned not to quit. And then when it got to some of the SWAT training, you know, it was difficult.
You know, there was a two mile run. There was an obstacle course.
Then, you know, the moving and shooting. When we were training as a police officer, they just did these triangle stance, you know, push out and shoot.
There wasn't a lot of moving. It was it was horrible training, to be honest.
You know, it really wasn't functional training. And then I got to SWAT and all of a sudden they're like, what are you doing?
No, we're rolling on the ground. We're shooting under cars. We're, you know, we're running while we're shooting.
We're moving while we're shooting. And I think just.
The higher level of activity.
And in that decision making that you learn how to do on the spot while playing sports.
I think those are probably what helped push me into the SWAT school and help and help me succeed as well.
Now, prior to 2016, what was some of the notable kind of career calls that you ran in that time period?
Oh, one of one of the SWAT call outs we had, we had an individual armed with a 308 rifle and a scope.
And we were at his home for seemed like 15 or 20 hours, but I think it was like 13 hours.
But it was like negative seven out the entire time.
And so I was on the react team right next to the door and we weren't 100 percent sure he was in the building.
And this was in 2008, 2009 ish.
And. I don't know why I thought of it, but just right away, I'm like, why don't we ping his phone and see if he's at least here?
So not chasing our ass off, sitting outside this building for no reason.
And everybody looked at me and was like, holy crap.
It was like, wow, nobody thought of that.
So we think it's when we find out he's inside and that helped, you know, we send in a robot,
we start breaking windows and things like that to break and make contact, throwing a phone.
And as soon as he sees the SWAT truck pull up up front, because we were doing stuff off to the side for a react team.
But when we started making notifications, we pulled up with an MRAP is what it was, is a converted MRAP.
I'm sorry. It was a bear cat at that time. And we used a loud loud haler and we're blasting, hey, come out.
He tried to go out the back window instead and get into our perimeter unit.
So and took him down without an issue. But that was a very memorable one.
I had a car fire that I responded to in the county and I had my actually had my wife with me at the time.
And she was a ride along. We were allowed to do ride alongs if we so chose.
And she I get bored once in a while. So she rode along with me this evening.
And it was a car. Some kids were driving a van. They lost control.
They had a tree van caught fire with entrapment.
So I haul asked to get there. It's outside my jurisdiction.
It's about a mile outside my jurisdiction. Not quite a mile, but at any rate, I get there.
I'm first on scene and I see the fire. I grab my I tell my wife to stay in the car.
Obviously, I grab my fire extinguisher out of the car.
And I run up there and I see three, there's four kids total in this car.
And I see three of them with obviously broken legs and stuff trying to get out of the car and they can't.
So I helped drag these three kids out of the car.
And then I go back for the driver, who was the one who was entrapped.
He was fully entrapped, not out at all. And I he he as I was walking up to him,
I the fire kind of wrapped around him completely like flashed up on us.
And I'm hitting the fire with the fire extinguisher and I'm getting flash burns on my arm and my face from this.
The coming up right there. And and unfortunately, we weren't able to save him.
But he burned to death right there. What made it so much harder is right after that,
because one officer, county, county contacts me.
He I actually knew this kid. We dealt with him a couple of times for not anything major,
but he lived inside my jurisdiction.
So now came the time for the death notification.
And the coroner contacted our department.
And of course, I was the only one working.
So I just watched this kid burn to death. And then I had to go assist the coroner in giving the death notification to the child's mother.
And. That was probably the hardest thing ever did as a police officer.
I mean, it sounds horrendous. I mean, kudos to you for the rescues that you made.
But I think the I've said this so many times, we in our training in fire and police and EMS,
you do A, B and C, you get outcome D and you get out into the real world.
And you discover that a lot of people don't make it no matter what you do.
And that inability to save can be a crushing weight just within itself.
I wrote an article about that. It's actually on my website and I posted it a couple of different times.
It's called a mother's death. And I wrote it as a it's more of like a poem, I guess.
And it talks about how. It sometimes feel like death is just following us.
No matter what we do, we can't stop it. And it's almost like death asks in that, you know, like the concept of death.
It humanizes death and so, yeah, but it's really it's really sad.
To experience those things and then look back at them and realize how much.
More you should have done like in terms of getting help like that hurt me bad.
And looking back now, I'm sitting there thinking I didn't go talk to anybody.
I didn't do a critical debrief. You know, like I went home that night.
I took my wife was a little freaked out.
I took a shower and proceeded to cough up soot and stuff from the fire for the next week.
You know, and I should have went and talked to somebody, you know, I should have went and, you know,
and sought that help just, you know, seeing how it's even affecting me now.
And I'm losing my train of thought. I'm shaking a little bit.
You know, that tells me that maybe I didn't deal with all of the emotions and feelings behind that.
This isn't as acute, but I was on a plane a few weeks ago about to fly from London back here to the US
and the passenger had a cardiac arrest and I ended up working a code and it was a really interesting perspective.
The gentleman didn't make it, which is horrendous.
And we did everything we could with the I mean, I was the only one.
I think that any sort of pre hospital experience whatsoever.
And so the stewardess, the flight crew were slowly able to get bits of equipment
because they had protocol and everything that needed to be open needed permission.
I mean, there was, you know, not a good system when it comes to getting a responder to help the equipment that they need.
Very long story short, I'm helping the London ambulance crew doing compression still.
And then finally it gets to the point where we change it off and I tell them, look, I'm probably in the way now.
Now I've done my bit on the chest. Do you need me? And they're like, no, we'll come find you when we're done.
So I went, washed the blood off my hands and went and sat back down.
And it kind of, it struck me, it hit me hard.
And I was like, wow, you know, 14 years of literally wiping down gear after someone's died and just going back in service and doing it all over again.
But what was striking was I realized what I was feeling is what actually is supposed to happen when someone dies.
And so when it happens to us, like as you sit here, when you're shaken,
it was because of what you saw was horrific and tragic and you felt completely helpless in helping the young man that was trapped.
And sometimes we look at it as like, what's wrong with me?
And actually that's how it's supposed to feel because it should be because it was horrendous.
But when we wear a uniform, we try and burrow it down at what's wrong with us because you've got another call to go to.
So it's kind of like, where is that medium between feeling because you're supposed to feel,
but obviously, like you said, not being overwhelmed where it consumes you?
Yeah, I don't have an answer for that, but I think those are very, very good points.
And I think that's essentially what I've been trying to highlight is, you know, we need we need to pay more attention to our mental health.
I mean, there's just no doubt that I know it sounds cliche.
Everybody says that nowadays, but damn it, it's true.
Especially in these fields that we're working, you know, we're all these again, type A personalities.
I can handle anything. I was in a shootout last week.
Like, come on, we can be Billy Badass, but that only goes so far.
The way I've framed it recently is I'm almost 50 now.
So I grew up in the Rambo Schwarzenegger, you know, the 80s movies.
And that was a manly man, you know, the bodybuilder and the emotionless face.
And then you get into this profession and that kind of bleeds over into us.
You know, now we're wearing uniform, believing that same thing.
And you see a lot of these, you know, firefighters, police officers, you know, that still believe that kind of rub some dirt in it.
You know, don't be a pussy, boys don't cry.
But then when you take a step back and ask yourself, why did you become a police officer?
Why did you become a firefighter?
It was kindness and compassion. On the yin yang, it was the yang, which is the black, which is, you know, the soft,
the kind of, you know, feminine energy.
And I mean, in a positive way, but somewhere along the line, we think that we're just a white circle.
We're all yin or might have a back.
I think yang is actually white.
But, you know, we're all we're all hard and we forget to show ourselves the very compassion that led us into this profession,
the very compassion that we show other people when we go on calls.
So that's the disconnect is that we believe this two dimensional facade of what Hollywood told us masculinity was.
And I always say you want a perfect example of what a man actually looks like.
Watch the band of brothers and listen to the real men talking about something that they did.
It was 60 plus years prior to that filming and they're still broken and they're still in tears because that's what's supposed to happen.
When you lose people, it should affect you.
You're not this Robo cop.
And that mentality, I think, is what a lot drives a lot of our men into the ground because they feel too proud to reach out thinking that they're weak
and thinking that they're alone when they're not.
They're just simply being human beings.
That 100 percent happened to me.
You know, I had that mentality.
I was I was a Billy.
I was swat. I was this.
I was that I have all these trainings.
I've been you know, I have these degrees, you know, nothing can hurt me.
And then I got hurt and I didn't know how to handle it.
I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit more as we as we progress.
But that's exactly what happened to me.
I was that guy who would have talked shit and probably did talk shit to other officers at some point prior to experiencing it myself.
And, you know, so I'll be the first to say I was wrong then, you know, like when I was when I had that attitude that I'm invincible,
I can handle this all by myself.
A, there's no need to handle it by yourself.
I mean, there's just too many other options and there's no there's no reason to burden to carry a burden like that on your own.
I completely lost my train of thought there.
I apologize.
No, you were saying you saying that you used to buy into that yourself that you were that guy.
Yeah. Yes.
Yeah. So so I was that guy, you know, especially when I was doing the SWAT callouts.
I thought I thought I was Billy badass and I didn't I didn't think it would happen to me.
You know, you know, you joke around with the guys after, you know, you're on an armed subject column, even if there were shots fired or whatnot, you're still joking around.
And then something so horrific happened to me in May of 2016 that I just it it scrambled my head is the best way I can put it.
It put me into a different dimension.
I didn't know where I was.
You know, I didn't know where I was emotionally, what was going on.
And I turned out the hall, unfortunately.
So let's talk about it now since you opened the door.
So May 7th, 2016, how did that day start for you and then walk us through how it obviously evolved?
So May 7th, 2016, Saturday, normal day, not a big not a big nothing was going on.
I'd actually been texting friends prior to work.
I worked to three p.m.
to 11 p.m. shift and I've been texting friends off and on about going and seeing a movie.
I think it was a new Avengers movie or something that came out that weekend.
I was supposed to meet a state cop friend of mine at the PD at 11 o'clock.
He was going to him and his wife and I were going to go see this movie again.
So I didn't want to do anything that day.
And like I said, this was one of those departments where I wanted to find a hiding spot.
I could find a hiding spot.
Nobody would see me.
I wouldn't get a call like I could literally disappear and just sit around.
That's what I did.
Didn't make a traffic stop.
Nothing.
Fast forward to the end.
So this was a Saturday.
So at 7 p.m.
we had a power shift officer come on his name doesn't matter, but he came on and so we had two officers for the remaining of the shift.
He actually stayed till 3 o'clock in the morning.
We had another officer that came on at 11 p.m.
when I got on.
So, you know, 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. we had two officers.
So I'm chilling through my shift making arrangements to go see the movies and whatnot and about 20 minutes till the end till 11.
I go and I get dinner at McDonald's at sit at the edge of town doing my fat kid thing.
Eating.
I mean, if you look at the crime scene photos, you can see my McDonald's in my squad car still.
It's funny, but but like five, I'm just sitting down getting ready to eat.
I hear my my partner make a traffic stop and I was at the FTO and during the FTO, he would do that all the time.
I get on his ass about making traffic stops at shift change because I didn't want to be over time.
I had plans like I would always just give him shit about that.
And he thought it was a joke.
So I thought he was just fucking with me.
So he makes a traffic stop and within two minutes, you know, I'm asking him if he needs backup and he's saying he's good.
He doesn't need he doesn't need a back.
So I finished my I'm sitting on the edge of town.
I just finished my lunch.
I hear him clear a stop.
I'm OK. Cool.
Send it a shift.
So I'm headed back to the police department and as I'm headed back to the police department, I'm about I'm a block away from the police department.
I see a car turn towards me from a road and it didn't have any headlights on.
And I'm like, well, shit, I can't really say I didn't see that.
Like it's coming directly at me with no headlights on.
So I can't I can't just ignore that one.
So I reach out to my I reach out over the radio to my partner, make sure I wasn't stopping the vehicle.
He had just stopped if he'd already addressed it, then I don't need to address it per se if it's a mechanical.
At any rate, he says it's not the same vehicle.
So I flip around, I get behind it.
And as I get behind it, it pulls in, it turns onto Vine Street and then it turns right into a parking spot.
I'm thinking to myself, it's 10 minutes before the end of my shift.
No harm, no foul. Dude made it home.
I can roll down my window, do a little community policing and just tell this gentleman, hey, you know, your lights are out.
Get it fixed. You know, maybe you just forgot to turn them on.
Maybe you didn't pull your break down all the way.
Whatever your home, your safe, no harm, no foul.
As soon as I rolled down my window, I heard another individual yell.
Sorry, I heard him yell fucking Charlo.
And right then I was just like, like when you hear somebody screaming your name, yeah, I knew something wasn't right right away.
I look over and I see this individual just running directly at my squad car from the house.
So I open my car door and by the time I open the car door and have time to stand up, he is on top of me.
And I put my arm up, my left arm up to stop him.
And he just starts punching, just punching it fist after fist.
This is not the guy who is driving the vehicle.
This is a third party that was actually the person my partner had just stopped.
So. He just starts punching me.
I go, I try to get out over my radio like I'm blocking with one arm.
I'm blocking these punches with one arm.
I've closed distance.
So he's like right.
I'm right on top of each other.
So his hits are kind of hitting me in the back of the head and they're not really strong.
I guess is the best way because I close that distance so they they don't have the force.
I try to get out of the radio, can't get out over the radio.
My radio had changed in that little scuffle.
The channel had changed and I was going out over some channel that wasn't even being watched.
I go, I see my taser on my belt.
I grab my taser and I pull the trigger and I see the probe sit him in the chest and it doesn't do shit.
It was like nothing.
So I'm like again, holy crap, what do I do?
I shove the taser into his chest and it has a second mode.
It's called a drive-stun mode and I hit him in the chest and that pain compliance was enough to push him off me.
So as I push him off me, I clear the car because obviously I don't want to be trapped by that car anymore.
And I start backing away from him with my arm raised and I'm yelling, please stop, please stop.
I maybe made five, six, seven feet away and I see him reach into his pocket and pull out a pistol and start firing.
Yeah, I see him start firing and I was hit.
Like I knew right away I was hit.
Like some of these people are like, oh, I didn't know I was shot.
I fucking knew, man. It hurt like a, it didn't feel good.
It felt like it was hit with a sledgehammer and it burned and everything was numb.
My entire arm was numb.
And so based on the injury, it looks like there's a little hole here in the elbow and there's a big hole here in the arm.
So it looks like entry and exit.
However, I never had my back to him.
I never turned my back to this man.
So the best I can figure is when I saw the gun, I went like that and the round went through my arm.
I went back down.
I drew my pistol, even though I was hit and drew my pistol.
I returned fire.
I hit him in the neck and the leg.
Dropped him right there.
He dropped there.
I emptied my mag.
He got up.
He went into the house and I went to my, I started running towards my squad car to get my AR because he was still shooting at me.
I got to the, I got, as I was running to the car, my training just kicked in.
I'm like, that's a bullet magnet.
Don't go back to that car.
So instead of going to the car, there was a building right behind it.
I went to the building that had a brick facade.
I thought it had a brick facade, but at any rate, I went to the building and I pied the corner and kind of had eyes on.
And that's when I was able to change the channel on my radio and finally get out to my dispatcher and call for help.
From there, I've got this corner pied.
You know, I'm checking my wounds.
I'm letting dispatch know I'm hit.
They're trying to get there.
They didn't hear me at first.
When I went back over the radio, you know, this was 1052 at night.
They had no idea that even I tried to make a traffic stop because I didn't try to make a traffic stop.
I didn't go over the radio.
Nothing, you know, so.
I go over the radio and met had six George to two shots fired on hit and there's silence like you can hear like there's a pregnant pause or like you can hear people like I can just picture them looking at one another and the dispatcher being like, what did he just say?
So then I come back over the radio, make it six George to two shots fired on hit and then it starts lighten up and officers coming from everywhere to try to back.
But the closest officer was still I mean, I had my partner there.
He actually was in town.
So he pulled us that direction and it just so happened that our night shift officer was coming to the police department at that same time.
So while I'm while I was returning fire, I was also moving backwards.
So that's where the moving and shooting with accuracy came into play.
My SWAT training saved my life.
My ability to move and shoot, put him down to stop him from shooting back at me has saved my life.
But he saw all she couldn't see who I was shooting at.
But as you this happened in the backyard of the police department, I told you it was only a block away.
So that block was the block.
The police department was in and she pulls into the parking lot of the police department and I'm on the road right across from from there.
And she sees me backing up moving and shooting.
So now so now there's three of us there.
I tied the corner.
She's trying to tell me to come back to her to get away.
But I want to set up a perimeter because I want to get him.
He got me.
I want to get him.
So I start trying to set up a perimeter and then I see him come out of the house with an AK-47 and I'm I looked at my pistol.
I remember strictly looking at my pistol and looking back at his AK and being no.
I was outgunned.
I knew it.
I already went through a mag.
My extra mags were in my car.
I believe my AR was in my car, but I later found I didn't bring it to work that day.
I was actually sitting at home still, so that wouldn't have done good anyway.
But I only had two mags left on me and he now had an AK-47.
And as soon as I ducked back behind cover, he opened fire.
He believed I was in that squad car and he just shred my squad car.
He emptied a full 30 round mag into my car, specifically targeting the driver's area.
Went through the steering column, the computer, the driver's seat, driver's door.
And those rounds, the 7.62 rounds went through both sides of the car.
Like you see in movies people hiding behind cars.
Those rounds go through so easy.
So he comes out of the house.
So after he mag dumps into my squad car, my partner is still yelling to me to come back.
I hear the gunfire stop.
So I'm knowing he has to reload.
I think I had a good opportunity to cross that field to get back to her.
So she kept lethal cover down across the field to get back to her.
So now we can get that force multiplier two on one.
And she sees my injuries.
She starts checking me out.
And then we hear a wreck.
He had ended up getting into a truck to escape and rammed my squad car.
So hoping I was still in it, I guess.
Rammed my squad car.
And because of the situation, we didn't have officers.
We didn't have a perimeter.
He was able to escape the perimeter which started about a two week long manhunt.
That ended when he broke into a church in southern Illinois and changed his wounds from where I had hit him in his neck.
He dressed his wounds.
He was a survivalist, that kind of an individual.
And he left the bloodied rags and a garbage can inside a church and the preacher saw him, called the police.
The police called.
The FBI was involved.
The FBI SWAT team came out.
He opened fire on FBI SWAT, shot one of the FBI SWAT guys also in the arm.
They opened fire, returning fire on him.
And the autopsy wasn't able to determine how many rounds he was hit with.
Meaning a lot.
Yeah.
What about the backstory?
I want to obviously get into you and the hours and days and weeks after that.
But did you ever find out motive, why he shouted, Sharlow?
I mean, the reason he got to this point of basically kill or be killed?
So I dealt with him a couple different times in the past.
The first time I dealt with him, I was responding to a gas station for a domestic, I'm sorry, a disorderly conduct.
There was an individual yelling racial slurs at a black individual at the gas station.
So I get there and I speak with the black individual and he's telling me, he gives me a description.
I'm able to get information from the cameras.
I get a license plate and I go to the end of it, the suspect's house.
I get to the suspect's house and at this point, I'm just trying to talk to him, find out what's going on.
Because as long as it's only words, I mean, that's a very fine line of freedom of speech for disorderly conduct.
It's a fine line. Is it right?
No, it's never right.
But I don't know that we can necessarily arrest somebody for just being an asshole.
So I walk up to try to talk to him about the situation and immediately he starts yelling,
you have a warrant, get off my property.
He balls his fist up and he starts running at me.
So at that point, I draw my taser and I put it on him and I held him at taser point until I got a backup officer there.
We stood there for like 15 minutes.
We just with my taser pointed at him because it was me, him and his wife.
I didn't know if anybody else was in the house, but I didn't want to go.
I didn't want to lower my taser and go hands on with this guy one on one.
So I just sat there waiting for backup.
And during that time, he was yelling at me, telling me how I am the problem with our society
and that it's a police state and all this kind of other stuff.
And then once we got him into the squad car, as I'm taking him to jail, he started yelling at me in German.
I know it was German because I've heard German.
I don't know what he was saying, but I can imagine it wasn't friendly,
especially seeing he was yelling and spitting at the partition in the car.
And then he went and told me how he started yelling at me about how I was just protecting those animals
and that I was the reason that good white men were being put in prison.
So that was the first interaction I had with him.
He ended up going to jail.
He was found guilty of disorderly conduct and aggravated assault to a police officer.
They actually charged it. I was shot.
Me being the assaulting, the one he assaulted.
But he was ordered to do some anger management and whatnot.
And we saw how well that worked.
But so fast forward maybe a year after that, I stopped a car for speeding like 30 miles an hour over.
It was in a 35 mile an hour zone and she was going like 65 or 70 or something like that.
So she was flying.
So I get her stopped and when I get her stopped, she's in tears, bawling.
And it's clear that she's not just upset about being stopped.
And speaking with her and investigating, I find out that her and her husband had had a domestic
and that he was at his house and she was trying to get away to get to her parents house.
He lived in the county.
They lived in the county and outside my jurisdiction.
So instead of just to make sure everybody was OK,
we tried to call him and try to get his side of the story.
And as soon as I call him, he goes, he tells me to fuck off and hangs up.
I call him back and he won't pick up, etc.
So like the man just wouldn't speak with us at all.
The very next contact I have, he shoots me.
So I don't do I have do I know why?
No, I don't know what brought him there.
I guess is the apple simply doesn't fall far from the tree because fast forward two years after that,
my police department was notified by a confidential source that his father was making threats
and had vowed to kill me, which prompted me to leave Illinois altogether.
Yeah, I think this is I'm glad we got the backstory of that as well,
because, you know, especially in twenty twenty three in the last couple of years,
you know, any officer involved shooting a lot of times certain sides of the media will run with it
and they'll be the slump.
But, you know, hearing, for example, the rescue you made a few years prior
and then the obviously sheer psychosis through mental ill health that led to this person getting to this point,
you know, now it humanizes both sides of the story.
And if you've got, you know, a parent who is full of hate and then their trauma was never addressed
and they raise a child to be the same way, this is the problem that we have.
And in the law enforcement conversation, you never hear anyone say,
why are our streets so dangerous in America?
And this is a perfect example.
You know, oh, why did Jeremy shoot that poor guy?
Well, now you learn who that fucking poor guy actually was.
Now it adds a lot more color to the whole scenario.
You know, and you see you see both sides and his empathy even for that man,
because once he was a little toddler, that all he thought about was kicking a ball and drawing the crayons.
So if we don't have both sides of the conversation,
making sure that the bar is high and law enforcement, but also fixing the violence in our country,
we're never going to get to the bottom of it.
Well, unfortunately, he has last night, the person who shot me,
he has two kids, two boys that I know of.
You know, so how are they going to grow up?
Are they going to grow up with that?
Oh, my dad was killed because of a police officer is how that story is going to go.
It's not going to go.
They're not going to be told no dad chose to shoot a cop and the cop shot back.
Like that's not how that's going to go.
I'm going to be in those child's minds because of the way this family is.
I am the bad guy.
And even after the shooting, I was torn apart and social media and the news.
There is rumors going around that the reason he shot me is because I was sleeping with his wife.
Like people are just disgusting.
And they don't understand that we are people too.
And you know, it was horrible.
It was just such a horrible experience.
The vitriol afterwards, the number of people I've had people on my social media that I've arrested
reach out and straight out say they wish he would have killed me
and it couldn't have happened to a better guy, meaning me.
You know, that's the type of people that we're out there dealing with.
Yeah, that's disgusting.
It really is, you know, and there's times where us in uniform make mistakes.
And when that happens, we need to be held accountable.
But we also need to support our men, women who leave their families and go and protect complete strangers.
You know, and this this this narrative that's been created recently is just it's disgusting because yes,
there are people that should never be wearing uniform.
And yes, there is absolute leadership failure.
And yes, there are low fitness standards and training standards, like for example,
qualifying in a triangle stance with six shots once a year that contribute to this
and mandatory overtime and sleep deprivation and all the things.
But if you just vilify a cop because they made a wrong decision at that moment in time,
and I'm not talking about the George Floyd's, I'm talking about the the gray area ones
and it's immediately to them and nothing about why the person was resisting
on their rap sheet that was a foot long.
Then again, you're not you're not looking to even try and solve the solution.
You're just looking for a demon.
So you have to do fucking nothing yourself to fix it.
I fully agree with that.
And it's you know, do you know who hates bad cops more than anybody else?
Good cops, because it makes it so hard.
So do you know what happens?
Those good cops will turn in those bad cops.
There's a myth that, you know, that these cops are looking out for one another, blah, blah, blah.
I've had I the internal politics of a police department are sometimes like a high school.
There's clicks. It's not fun.
It's by any stretch of the imagination to think that there's some huge criminal conspiracy
where these people who can sometimes barely even stand each other are going to cover
for one another while they're committing constitutional violations.
Come on.
Like it's just not you watch too much.
They watch too much TV.
Cops aren't the bad guys.
Well, it's even this notion that, you know, a cop wakes up ringing their hands,
hoping that they're going to shoot someone today when someone has to shoot another person
that can haunt them the rest of their life, you know, say they weren't even shot,
you know, whatever it was a situation they reached for something they ended up having to.
It was a gun they shot first.
You know, they weren't shot themselves, but that's going to haunt them.
They were forced to take a life and the notion that cops want to kill, you know,
only a complete sociopath would want to.
So I know every every profession has them.
There are sociopathic plumbers and accountants and lawyers and firefighters,
but we do everything we can to try and make sure that that doesn't happen in our profession.
But apart from those cases which need to be addressed with the full force of the law,
the other men and women are just simply trying to do a good job, protect their community
and make it home safely to their family.
100% and it makes me so angry.
All these people are like, well, most cops are good.
If I said that about any other grouping of people, if I said most white people are good
or most Asian people are good or most black people are good,
they're immediately going to call me racist because I'm grouping people
and then putting a group at blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But why is it okay to group police officers and say most of them are good?
Like it's the same thing.
It's the same mentality.
It's just a different it's just showing in a different way.
Absolutely.
So you have this, you know, very, very acute shooting, this acute trauma.
Walk me through, you know, the next few weeks,
both physically as far as the actual injury itself, but also mentally and emotionally.
So physically, I get to the hospital.
I need to act quickly.
I was supposed to get a helicopter ride, but they determined my injuries weren't bad enough
and I still I've never been on a helicopter.
If anybody wants to hook me up with the ride on a helicopter.
But at any rate, I get taken to the emergency room
and that was the only time I actually felt any support for from my local police community.
They were lined up.
There was 50 officers lined up at the emergency room showing support for me when I arrived.
And that was amazing.
I felt safe.
You know, the guy was still out on the run.
You know, I even questioned is he going to come try to find me again, you know?
And at that moment, I was probably the safest I could have been.
I had a 30 man deep detail making sure I was okay.
But that didn't last long.
They left the I mean, they left the hospital within a couple hours.
I was treated and released the same day.
My you know, my injury was it didn't strike any major arteries.
It didn't go through even any major tendons.
It was a straight through and through.
It was a 380.
So it was a smaller round, but it was a hollow point.
I still got some of it in me.
But no surgery was required and they packed the wound.
That was painful, by the way.
Especially the deep reading is that what they call it?
Yeah, where they yeah, where I have to pull away the dying flesh and it was horrible.
Yeah.
So so I'm released from the hospital the same night, like three, four o'clock in the morning.
But while I was at the hospital, the investigators came and took a statement from me.
They took all of my clothing.
They took my cell phone.
They took everything from me.
I left the hospital in a hospital gown naked underneath and nobody brought me anything else.
They took my firearm.
They took everything.
Nobody in my department brought me another firearm.
I mean, there's there's some there's some best practices that suggest after an officer is involved in a shooting.
Yes, you have to take that firearm for a forensics, but you immediately give that officer a new firearm
because it can wreak havoc on the officers.
Well, did I do something wrong?
Am I the wrong?
It can really cause problems.
None of that happened.
I had my own weapons at home, so I felt safe still, but as safe as I could at that time.
But I still had my service weapon taken from me and it did affect me.
Like why? Why?
Why isn't my department supporting me the way they've always been told I would be supported?
So I get home that morning and I couldn't sleep at all.
I mean, I was wide awake.
I at that point I hadn't slept since Saturday.
Like I woke up at Saturday morning at like nine o'clock, worked my entire shift, been in the hospital.
They pumped me.
They did give me like morphine or something, but even I like I stayed awake through the high.
And then that morning I just felt like I was on cloud nine.
I hadn't felt I had so much energy.
It was shot. I was shot.
How much energy I had.
Fast forward another eight hours to Monday night or so that would have been Sunday night.
I crashed. I crashed out like hard, like just done, like dead to the world.
But then nightmares started almost straight away.
Like and the nightmares were horrible and they were never the same.
But they always had kind of the same gist.
I was always dying.
I was in and I would always wake up right before I died in every single one of them.
And it just got to the point where and this is going on weeks now.
It got to the point where I'm not sleeping.
I started believing that maybe some of the dreams were actually memories rather than dreams.
I was only sleeping maybe 30 minutes a night for to the point where I started having
hypogalogical hallucinations.
It got bad.
And so I the only I didn't know how to treat it, but I was still thinking I'm Billy badass at this point.
And I don't need no doctor and blah, blah, blah.
Other cops can handle this.
I should be able to handle this.
So I did what most cops do.
I started drinking.
And what I found is in order to sleep if I drank enough, I could sleep.
I mean you call asleep if you drink enough you pass out and that's what I was doing.
I was drinking a fifth of whiskey a night just so I could sleep.
As I continue to do that, my behavior just became erratic.
Like I wasn't making it wasn't firing with on all synapses.
You know, I was making poor decisions and just in general, I was jumpy.
I was scared of my shadow.
Somebody knocked on the door.
I'm answering the door with a pistol in my hand type thing.
And as the sleep continued to evade, I just started getting deeper and deeper in this
depression where all of this was my fault.
My department's not helping.
Nobody, you know, I had reached I do need to step back.
I forgot to mention this.
So I got that on Saturday.
I'm home on Sunday.
I reach out to my police department.
So I was told I can't talk to anybody including a doctor anybody until after I've been interviewed
by the state police for their their their on duty shooting team, whatever it is.
Usually that should be within, you know, 24 to 48 hours.
They give you a time to go home and sleep.
But then you're supposed to enter you're supposed to go back for this interview right away.
It was Wednesday and I hadn't heard anything and I'd already been dealing with nightmares
for two nights and I asked chief.
So I called my chief.
I'm like, look, I'm having these nightmares.
I need to get a debriefing or something.
This isn't right.
And he's like, you can't talk to anybody.
We'll see what we can do.
They ended up scheduling my appointment for the interview for that Friday.
So I got shot Saturday and I had I couldn't even talk to anybody for an entire week about
anything involved in it.
And then after after that, he scheduled a debrief, like a critical critical stress debrief,
which was another four or five days out, which I didn't want to go to.
I hated that thing.
It was especially because I actually find some fault with some of the other individuals
involved in my shooting.
For example, if that first police officer would have called back up like he should have
on the initial traffic stop, we would have been dealing with them right then and I wouldn't
have got shot because that's the same person who shot me.
So, you know, there's just.
So I wasn't getting the support I needed from my department that I felt I needed it.
And they were telling me I directly couldn't talk to anybody.
I started just drinking.
That's when I started just drinking to shut it off.
And then after I started drinking to shut it off, it never occurred to me to go try
to get help again, because I was already denied once, you know, and that's obviously means
I need to handle it.
I need to be that Billy bad ass.
That's what they're telling me.
So I try.
And as the depression got worse, as the drinking got heavier, I found myself one night just
blaming myself for everything, wanting the pain to end.
Just I didn't want to die.
I just only knew one way to stop this, to stop everything.
And I would continue to drink, charged my Glock, put in my mouth.
Next thing I know, I wake up the next morning.
I passed out.
I don't I don't remember if I took the gun out of my mouth and continue drinking.
My next memory is waking up the next morning with the pistol still on the bed, laying next
to me and bottle of whiskey empty in bed with me as well.
And I realized, holy shit.
I almost made a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
And right away, I went to my personal doctor.
I was still feared using any department resources because I feared that they would try to use
that to make it so I could never come back to work, which ended up happening anyway.
But I went to a my personal doctor and I said and he'd heard about my situation on the news.
And he's like, absolutely.
You need to get into talking to somebody.
He sent me up with a counselor.
They did an intake and they sent me up with a shrink and that started my actual treatment.
So up until this point, well, firstly, I want to go back before I even hit that one again
of the seemingly least discussed elements when it comes to suicide is the feeling of
burdensome.
And I want to preface this with myself.
And I think a lot of people out there, if you'd asked us 10, 15 years ago about suicide,
you'd be like, oh, it's so selfish, it's so cowardly, how could they?
You're leaving your family behind.
And then you talk to lots and lots of people like yourself who have either been there or
have even had people that survived their attempt.
They actually did jump or did pull the trigger.
And over and over and over again, there's, of course, the element of wanting the pain
to end, the suffering to end.
But also, you know, people say, well, how could you leave your family behind?
There seems to be this universal thought.
And I think it's through the miswiring of the brain, and here you are underlining what
I talk about all the time, which is sleep deprivation as well, which causes more and
more psychosis, alcohol, which causes more and more psychosis.
But now the brain is trying to convince the individual that they are a burden to the people
that they love and they would be better off without them.
Did that factor at all in your self-talk?
Yes.
Yes and no.
I mean, that was part of the depression.
I mean, that was a regular thing, but when it the memories I do have of the night that
night where I put the weapon in my mouth, I don't recall even caring.
I still look at, I believe I was selfish in my actions that night.
I mean, I would have robbed my daughter of a father.
I would have robbed my grandson of a granddad.
I'm getting ready to have my second grandson.
There's so much I've experienced that I never would have gotten to, and all of those experiences
involve other people and other people I care about, my daughter, my mother, my sisters,
my brothers.
And I would have been taking all of that away from them as well.
So I do, people, when they talk about suicide being selfish, people talk about suicide being
selfish, two things can be true at once.
It can be selfish.
And I do think the action itself is selfish, but that doesn't mean we can't understand
why somebody is making that decision.
And that decision is bigger than selfish.
That part of it isn't the selfish part.
The action is selfish.
And just by definition, it is.
By definition, it is.
That doesn't mean we can't understand what got us there.
People are selfish all the time.
We're selfish when we pick out a car that we want.
Why is this any different?
Well, also, I think, you know, the people say, oh, no one in their right mind would,
for example, do that.
And like, you're absolutely right.
And I think that's just it.
These people I'm talking to are police officers and firefighters and people that have vowed
to give their life to others.
That's how good of a human being they are.
So when the brain becomes miswired and I say broken, I mean it with compassion.
But it is, you know, it is broken.
The chemicals are off and, you know, synapses aren't firing the way they're supposed to.
In that moment, the person believes that it's selfless.
I believe to the core that I am a burden to my family and they will be better off.
And it terrifies me.
But I'm going to sacrifice myself so they'll be happy.
Makes no sense to a healthy brain.
But at that moment, we have to understand that that makes perfect sense to someone in
crisis.
I think that is a very accurate way to put it.
And that is a lot of what I remember.
Like I can make this all go away.
I am the problem.
I can make it so nobody else has to deal with these problems.
I can fix this by going away.
And I know how to do that.
That's the kind of thing.
So I mean, I guess in that sense, yes, it was similar.
But going back to me having a belief though, like you said, the way you described it, that
seems sane to that individual.
It doesn't seem selfish.
But they're wrong.
You can just be wrong.
And it's no fault of our own, like you'd mentioned.
It's the wiring, the chemicals, the injury to the actual brain that is causing it.
But it doesn't make it any less wrong.
It's still wrong.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, what about the upswing thing?
I know it wasn't a perfect upswing, but what began to start helping?
Obviously, alcohol is not going to work.
Not sleeping certainly isn't going to help.
As you start meeting these professionals, what are some of the things that you start
adding into your life that allow you to start beginning to grow from the trauma that you've
been through?
So I was held up in my house.
I wouldn't go anywhere unless I was drinking.
I didn't want to go in public at all.
And a buddy of mine was retiring from the county corrections.
And a bunch of cops were getting together for his retirement party.
And my girlfriend at the time was like, all you do is sit in the house.
You don't do shit.
You are coming to this party.
You'll know people there.
You're in a safe place.
Stop being a dick.
You're going.
So I went.
Later I met a guy who, again, I won't name him, but he worked for another jurisdiction
Champaign Police Department close to me.
And he was really big into the workout world.
And he'd been involved in a couple of shootings.
He did a couple of tours overseas.
And he had expressed to me that he understood what I was going through.
And that he'd actually talked to my girlfriend prior, I guess, and knew what I was dealing
with.
And he's like, look, come to my gym.
I have this gym.
Come to my gym.
Start working out with me.
I was fat at the time.
I weighed like 220.
I was a big kid at the time.
And I was like, no, I don't want to go.
And he's like, it's not about the gym.
It's about brotherhood.
It's about talking, being around people with similar experiences who might know a little
bit that you don't know.
So just show up.
And I'm like, all right, cool.
I'll come.
So I come to this guy's house and I start.
I agree to start coming Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
And I just I get there, we're shooting the shit.
It felt like I was back in the locker room at a police department with the guys.
But at the same time, everybody there had dealt with something similar, either in wartime
or at a police department that I dealt with.
And so when I'd have a bad night, I could come in there and I could be like, man, I
didn't sleep through shit last night.
And I could explain what I was feeling.
And and these and they were they would talk about it while we're doing manly stuff, lifting
weights, you know.
So we're sitting here talking while we're lifting.
And it really I found it.
I found the more I worked out and the more I was doing this.
The less anxious I was about everything.
And it seemed that the more I wear my body out, the longer I would get restful periods
of sleep without needing alcohol.
So when I started so take this out a couple of months now, now I'm working out every day.
And I'm finding that the anxiety, I'm able to control the anxiety with medications.
I mean, at this point, I'm using medications that the doctors have all prescribed.
You know, I'm on seven different medications, including Xanax, trazodone for sleep, prazes
and for nightmares.
What?
There's another depression one.
I don't even remember all the names.
But between the energy I was burning off of the gym, like you mentioned earlier, like
a good thing from dispatchers and things, be able to just go outside between burning
off that energy and that physical activity and the medications, I was starting to actually
get real sleep, really restful sleep.
And I was able to interrupt the nightmares with the medication, not needing alcohol.
So I started cutting back alcohol big time.
And that helped huge.
It's amazing.
Because first of all, the sleep I was getting when I was drinking wasn't real sleep.
I mean, it's not restful.
It doesn't recharge the body the same way that the mind doesn't work the same way while
you're drinking.
It just doesn't.
So cutting out that alcohol, and I had to cut out the alcohol because Mark did a really
smart I'm sorry, I wasn't gonna say his name.
But he did a really smart thing.
But he set the gym time so early that if you were drinking the night before, you were in
a world of hurt that morning.
So it got to the point where instead of going out drinking the night before, I'd be like,
No, I can't drink because I have to be at the gym.
And if I didn't show up at the gym, my phone was getting blown up by these guys, where
are you at?
You better be here, blah, blah, blah.
So they were holding me accountable.
And over time, I learned that I didn't need the alcohol.
And so I went a couple years without drinking at all.
It took a while to get there.
That didn't happen overnight.
It took a long while to get there.
But I was able to cut the alcohol completely.
And now I'll have a drink now in the then it's not like it's a problem.
But I what I was using the alcohol for at the time was absolutely unhealthy.
It was self medicating.
And if I would have continued that path, that would have caused my death.
So you're you're finding this community this tribe.
If my memory serves me right, you were kind of tripped again when your department circle
around when you almost hit the EMR.
Yeah.
So in the state of Illinois, there's a law and I write about the need to change this
law.
The law states that an officer one injured on duty must return within one year of the
injury or they can be terminated.
So I start these processes with the strengths.
I'm doing everything that the psychologists and psychiatrists are telling me to do.
And my psychiatrist is telling me that PTSD is a long term issue and that a year's timeframe
is not long enough to determine if you're going to be able to make any difference that
you would be able to return to work type thing.
Well unfortunately, that doesn't line up with work time frame.
The doctors refusing to sign paperwork saying I can return to work because he says my mental
health situation is such that it would be unsafe for me and the public potentially.
And he's also saying that he won't sign the paperwork that says he doesn't see that I
can make any significant improvement, which is the standard that they need for medical
retirement.
So I'm caught in this limbo where my doctors won't sign the paperwork either way.
But work is yelling at me to either come back to work or start the retirement process, do
one of them, but I can't do any of that until the doctors do that.
So I'm going back and forth with them on that issue.
While I'm doing that, the workman's comp decides that they are going to send me because I physically
healed from the physical injury.
So physically I was cleared, mentally I was not.
So the workman's comp decides to send me to one of their doctors for an evaluation.
And that doctor, after his psychological evaluation, determines that I did in fact have PTSD, but
it had to have been from my childhood trauma and not from the shooting.
This is enough for the village insurance company to deny my workman's comp claim for the shooting
and the PTSD claim.
So they denied my PTSD claim right there.
Because of the way that law is written, the police department still had to keep me on
the payroll for that year.
They just didn't, the workman's comp insurance just didn't pay my wage.
They had to pay it directly.
I continued to do that.
I continued to talk to my doctor about trying to either get back to work or retire.
He won't sign the paperwork either way.
Finally a week before, finally I get the doctor to sign the paperwork.
This is one week before my year is coming up.
So I start the retirement process right away.
My chief calls me, tells me, hey, I'm expecting this phone call.
I knew it was coming.
But he calls me on my one year anniversary, says, hey, Jeremy, I need you to meet me at
the edge of town.
I'm like, okay.
So I meet him at the edge of town and he asks me for my badge and my credentials and says,
you know, we have to terminate you.
You've been one year, you're not able to return.
And I'm like, what am I supposed to do?
And he's put his arms up and figured out.
That was that.
See, what's so infuriating, I mean, I've heard firefighters in states that even have cancer
presumption where people have said, I have literally heard people in insurance companies
say we will just keep fighting them till they die, you know, denying their claim.
And the same with the workman's comp.
If I became a police officer and didn't really see any acute calls and six months in, I'm
saying PTSD, then maybe there's an argument that what I did before was the biggest part
of my mental health challenge.
But if you spend years and you have these saves from that wreck and some of the horrors
there and you still went back to work and you've worked for all these years and then
you have an acute event where someone tries to murder you and you actually get physically
injured and you have this gunfight with this person and then he's free somewhere for two
weeks and you determine that that wasn't traumatic enough to be the main reason for the PTSD
diagnosis.
That's fucking disgusting.
You know what I mean?
I've had people on here that were, you know, hit by a car wearing uniform, shot wearing
uniform and their department turned their back on them.
And you know, if you are going to show up every morning with that badge on your chest
and do the thing that you're paid to do and you get hurt mentally or physically doing
that thing that you're paid to do and your department betrays you, that is absolutely
behind some of the suicides that we have in this profession and a lot of the struggles
that our men and women have.
I would agree with you.
I absolutely agree.
And you know, it's just a shame that the other thing that I don't understand about that is
we all, at least I thought most of us got in this profession like you and I talked about
early on, kindness, compassion.
Where is our kindness and compassion for an injured brother or sister?
Like where did that go?
Why did I become the enemy?
I don't understand.
The only thing I can figure with that is I represented a fear that they had.
Like I am the worst possible scenario.
My job's taken away.
I'm struggling with this mental health stuff, et cetera, et cetera.
And so they don't want to look me in the eye because they're worried they may end up looking
in a mirror eventually.
Now for people that, as we talked about, that are in the profession, that identify with
that role, that are part of that tribe, that have purpose every day, when they leave, retire,
you know, get hurt, whatever it is, that is very, very jarring.
But when that tribe basically turns that back on them, that can be extremely detrimental.
So now you get this termination notice.
Talk to me about that, that impact of that mentally and emotionally on you.
And then again, how you were able to pull yourself back up at the depth.
So that actually, I mean, that actually led to another round of drinking and another round
of bad problems.
It ended up, I ended up mixing some whiskey and some Xanax and mixing those two things
together isn't a very good combination.
I don't recommend it.
And I ended up finding myself admitted into the hospital on an in-ball, you know, it wasn't
anything that was sustained.
It was just a temporary, you know, get the alcohol out of the system type thing.
But I, it threw me so hard.
I didn't, I wasn't me.
It was almost like I was, I didn't recognize that person.
And while I was doing that, and I was acting these ways, I said some of the, I said some
of the most vile things to other cops.
Like when I was being taken to the hospital, I accused these cops of some really bad, vile
shit that I never, that I don't believe, A, and that it was, at that time, I felt like
they had all abandoned me, so I needed to lash out and make them feel what I was feeling.
So then, and like I said, that landed me in the hospital.
But one of the hardest things I had to do after that was forgive myself because I had
to forgive myself for the feelings, because it's not something I can control.
I had to forgive myself for how I acted.
I was embarrassed, you know?
During this time, I ended up getting a DUI, you know?
And that was, talk about embarrassing.
Here I am a police officer, 13 years, SWAT, you know, alcohol enforcement officer, led
my department in DUIs for multiple years in a row, you know?
Like, and here I am doing the same fucking thing.
You know, I felt useless.
And as I was going through this, that, I had to find an outlet.
So that's, I turned to social media.
And essentially, I created a Facebook page.
And I just started bitching.
I create videos of the mornings when I'd wake up, and I would be hungover or I'd want to
go to the gym, or I'd need motivation to get up to the gym.
And I was just making all these videos about how hard everything was and how I felt about
everything.
And lo and behold, people were listening.
I was shocked.
Like, right away, people wanted to hear this stuff.
They wanted to know what was going on.
And then, lo and behold, I started getting private messages.
And nine times out of 10, it was from the spouse of a cop, either female or male, but
it was never the cop that was dealing with it.
It was always the spouse of a cop.
Can you help me with this?
He is doing this.
She is doing this.
They want to explain the entire situation and how it was similar to my situation and
then ask me how I was able to still get out of bed or still go to the gym or still climb
XYZ mountain or do whatever I was doing.
And so I was like, okay, maybe there's something to this.
Maybe there's been sharing my story.
Maybe I'm going to be able to reach that one person.
And maybe it's not even something I know that I say.
Maybe it's some random thing that I've said in this conversation that somebody is going
to key in on.
And that's going to be the difference between them pulling the trigger or not.
And if that's the case, if I can reach one, if I can stop one person from having to experience
some of these things that I have, or if I can help one person to know that they're not
alone, that's what it's about.
And that's everything.
You know, it's even with this podcast, you know, you look at the metrics, oh, how many
people have hit download, you kind of remind yourself again, a single person, if anything
that you do helps one single, but even if you put your whole life's work into something,
if it changes one life, it was worth everything.
Absolutely everything.
One is enough.
You know, and then it has a synergistic effect as well, because I help one, maybe that person
that I help buys into that mentality, and then they help one, and then they help one,
and then they help one, and then they help one.
And then now you've built this community of like minded individuals who are struggling
and are sharing their struggle together.
So this is the story.
This is the persona I was putting out there.
This is the things I was saying.
And randomly, one day, I get a Facebook message from a guy named Chris Thorpe.
And do you know Chris Thorpe?
We actually, we've never actually crossed paths, even though I know he's part of the
family.
Yeah, he isn't anymore.
He used to be but Chris Jacobson and Chris Thorpe.
So Chris Thorpe at the time, he they were just starting up the Chris Thorpe calls me
and says, Hey, I'd like to I'd like to talk to you about this organization called Operation
Endurance Warrior.
And I'm like, Okay, what do you what do you want?
You know, I'm thinking it's a scam at this point.
I've gotten so many scam calls and emails from my social media.
I'm like, All right, here's another one.
And then he starts talking to me and he's any and he's like, this is what we do.
You know, we're an organization who honors and powers motivates injured law enforcement
officers and veterans to show them that there's no reason to struggle alone.
And you've been showing me your mission is the same as ours.
Why don't you come and help us?
And I'm like, Oh, wow, these guys want me to help.
You know?
Yeah, I would love to.
And then I'm like, and then he goes, Yeah, we'd love you to help by becoming an honoree.
I'm like, Whoa, wait a minute, you bait and switch here, buddy.
You said I was going to be helping you.
Now you want to you want to make me an honoree?
Come on, what's this about?
And then he explained that, and then he went into the asking for help sometimes and allowing
others to help you can in itself show other people that their strength and allowing that
to occur.
And then he also suggested that that the organization may help give me a platform where I can share
my story and maybe touch more and help more.
And so I was like, Okay, I'll give it a shot.
And they brought me on as an honoree.
I went to my first event with Operation During Warrior in October of 2018 in Kedua, Kentucky.
It was a Warriors Challenge.
And Adam Francis was one of the masked athletes that was there.
And that man, if you've never met Adam, he's a big old teddy bear is the best way to put
it.
He's a police officer in upstate New York.
He's a former field medic with the army, and just an all around amazing human being.
And he had actually gotten my information from whoever with the Operation During Warrior
a couple weeks ahead of time.
And this man out of the blue is texting me calling me, you know, just, you'd have thought
we were best friends and I'd never met this guy.
And he's sharing with me, you know, things that he's dealt with in wartime and, you know,
dealing with himself as a police officer.
And I'd lost that brotherhood with the police department.
And here I'm finding this group of guys and they're wanting to they're saying, hey, not
only are we here, but there's a bunch of us and we're all across the country.
Come be part of that.
And so at my first meeting, a masked event, I'm there, I'm doing this Warriors Challenge.
So three and a half miles through like crazy terrain.
It was hot.
It was like 97 degrees with 130% humidity, I think.
And during the course, Adam actually vomited in his mask.
It's a gas mask that they wear and he vomited in his mask.
But they have a rule, the masked athletes, that they will not remove their mask on a
course because it's not about them.
So the man broke the seal, let the vomit drip out of his mask, resealed the mask and finished
the race.
That's the dedication these guys have.
Right there, I was like, the SWAT guy in me kicked in and I'm like, I want to be like
him.
And so I started kicking up my training schedule, I started getting more involved in Operation
Enduring Warrior.
I started making training or workout videos to get others involved.
And I just continued to do what I was doing on social media.
And as I continued this path with OEW, I continued to speak about the issues I was having as
I was having them in real time.
If I was having a bad day, I'd go live and man, I'm having a shitty day.
I didn't sleep last night.
This is the anxiety I've been dealing with.
This is how I've dealt with it.
And then I started sharing different ways to deal with them, some of the different methods
like the 54321 method, the stop method for grounding and things of that nature that I
use on a daily basis to get me through rough times.
And it just kind of snowballed from there to I was able to become an active member of
Operation Enduring Warrior's honoree team.
But then I became the program manager for their Warrior's voice team.
And I continued to work.
It took me about a year and a half, but I finally was able to make their mass athlete
team as well.
Amazing.
Were you the very first honoree in Task Force Sentinel then?
No, I was the second, second or third.
I think the third.
The first two, I believe was a gentleman by the name of he goes by PJ.
He was a tribal police officer.
I had PJ on the show.
I'm getting confused.
Yeah, PJ was number one and Drew Stokes was number two, wasn't he?
No, I think Bones, New York City police officer was at 911 when the buildings came down.
He was a plainclothes officer.
Stephen Bones is his name.
He looks like a pirate.
He is one of the coolest guys in the world.
That man will tell you stories.
The stories that man can tell you.
Great guy.
And then I believe I was the third.
Yeah, definitely.
Drew came in, I think shortly after I did.
I think I was the third Task Force Sentinel.
I believe I am the first police officer honoree to become a mass athlete.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
So when I interviewed Drew in his home, and again, very powerful story and all the poor
guy was trying to do was buy some supplies for some evacuees they brought from Puerto
Rico and some psycho tries to murder him in a public's parking lot just because he's wearing
a uniform.
But I got to see it.
I did this interview with Drew and then he becomes an honoree.
And I think it was, I forget, it was a few months later.
And watching that man at the beginning, I ran, I'm not wearing a mask.
I'm doing along just kind of doing the support.
Obviously, the mask athletes are doing most of the real heavy lifting and we're there
just to kind of bring the masses over.
But at the end, Spartan actually gave us a little area and I did an interview and it
was Drew Lopez and a few others.
And hearing, I mean, so it was we're talking like real time.
He just finished the race.
We sat down and hearing just the hope, the realization that he wasn't as broken as he
thought he was, that he could do more than he realized really underlined.
This is what OEW is about.
It doesn't matter if it's first responder or if it's military.
You get this people, you know, they're broken physically, they're broken mentally.
And again, I say that term broken with compassion.
You know, it's like it's like any injury mentally.
We're very scared.
You fuck up your back deadlifting.
It's really hard to start deadlifting again, even if your back is solid.
So just watching the growth of and I've run with multiple now watching the growth of these
people from beginning to end operation during Warrior is doing incredible things.
Absolutely.
I mean, I credit them with saving my life.
If I would have been stuck in that in that cycle that I was in where I was turning to
alcohol and mixing it with the drugs, it would have been a matter of time before I was back
in that same position.
I would I found myself in, you know, prior, you know, waking up with a pistol next to
me.
It changed the organization itself.
The the individuals in the organization showed me that there is no reason to be alone.
And in addition to that, they empowered me to kind of redefine who I was.
They created a situation where I could get out of the organization, whatever I was willing
to put in.
So I put in the work to become a master athlete and I reap the benefits of that.
What they tell you is there's healing and helping others.
And so each one of these events that I get to go and I get I have the honor of taking
one of these injured police officers or injured veterans or injured firefighters.
And I get to sit there and see that transformation and then through the course of a weekend,
that's rejuvenating.
There's power in.
And so I regularly say there's healing and helping others.
But even further than that, when I lost my position as a police officer, I hadn't really
done anything other than police work in 13 years.
In addition to that, I chose the the side of police work, which is more militaristic
in terms of, you know, SWAT and those SWAT skills don't necessarily translate to the
the public, the private sector.
I'm sorry.
You know, kicking in and clearing a building in less than a minute doesn't really matter
when you have to make copies.
So they didn't care how accurate I was when I was shooting to press start on the copy
machine.
But so I didn't have the skill set.
You know, I did have it.
I had a couple of degrees.
I had a bachelor's in business and a master's in legal studies.
But I didn't know or couldn't articulate the skill set I had in order to even try to get
employment outside of law enforcement.
I didn't have any other passion.
That's what I wanted to do.
It was taken from me.
I felt as though I was lost.
And so the more I worked with Operation Enduring Warrior, the more fundraising I did, the more
event planning I did, the more CRM work I did, you know, customer service or customer
service stuff I did, you know, the more leadership positions I was I was putting.
And with the experience over the course of it, so I began with OEW in 2018.
Here we are in 2023.
Over the course of that five years, I gained the experience to get a position where I work
now with the Child Abuse and Neglect Council here locally as a development coordinator
raising money for child abuse victims.
So I mean, I was able to take what OEW, the tools OEW gave me and translate them into
my personal life to find a way to continue to give back to my community.
I might not be on the front line anymore as a police, like I was as a police officer,
but I'm doing everything I can with OEW to make sure those guys are okay.
And I'm helping my family there.
I'm still doing that as I'm on this podcast doing right now.
But I'm also getting to go to work every day now and raise money to stop people victimizing
our local children.
Like how amazing is that?
Like, so it's not just about these races that OEW teaches us skills and helps empower you
to reach any goal that you want to achieve.
It underlines what I've heard over and over and over again.
You know, I mean, firstly, it's finding that tribe and OEW is a beautiful tribe and you
and I are going to see each other again a week, sorry, a month from now when we're in
Tampa for the gala.
So anyone listening, February 17th, OEW gala, if you want to help support, there's an opportunity.
But also its purpose, as you said, you know, and this is the problem, I think, you know,
when we, when you're a firefighter and you transition out, like, oh, I'll go teach at
the academy.
When you're a cop, you transition out.
Oh, I guess I'll go do security, you know, but no, we have developed an amazing array
of skills, you know, soft skills, as they say.
And so where I think a lot of people stumble as they transition out, you know, whether
it's retirement, whether it's after injury, whether they just have had enough, you know,
halfway through a career, but you still need to have that service woven in somewhere.
Service that took you into uniform.
Now you become a realtor or, you know, whatever it is.
If it's a company that's money focused, you know, you're probably not going to feel fulfilled,
but you have an organization like OEW, we are literally in a tribe, you have that community
again, you have that purpose, all of a sudden it's taking the skills that you had and applying
them in a different way, in a different uniform, but making a positive impact on the world.
And I think that's key for a transition story.
I think you're correct.
And you said you nailed it on the head purpose.
When you find that purpose, when you find your why, the farthest distance you're ever
going to have to travel is the six inches between your ears.
That's the farthest distance you'll ever have to travel.
And if you understand your purpose and your why, that's nothing.
You can do it every time.
It's when we lose our purpose or why that we find ourselves in a bottle.
We find that anxiety is taking over, that the darkness of the depression is taking over.
And we don't have that reason to keep pushing forward, your purpose, your why.
100%.
Well, I want to get to where people can find OEW.
Before we do, you ended up writing a book, My Brother's Keeper.
So what made you write the book?
And then tell me about that process, if there was any catharsis or anything in that process
too.
So, I told you very early on, I mean, I didn't start seeing a psychologist, you know, a couple
months after my shooting, I think it was maybe two months after my shooting.
And he started telling me, one of the big things that he preached was exposure therapy.
It's a type of cognitive behavioral therapy that is very common to help people deal with
to reframe the stressors that would potentially trigger them with PTSD.
One of the methods that they can do it is obviously physically take somebody to a place
or, you know, physically do something exposing you to whatever that trigger was.
In my case, with it being a shooting and such, it's a little bit difficult to put myself
in another shooting situation to expose myself to that.
And I was exhibiting a lot of avoidance.
What's the word I'm looking for?
Avoidance behaviors.
I was avoiding talking about it.
I was avoiding anything to do with my shooting.
And so, he's told me to start writing a journal.
And that journal was twofold.
It allowed me to vent, it allowed to get that stuff off my chest so I could potentially
understand it.
And it was a form of exposure therapy.
In addition to the journal, he had me writing daily what happened.
He wanted me to write down what happened.
Not just, I feel shitty today.
No, Jeremy, write down from the moment you went to work that morning through now, I want
you to write that out.
So it brings me back.
And the intent there is to bring you back to that moment when you're in a safe environment.
And over time, it's supposed to lessen the affect on the individual.
And their emotional response will kind of diminish.
I mean, we see it when we learn how to do anything.
When you learn how to ride a bike, you're scared first.
And then you learn how to ride a bike and you never think about it again.
Same kind of concept.
Is it working?
I don't, I mean, I'm better than I was.
I don't think it'll ever go away.
And you know, there's still times, there's still times I'll go to sleep and the moment
I shut my eyes, I see the muzzle flash and I can smell the gunpowder.
Will that ever go away?
I'm told it might not.
But that's the nature of the beast, I guess.
So tell people what's actually in the covers of the books.
You have obviously, you know, you storytell the event itself, but there's some other great
information in there too.
Yeah.
So I spent a lot of time thinking about how I wrote it.
So the first half of the book or three quarters of the book, first of all, it's very short.
The reason it's so short is because I know you pot people don't like to read.
So that was actually an incentive.
You're tired.
That's the problem.
Right.
Exactly.
So it was actually written so short on purpose because I wanted somebody to pick it up and
actually take something from it.
If I can reach one, I thought there'd be more likelihood with it being short that that might
occur.
But the first couple chapters are due detail, the story.
And then I go into how some personal reflections about what I did wrong, what I could have
done differently.
And that I think was a huge turning point for me.
While I was writing the book and I was looking at my personal reflections, I took an extreme
ownership and our extreme responsibility perspective when I was writing that.
And when I did that, I kind of reframed my thinking that even if I'm triggered, even
if I have this emotional issue, I am still responsible for my behavior and my actions.
And that allowed me like a little break, I guess is the word.
So when I start to feel like one of these emotional things or whatnot, it allows me
this break where I can say, okay, how is this going to affect me?
So I slow everything down and that's the direction I go.
So I talk about the personal reflections.
I talk about finding OEW.
I talk about and then I go on to make some recommendations.
I make a couple different recommendations about how to help change this for police officers.
The major change I recommend would be, you know, like you mentioned the cancer, you know,
they'll just wait people out for cancer.
There's some professions in which there is an assumed responsibility.
If you're in this profession and you have this ailment, it's assumed that that ailment
is from your job just because it's so prevalent.
I think I suggest that every police officer who has been hired has given a psychological
evaluation.
That's just standard now.
If they've been given a psychological evaluation at the beginning and this will require policy,
policy change, it should be and they pass and are hired a subsequent failure of a psychological
evaluation should simply indicate that the job caused it.
Like the burden of proof should be moved to the village or the city or the municipality
to prove it wasn't work related instead of us having to prove it was.
That's the major, one of the major changes.
And I also make reference to making sure that there's policies in place for your officers
to seek mental health, making sure that you have the best practices in line before an
incident happens.
My department didn't even have a retirement plan set up for an officer.
They'd never had an officer retired.
So that prolonged my situation and made it worse.
So I make a bunch of different policy changes and then I kind of put it on anybody who's
reading it.
I'm hoping that there's active officers in the command staff who are reading this right
now, people in the position of power.
We don't have to wait for the lawmakers to make a change.
Most of these things can be done at a policy level within the command staff.
A command officer can make the decision to bring in mental health advocates to a police
department and put other policies in place to make it easier on the officers.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I think the barrier to entry is the big problem that we have now.
We're still stuck in the whole stigma conversation and that's not the issue anymore.
There, of course, are pockets of the country where they maybe still believe that.
But it's now the EAP Russian roulette horror stories that we hear, the counselors that
aren't culturally competent.
How do we remove the barrier between the person who might be in complete crisis, might be
just struggling, might be okay, but just simply want to stay okay to access the right mental
health tools that they need without financially ruining them or having to schedule six months
ahead or all these things that you hear.
This is what we need to be talking about now.
We get it.
Mental health is also applicable in the first responder professions.
How do we actually make it work?
Absolutely.
Where can people find the book?
The books available anywhere books are sold.
Most of the time it has to be ordered.
That's just the way everything is nowadays.
It's available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.
It's available on my Facebook officer, Officer Jeremy Sharla, retired.
It's also available on my website relearningtolive.com.
Brilliant.
And what about OEW?
If people want to contribute, if maybe they want to join as a masked athlete or even be
an honoree, where are the best places to find them?
Facebook page.
They have a Facebook page with a probably a hundred thousand plus following.
Their logo is a mask.
So it's pretty gas mask.
It's an Avon gas mask.
For those who know the difference between them, but go ahead and check them out on Facebook.
They have Instagram as well.
And they do have a website.
I'm trying to remember if it's operation enduringwarrior.org or enduringwarrior.org.
But I can't recall off the top of my head.
Brilliant, I'll put the link on the show notes for this episode.
Well, Jeremy, I want to say thank you so much.
I mean, we've been chatting now for basically two hours.
As I said before, it's been a long time coming, but you've got a very powerful story, but
it's not just, this is what happened to me and I'm kind of coping ish.
It is infused with what people need to hear, which is hope.
Are we going to be the same person prior to a traumatic event than we are after?
No, of course.
There's going to be a change, but it's a new version of you and the fact that you found
this new tribe and this new purpose.
And I've saved, I'm sure, way more than one, but at least one.
It's empowering.
And like I said, it really infuses hope.
So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time today and coming on
the Behind the Shield podcast.
Thank you, James.