This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade and that is 511.
I wore their uniforms back in Anaheim, California and have used their products ever since.
From their incredibly strong yet light footwear to their cut uniforms for both male and female
responders, I found them hands down the best workwear in all the departments that I've worked for.
Outside of the fire service, I use their luggage for everything and I travel a lot and they are
also now sponsoring the 7X team as we embark around the world on the Human Performance Project.
We have Murph coming up in May and again I bought their plate carrier. I ended up buying real
ballistic plates rather than the fake weight plates and that has been my ride or die through
Murph the last few years as well. But one area I want to talk about that I haven't in previous
sponsorship spots is their brick and mortar element. They were predominantly an online
company up till more recently but now they are approaching 100 stores all over the US.
My local store is here in Gainesville Florida and I've been multiple times and the discounts you see
online are applied also in the stores. So as I mentioned 511 is offering you 15% off every
purchase that you make but I do want to say more often than not they have an even deeper discount
especially around holiday times. But if you use the code SHIELD15 you will get 15% off your order
or in the stores every time you make a purchase. And if you want to hear more about 511, who they
stand for and who works with them, listen to episode 580 of Behind the Shield podcast with
511 regional director Will Ayers. I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the
Behind the Shield podcast that is Transcend. Now for many of you listening you are probably
working the same brutal shifts that I did for 14 years. Suffering from sleep deprivation,
body composition challenges, mental health challenges, libido, hair loss etc. Now when
it comes to the world of hormone replacement and peptide therapy what I have seen is a shift from
doctors telling us that we were within normal limits which was definitely incorrect all the
way to the other way now where men's clinics are popping up left right and center. So I myself wanted
to find a reputable company that would do an analysis of my physiology and then offer
supplementations without ramming for example hormone replacement therapy down my throat.
Now I came across Transcend because they have an altruistic arm and they were a big reason why the
7x project I was a part of was able to proceed because of their generous donations. They also
have the Transcend foundations where they are actually putting military and first responders
through some of their therapies at no cost to the individual. So my own personal journey so far
filled in the online form, went to Quest, got blood drawn and a few days later I'm talking to
one of their wellness professionals as they guide me through my results and the supplementation that
they suggest. In my case specifically because I transitioned out the fire service five years ago
and be very diligent with my health my testosterone was actually in a good place. So I went down the
peptide route and some other supplements to try and maximize my physiology knowing full well the
damage that 14 years of shift work has done. Now I also want to underline because I think this is
very important that each of the therapies they offer they will talk about the pros and cons.
So for example a lot of first responders and shift work our testosterone will be low but sometimes
nutrition, exercise and sleep can offset that on its own. So this company is not going to try and
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tools in the toolbox. So to learn more go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808
of the Behind the Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling. 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 retired Anaheim firefighter Rick Cheatham. Now as you will hear this is such an important and
powerful conversation. Rick is courageously vulnerable and transparent when it comes to
some of his mental health journeys early in the fire service career. The murder of his son and
the ripple effect of that on him and his family. The freak accident after his retirement that
paralyzed him. His spiritual journey, overcoming grief, the mental health tools that work for him
and so much more. Now before we get to this incredible 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 over 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 Rick Cheatham. Enjoy.
Well Rick I want to say firstly this is amazing. I worked in Anaheim I think it was 15 plus years
ago now and occasionally I've got sent to station three or I take some overtime there and that's
usually where our paths cross but now we're doing this bizarre thing called podcasting sitting face
to face on a computer so I want to welcome you to the Behind the Shield podcast today. Thank you,
thank you for having me I appreciate it. So where on planet earth are we finding you this afternoon?
Well this afternoon I happen to be sitting in my house in Nashville Tennessee where I retired
about three and a half years ago. Beautiful well before we even jump into the whole lifeline thing
so many of certainly it seemed like Anaheim specifically went to Montana, Tennessee.
So what is it that you found about where you live now that you love and why do you love it
in comparison to California? First of all my family was out here my sister and my mom moved out here
I don't know 20 years ago something like that 18 20 years ago so my family had been coming out
here for several years just visiting and we fell in love with it. The people were great that the
scenery around here I mean it's just absolutely beautiful I mean there's trees everywhere.
The only problem with this place is it gets a little cold. My winters here are not not what I
anticipated after having my injury just seems to set it off a little bit more being cold but other
than that my family brought me here the scenery brought me here and in a lot of ways freedom
brought me here. Leaving California at a time when I did it seemed like our freedoms were being stepped
on and manipulated in such a way that as much as I hated a little bit of the
but as much as I hated to leave I just needed to get out of California.
Absolutely it's funny people you know back home talk about you know America through let's say
you know the the British lens and their media and we are such an incredible tapestry of beautiful
humans but you know sometimes a few people get into I'm using this term very loosely leadership
positions and their shitty decisions can negatively impact or divide these communities of wonderful
humans that up until that point were actually you know thriving next to each other.
Absolutely absolutely you know spending my entire life in in California I got to see a lot of the
good along with the bad but overall it was primarily good I had a great upbringing great
life coming up in Southern California and you know some things change there towards the end and
I guess that's just the nature of the beast things always do change
but I felt it was just best for me to to leave at the time and come out here where my family was and
just get a new start. Absolutely well let's start the very beginning of your timeline then so tell
me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic what your parents did
and how many siblings. Okay I was born in San Jose California so I was born out in Northern California
and that's where my my dad was from and my mom was was from Washington and and happened to move
down to Northern California and that's where she met my dad in high school.
My mom and dad were very young when they got married my mom was 16 my dad was 17
they had me at 17 and 18 so it was it was a pretty quick little rendezvous for them I just found out
here within the last two or three years that my mom and dad were married after six months of dating
each other and I thought that was rather interesting because my wife and I got married
after six months of dating ourselves but my dad was my dad was a preacher so I grew up in a very
very religious household upbringing my mom like I said had moved down from Washington met my dad in
high school and my mom's dad my grandfather ended up not keeping a job or for whatever reason
had to move back and so my mom and dad decided it would be better for my mom to stay so they stayed
they ran off to Reno got married and the rest is history as you say one interesting side note to
all that is I do have I was raised with a brother and a sister I have a brother that is
I have a brother that is nine and a half months younger than I am so we grew up pretty close and
then I have a sister that was several years behind us both and she was like seven years behind me
but in 2020 I got a phone call from my dad and he said you might want to sit down and I thought oh
dear I said are you dying and he said no but you might want to sit down for this I've got something
to share with you so he shared with me that I had another sister that I didn't know about so at
you know 2020 on my anniversary no doubt I got a phone call from my dad explaining this and
it turns out I have a sister that is eight months older than I am so it's kind of an interesting
dynamic three kids my dad had three kids and we were all within a year and a half of each other
but that's a side note to how many kids are in my family my brother is the one I grew up with my
my my my sister was several years younger than I was we grew up in a really religious environment
you know church three times a week of course when your dad's the preacher there's a lot of
expectations on you as the preacher's kid those expectations were not always met with the most
positive outcomes I challenged and tested a lot of my I wouldn't say I was testing my upbringing or
my religious background because I bought into it 100% I was I was sold out and but I also had a
wide wild side so I ended up leaving from high school and went off to the military and came back
and sowed my wild oats for a little bit and after that ended up meeting my wife
at our church where I was attending in Brea California and interesting story with her is that
I actually prayed for her very very specific prayer in fact from her her height her weight her
her skin complexion her hair tone everything about her and I think I the reason I prayed so vividly
and specifically was because I knew that I was kind of slow and probably wouldn't recognize the
woman of my dreams had I not had a visual imprint on my mind of what that would look like and two
weeks after that prayer my wife walked into my life and lo and behold she walked into my life on
a blind date for me so so it was a very very dynamic time just young in my in my life and
having this opportunity to have a wife after a prayer that was very specific it kind of just
opened the door for me to realize that there's something bigger than myself out there didn't
always know exactly what that meant didn't know exactly how that looked I looked at everything
through the lens of my religious upbringing and my religious beliefs and in my particular
denomination those kind of things praying for a woman and then have her show up in your doorstep
two weeks later wasn't always a realistic understanding for most people in my denomination
but it kind of changed who I was and and and where my thought was headed when it comes to
God and you know a higher being and he became real he became real to me at that point and so
it was no longer where I was tied up in my dad or my mom's religion I was more connected to my
own faith and ask things what have it I started questioning a lot of things and ended up questioning
and ended up questioning my questioning myself out of my denomination so I ended up leaving
that religious organization still love the people dearly I'm so thankful for the upbringing that I
did have because they taught me so much about just how to how to understand the Bible in a way to
always ask questions sometimes I think they might have thought I asked too many questions but I was
raised on the on the idea that the more questions you ask the better able you are to understand
and so I took that philosophy with me all the way through and finally ended up
leaving that denomination jumped into another one for a while and and just didn't really find
a my niche or my my my need there and it was during the time that my son ended up passing
away that my wife and I just finally pulled away from religion altogether and just started focusing
on our relationship with God so in a nutshell I went from California to Nevada back to California
getting in the fire service started working towards that in the late 80s was affirmative action was
real heavy back then and didn't know that I would be able to get on at that point but I had just
finished a a seminar type curriculum with my wife and it was basically
taking real estate agents and teaching them my wife was trying to become a realist realtor
and teaching them how to weed out all of the looky-loos that you might come across as you're
selling homes so it's just a way to streamline the process of finding out who was committed
and who was not committed the name of the course was life and career management training and what
they taught in that course was the power of commitment and once I went through that course
it became very clear to me that being a victim of at that time affirmative action where people
were telling me there's no way you can be a fireman you're you're number one you're you're too old
you're too white and you're too male and you're probably not going to ever
break into the fire service like the old days when they were allowing people to come in and
maybe it wasn't fair at the time I don't know but I know that for me after taking that course
it became very clear that it didn't matter what was going on or anything around me as far as that
was trying to keep me back the power of commitment taught me that there was no doubt that if you put
your mind to it and you focus and you're determined and you're disciplined you can achieve anything you
want so six years later I got a phone call from anaheim fire department and they offered me a job
they were my 28th or 29th department that I had tested with took me six years I had 28 or 29
thanks but no thank letters and finally I got the one from anaheim offering me a job and it was the
dream career of my life I mean I do have to thank there was one man in particular that was very
instrumental in helping me get that job and his name was Tommy Denson and Tommy Denson I don't
know if you were there when at the time or if you'd already left or if you knew of Tommy but Tommy was
a member of the church where I attended and so we became very very close and he put in a good word
for me and that good word was put into a man by the name of Jerry Austin and Jerry ended up hiring me
I think that name sounds familiar I want to say maybe Terry talked about him before I'm not sure
but um when you were talking about the affirmative actions it's it's an interesting conversation
because back in the day obviously you know that was that was a pendulum swinging all the way
to the other side and it happens so so many times and so many topics from you know certain
departments definitely arguably almost deliberately making sure that they weren't hiring you know the
minority groups whatever they look like through to the dragnetting of you know the knee-jerk
reaction to okay just go get me a hundred of this kind of person a hundred of that kind of person
so we can fill the quotas and when you fast forward to today the the beautiful answer to that is
mentorship programs and we got an amazing one that one of my friends started here in Ocala Chris Hickman
but you go to those underserved populations that maybe there are legitimate barriers to entry these
some some of these young boys and girls can't put themselves through a fire academy um and you give
them this free training and then there are scholarships of fire academies and then
departments way into hire that is how you positively impact diversity so you go into these
communities and you find the kids that would be great firefighters not just find a whole bunch of
kids because they look a certain way and i think that was the real disconnect from that initial
knee-jerk um that i hope you know we're really starting to crack that nut now is whatever that
group is that was underserved before find the incredible candidates amongst them and then use
that tool as well to say to other kids okay you tried it but you know you don't want to be
a firefighter now and you learned that that's phenomenal too you know absolutely served a
purpose but that's when you bring great candidates in and then you basically eradicate that animosity
that it was you know let's be honest that's what really rubbed people the wrong way during that time
was you had people that looked the part for whatever they were trying to fill but couldn't do the job
that's that's the thing so by by finding the best candidates and really reaching into these
underserved communities that to me is the 2024 answer to the diversity issue
i agree we had uh very very strong candidates coming up when i was just coming on and um
by far i think anaheim did just that they they they did everything they could to hire the best
that they could now of course there was always those that slipped through the cracks and you
usually found those out either through the tower or when they got on the floor and they started
their probationary period but for the most part when i came on uh it was all a bunch of very
talented individuals that uh you know i i just knew that for me to get on i i was going to have to
uh not buy into the the the predominant
the predominant thought at the time was uh sorry man but white men can't get a job with civil
service anymore and southern california was just littered with that at the time and i know for me
i never did i never bought into it and thankfully i didn't buy into it because of that course that
i had taken and some of the management training that they had instilled in me in that two and a
half years that my wife and i were heavily involved with them so i was able to sneak through the crack
if you want if you will uh just through a determination that um this is what i want to do
i'd come out of construction and had been a general contractor for for many years and i knew
that i had a value that i could add to the department any department no matter what it
where it was or or or when i knew that my background in construction was a huge value
to any organization i just had to get my foot in the door and prove it and thankfully anaheim
let me get my foot in the door and uh i i hope that everybody was happy with my construction
background and what i was able to accomplish as a truck captain and teaching in the academy and
teaching building construction throughout might have even taught building construction to you i
don't remember i'm sure you did i'm sure you did that was funny when i came out of the academy i
went to fire school in orlando and then my son's mother my ex wanted to move down to miami and it
was the same thing oh you'll never get hired down there unless you speak spanish you're a paramedic
and i remember thinking well i just need one job you can give away all the other ones to other
people i just need just one you know and then fast forward four months i was working for hire
leah so there we go yeah i guess you know that you hear the you hear the chatter a lot
uh all these competing voices they're everywhere and you can listen to them and then just evaluate
it and determine if that's going to work for you i think unfortunately for many people they listen
to that chatter and they listen to the thoughts that they have in their own mind over what they
can or can't do and you buy into it pretty soon you believe in it and once you believe a lie
uh you're pretty much guaranteed to facilitate that reality and a lot of people came away being
victims of the fire service you know it's too hard i you know i always tease my my my copper buddies
and you know say that was an easier test to take back then when i came on anybody could be a cop
but they weren't hiring very many firemen and the ones that they did uh they were not
hiring many people and they were not hiring many people and the ones that they did uh
there was there were certain criteria that they were looking for so there was a time when i might
even have thought about just saying forget it i can't do it i'll just become a cop but uh i knew
being a cop was not going to be an answer for me i was not cop mentality i don't think i have the
really is you know we both need each other thank god yeah nothing like uh the the the teamwork that
we had out there but i could not do their job especially towards the end of my career i was
seeing the stuff that they were having to go through i mean we were going through our own but
um man just to think what these guys were dealing with every single day and then we would show up
on scene and our patients would turn around they'd have a completely different attitude towards us
and a few more bruises i remember that we were the good guys but we used to be able to get a
lot of information out of them because we were the good guys and of course you know that information
if it was relevant got turned right on over to pd so they can do their jobs what about from the
fitness side what were you playing during school age and then as you said six years of testing
you know that's one of the things that we can own when it comes to improving our chances of getting
hired so so what were you also doing physically after you left school to prepare for the fire
service um i played baseball my sport was baseball i did play a little football uh junior and senior
year of high school but predominantly my sport was baseball so i played a lot of ball uh once i
finished with college um and then went to the military i ended up hurting my arm in college and uh
redshirted and instead of coming back and playing again i decided to go to germany
in the military and start having some fun but then when i got out and i just started playing
softball after that so i was very competitive in men's softball leagues in effect that was one of
my interview questions when i got hired with anaheim was they asked me if i played any sports and i
said yeah i played baseball and the chief at the time was a was a guy that played a lot of baseball
and i remember him asking me are you any good his name was jeff bowman and i said yeah i'm pretty
good and he said all right we'll have to see about that and they ended up hiring me and i was i was
a rookie playing on their softball team so i guess i was able to prove myself enough to get on the
team as a rookie so that was a lot of fun a lot of fun so i just carried on with that throughout
my career as long as i could played softball and outside of that there was not a lot of sports
activity motorcycle riding maybe i did a lot of motorcycle riding we did water sports sea do's
boating that kind of thing took a lot of trips with the the fire fire family river trips and whatnot
yeah now chief bowman i think he was the chief just before chief smith wouldn't because smith was my
chief so he must have been chief for quite a while then uh yeah jeff was a chief for many years many
years i think he was one of the youngest chiefs in southern california if i'm not mistaken i don't
know this for sure but i think he was around 32 or something like that when he became the chief
and uh he was there for quite a while yeah when you look back at your childhood now through these
mature eyes that you have were there any elements that you identify as as challenging traumatic
however you want to label them and the reason i ask is i was blown away i mean i've done over
900 interviews now how many of us in uniform had elements of that when we were younger and a lot
of those are the reasons why you know it drove a lot of us to serve for for a multitude of reasons
but they can also then manifest later in our career in a negative way if left unaddressed so
when you look back now were there any any elements that you reflect upon
uh
i don't know if this is where you're going with this question i know that very early in my life
i had a dream that i wanted to be a fireman at the age of seven i ended up burning down my next door
neighbor's garage and la county responded and it was quite a show i mean the whole mushroom cloud
blew the top of that doggone roof right off that garage and i remember being so scared thinking to
myself i'm you know something's major gonna happen to me and i remember this captain came up to me
and got down on his knee and licked me in the eye and was just thankful that i wasn't hurt and then
very uh i don't know very fatherly just gave me some advice and uh talked to me about the dangers
of what i had done and uh by the time i don't know four or five years past that rolled around
uh i think it was early 70s that uh emergency came out and that's what hooked me that's what
hooked me squad 51 did it to me man and that's where i thought that man i gotta do this but
at the time
i was still too young to figure out what exactly or how exactly i would do it i was still too young
to figure out what exactly or how exactly i would do it i didn't have anybody in my in my circle of
influence at the time that had ever been a firefighter so i didn't know much about it
so i just went about doing my own thing came back from the military and got into construction
and at about 1987 or eight i started seeing the writing on the wall that
now that i'm married i probably ought to look at a more stable career than swinging a hammer for a living
and by 1989 i was heavy into it so i had started really pursuing that dream if you will and uh
i think a lot of it just had to do with you know the upbringing i had uh my dad was always
a person that was serving people as a as a preacher my mom as well as the preacher's wife
so they were always helping people overcome whatever they were trying to overcome so it
kind of just inherently was in me to want to do something where i could help people
and do something that was respectable um and that's probably what caused me to go in that direction
what were the fitness standards or expectations when you entered anaheim and what has been your
observation of the evolution or devolution of fitness in the fire service well i'm probably
the wrong guy to ask about that there's a running joke in anaheim i didn't do a lot of
physical fitness i didn't do a lot of working out at the stations i did a little bit here and there
but most of my activity is what kept me sane kept me healthy and fit but there was a running joke
at our firehouse where i would go and hit the gym every day and it was literally me going into the
weight room and hitting the gym just hitting the weights and knocking on them and letting everybody
go okay i hit the weights i'm done i'm out of here and go do my thing but i was just a little bit
and feed back on, but when i first came on, I was the way i knew i had to do it.
so when i first came on, i worked construction all my days off even as a rookie
so my activity level was always super high so for me to go and and do all the
the weights and the things like that,
I was more focused on maybe doing more cardio
than I was muscle building,
because I felt like construction was giving me
the workout I needed.
And once I got in, I could start to see the evolution
where it was becoming much more
of a requirement to stay physically fit
just to keep your mind healthy.
And I did that.
I tried to stay as fit as I possibly could
throughout my entire career,
but didn't ever get into the day-to-day grind
of just making sure I was hitting the gym every day,
doing whatever I did.
I just kind of just went along with my own program
of working, enjoying my time off
to the best of my ability
and let the chips fall where they may.
Seemed like I always stayed pretty healthy.
What about the attrition rate for your probationary class?
By the time I got there in, when did I get hired?
Oh, five.
There was basically a history of about 25% attrition rate
where by the time you got to the end of the probation,
and that's the thing about Anaheim's probation
is it was a solid probation.
One of my classmates got let go
literally the day before we hit a year.
So, you held that bar high
and that was it.
We were either gonna make it or we weren't.
And it was gracious.
It was like, look, there's other departments around.
You'd be a great fit.
You're just not the right fit for us.
So, I was terrified for 365 days
and then just slightly less terrified
for the next several years.
But what was that like when you got hired
and then through your eyes,
how were they able to maintain
or create that very high standard
when maybe some of the departments around them
weren't holding it quite as high?
Well, our training cadre held a very high standard.
And it's like you said,
through the tower itself, that was stressful enough.
I mean, that was just every single day.
It was intense.
But once we got on the floor
and got into our probationary rhythms,
I think a lot of guys would have had
that's where they have most of their issues
because there's such a fear when you're in that environment
and everybody's just looking at you
and examining you and evaluating you.
And it can be daunting.
For me, I don't know that
what the attrition rate was per se.
I do know that we ended up losing one guy
out of our academy.
And our academy only had one guy
and our academy only had six people, I think,
something like six or seven.
So we were very small groups back then.
And then by the time you guys came around,
I mean, we were having classes that were 20 plus,
15, 20, easy.
But my class was very small.
We lost one man.
That was it.
Class before that lost a few.
But we didn't start losing people
on a higher level from what I could recall
until we started having these big classes come through.
And we were trying to catch up on the hiring.
We had such a rate of people retiring
and leaving a lot of those positions void
that we had to start hiring a much,
a greater amount of individuals
to be able to keep up with it.
And even then we couldn't keep up with it.
So I don't know exactly what that rate was,
but I know that it was,
or at least Anaheim was known
for having a very tough tower and probationary period.
And there were a couple of guys,
one in particular I know of,
that he was very well known for being the Axeman.
If he felt like you couldn't make it
and the thing they always said was that
you're gonna be put in the back seat
and you gotta make sure that that person in the back seat
knows what they're doing enough
because your whole crew could rely on them one day.
So it was taken very seriously.
I think it's a really important perspective
because you mentioned about trying to hire.
And I remember, I think there was two groups.
I think there was 15 in each.
So it was my group and then Jimmy Timbos
was the one, Portillo, all those guys,
was the one, I think they were six months
or a year behind us.
But despite needing to fill those vacancies,
you still got rid of 25%.
And what I've told a lot of people recently,
what I observed with Anaheim
is the bar was set high and kept high.
So people would line,
I tested against a thousand plus people for 30 positions.
So fast forward to today where people are struggling,
there's this, in my opinion,
I'd love to get your take on it,
completely backwards thinking that,
oh, if we just lower standards, we can get more people.
I disagree because I feel like
when you have departments that hold that bar up
and are known for good training and aggressive firefighting
and taking care of their people,
that is how you have people lining up out the front door,
not lowering the standards.
I agree.
One of the things that we were always challenged with
is there was a pervasive thought
once people got in some leadership positions
where they felt that
you had a 30 year career to learn this stuff.
So maybe you can go a little bit easier on folks
because they had such a,
they had a 30 year career to learn it.
And I could understand the reasoning behind that.
Without a doubt, I learned way more about fire service
and the firefighting industry, if you will,
after getting into the department.
And so you do learn a substantial amount of information
over the course of your year or the course of your career.
However, there's gotta be a standard
that you gotta meet before getting on the floor.
And that standard is there to develop trust.
The trust in our department to train,
the trust in the individual crew on whatever rig you're on.
And when you lower the standards,
then you give trust a fisher in the foundation.
And now you're wondering, okay, how did they get here?
Was this a quota or was this the cream of the crop?
And when you have a department like we came from in Anaheim,
we were always hiring the best of the best,
the cream of the crop.
And that was the way it was, at least for my career.
But I did start to see some of those standards get lowered.
And a lot of those folks that ended up
not making it through our process,
you could see turn around and sue the city
or go after individuals on the training cadre
or whatever that may be, which was sad for me
because without the trust of those individuals coming on to
our crew and knowing that they knew what was going on,
they had an understanding of the seriousness
of what we were entering into.
It's very difficult for me to look back and go,
yeah, I wish we would have kept that person around
because they could not keep up or do what was necessary
to maintain that factor of trust within our department.
So I know that on an individual level down
at maybe a crew level, perhaps,
it was gonna even be more difficult.
And so you had people come through
that you would see people looking at like,
okay, we gotta keep an eye on this one.
So let's do everything we can to bring them up
to the standard we need them.
And we'll use their entire probationary period
to get them there.
But at the end of that probationary period,
if they're not there, we're gonna have to let them go.
And I got very comfortable with that mentality.
I shit myself when I first got there.
Reason being, the way we were shown how to throw ladders
in the Florida Academy was you suitcase carry the ladder
to the wall of a completely open drill tower apron,
lay it flat, walk up the rungs,
then you had to do, pull it away
and you would actually foot it from the side,
which once I learned the other way, made no sense to me.
Then you'd have to flip it.
And it was just, that's all we knew at the time.
Then I come to Anaheim and guys are high shouldering it
and sticking ladders and I'm like, oh shit,
I have got a steep learning curve.
And I know, I'm sure some of the cadre in the Academy
were like, I'm not so sure about this English guy.
But it was just that.
At the same time, it wasn't like I was ridiculed.
With my classmates and then the cadre,
I was shown the right way.
It took some time and I got it and ended up, as you said,
meeting expectations at the end.
So it wasn't like it was unfair,
but each one of us had the opportunity to own our skills
and our fitness and our book smarts.
And so it's ultimately up to the individual
to be either be prepared or not be prepared.
And I think the way that I've always looked at it is,
an Academy and orientation should prepare you.
So if you get a fire on your very first call
on your very first day, you're prepared.
Doesn't mean your experience doesn't mean
that you're gonna run the call,
but you can at least do what you're asked of you.
So this kind of softly, gently, what if you get,
a Grenfell fire situation or the Vegas shooting
on your first day, are you ready?
Yes or no?
Right, that's exactly right.
And looking in that backseat, as a captain,
I was very fortunate that I spent most of my career
in a specialty assignment on the USAR team.
And so the people I always had there were assigned to me.
So we always had people that were at a level
of proficiency and skillset that I never had to worry.
I really didn't.
The only time I had to worry is if I had an overtime
or coming in and I didn't know them that well,
or I didn't know what they could or couldn't do.
So in those cases, you just keep an eye on them
until they earn your trust.
And then once they have your trust, it's a no brainer.
Absolutely.
When I first came on Anaheim, I remember we just missed,
I can't remember if it was in the Academy
or if it was right before we got there,
but it was the Stadium Lofts fire,
which once they rebuilt, Mikey ended up buying a place
in there for a crazy amount of money.
I was on that fire.
Oh yeah, so that's what I was gonna ask you.
So in your career, what was some of the,
the quote unquote career calls,
whether they're fires or anything else?
Well, I don't look at, I can remember the stadium calls
and I can remember the Stadium Lofts fire
because I was on that.
Shoot, the fires, they've all run together.
I'm not even sure what the big ones were anymore.
I mean, I know we had one over off of Rob Way,
which is in two's first in,
that I was actually on the roof, me and Dave Baker
were on the roof cutting a trench.
And man, the thing was blowing up on us.
And I walked away with my face mask melted,
burn marks on my turnout coat,
had some singe marks around my hood.
So it was getting hot pretty quick and we finished up.
And I remember getting down on the ground
and doing a little rehab and Chief Smith came up to me
and was telling us, man, we saw you guys up there.
That fire was on you guys.
I'm surprised you guys stayed up that long world.
We had a job to do and we felt safe.
So we were getting it done.
But I never looked at the fires like,
okay, that fire was named this, that's what it was.
This fire was named that, that's what it was.
But the big fires that we ended up going on
were pretty good size.
Three heads, that stadium loss fire,
we could see the header from the station.
We pulled out on to Cotella there and boy,
you could see the thing from all the way down
from where we were close to Disneyland.
That thing was almost to the 57 freeway.
And by the time we got there, that building had already,
that was in framing stages.
So that's the first time I've ever been on a fire
where we actually lost the foundation.
They had to rip the foundation out of that thing
and start over.
But the heat, the BTUs coming off that thing
were melting signs across the street.
That was a big fire.
I remember the Pallette Farm fire that we had.
I think it was on our shift
because I think it was me and Jimmy on that one and Terry.
But again, same thing, we were coming out one
and you could see the glow.
And that was in five's first year, I think.
I mean, crazy fire.
And that was the one where engine eight, I think,
was kind of trapped behind the fence
and we ended up cutting the fence
and the gauges had melted like a Picasso painting.
I do, yeah, I do remember that.
I remember, yeah, I remember burning up some gauges
on a fire.
Yeah, that was crazy fire too.
Well, I know that we talked about this
when we spoke not too long ago,
but the mental health journey of a lot of us in uniform
as you progress through,
and again, I talk about this all the time,
you added in the work week and Anaheim was 56 hours,
no Kelly Day, so a brutal work schedule
before you even mentioned things like mandatory overtime.
When you look back, when did you start to experience
challenges when it came to the mental health side?
I think it was pretty early actually,
because my wife would tell you that I would come home cranky
or I'd come home short tempered or kind of the typical
sleep deprivation kind of issues that you would have.
But I think when it really started to take off for me,
I can't say that I ever experienced
the mental health side of things
because of the fire service.
I was experiencing mental health stuff
before I even went in to the fire service.
And I'll explain how that works is that
I spent the first 10 years of my marriage
not in the fire service, I was a contractor.
And unfortunately, I had developed a wayward eye,
if you will, and I got caught up into an addiction.
And that addiction was sexual addiction, pornography,
and unfortunately for me,
it led way beyond just pornography.
And just before getting hired on into the fire service,
I had already been working for three solid years
on my sobriety, had a mentor,
had a guy walking me through it, helping me.
And he ended up teaching me how to look past my addiction
and see it for what it really was.
He says, that addiction,
is how you anesthetize your trauma.
So then I started realizing at that point,
okay, well, what's the trauma?
I thought I had a great childhood, man.
I mean, I love my childhood,
but there were some traumas that happened in my life
at a very young age that caused me
to feel certain ways about myself.
And those feelings over a course of time,
start creating a desire to anesthetize the hurt,
the shame, the fear, the guilt.
And so when I ended up leaving for the military
and going overseas, I completely went off the deep end
sexually with, you know, I just, you know,
it's not something I'm trying to do.
I'm trying to do it for myself.
You know, it's not something I'm proud of,
but I had my eyes opened up when you go to Europe,
their sexual tendencies or their appetites
are a little different than ours.
There was much more available in the 80s,
in the early 80s out there than there were here.
And so I got my appetite wet a little bit, if you will,
on the variety of women and all of the ability
that was out there to have these little rendezvous.
And so by the time I got stateside,
I was kind of well versed in my addiction,
but kind of devaluing it, if you will, by just saying,
well, that's just normal.
I mean, all guys are like this.
I mean, that's just what guys do.
And then I got married and I thought getting married
would end that and it didn't.
And in fact, getting married, it just intensified it
because now I'm looking at being married
and only having, you know, my wife and making sure
that she was the only one, but all of this success
that I'd had made it very difficult for me to be monogamous.
And after my two boys were born, I knew I was in trouble
and I knew I needed to get help.
And I just remember crying out for help.
Actually, as I was, you know, I'm gonna say this,
probably the most difficult thing I've ever done
is I've been very frank and open and honest with them,
with my background in sexual addiction.
So, you know, I was out cruising for prostitutes
and just crying tears down my face.
Why?
I gotta stop this.
I can't do this.
I'm destroying my life.
I'm destroying my wife, my family, my family.
My wife, my family, myself.
If I was to get caught, there's no way I'd ever get
on the fire department.
But yet the risk was not outweighing that benefit
that I had, that short term fix of,
man, I can just get over this by just a real quick hit
of the drug of my choice and I'll feel fine again.
Well, that didn't go over well with my wife, of course.
So we struggled for so many years back and forth
and trying to get through it.
And about 10 years in, two small boys,
she grabs me by the arms and she's kind of like shaking me.
And she just, these were the words she said to me
that woke me up.
She says, she says, I hate you, I hate God,
I hate the church, I quit.
And that rocked me to my core.
And that gave me the drive to figure out
how am I gonna get past this?
I gotta do whatever I gotta do
because I cannot imagine living the rest of my life
in bondage to this addiction.
And as things would have it, my mom had a book
that she had, I'm not even sure where she got the book,
but she gave me this book.
It's called, Discover the Mind of a Woman.
And I read that book for the first time
and my light bulb was just going off in my head.
Well, no wonder I'm the way I am, no wonder I do this,
no wonder, and it was all starting to make sense.
So I read that thing from cover to cover
and then eventually I decided, you know what,
I'm gonna give this author a call.
I'm gonna call the guy that wrote this book
and have a talk with him and see if there's any way
that I could be mentored by him or something, man,
because I need this guy's help.
So I gave him a call and as luck would have it,
he was gonna be in Southern California,
he was out of Arizona.
He was gonna be in Southern California
and he invited us to a seminar where he was gonna be speaking
on that very book and that topic.
So my wife and I went and I approached him afterwards
and I asked him if he would be interested in mentoring me.
And he said, well, I can, but you're gonna have to come
to Phoenix, Arizona on every Wednesday
for the next three years.
And I thought to myself, well, that's not gonna be possible
since at that time I had just got hired by Anaheim.
Man, I can't do that.
And so I said, is there anybody out here
that you would recommend?
And he pointed to this guy, standing this big, tall dude,
about six, seven, six, eight, just a big dude.
He said, go talk to Kevin.
He went through my three-year mentorship program
and he'd probably be able to help you out.
So I went to Kevin and I asked him and sure enough,
the guy was able to help me out
and started a three-plus-year mentorship program with him.
And through all of that, was finally able
to get to a place where I could come clean with my wife
as to what had happened and what I'd been doing
and worked through the rebuilding process
of rebuilding that trust.
And once that was completed,
we ended up having a little girl.
We got pregnant.
Actually, I ended up telling my wife everything
that was going on while my wife was pregnant with my daughter.
But when our daughter was,
when she was pregnant with our daughter,
my mentor told me, he said,
I just want you to do one thing for me.
If you ever feel like there's that voice,
and he called that voice the Holy Spirit,
if you ever feel like the Holy Spirit
is putting it on your heart to tell your wife
everything you've done, trust him,
and let your wife know so that you guys can get it all out
and then you could start rebuilding your trust
back on solid foundation.
I thought, okay, I'm gonna do that.
I thought, okay, well, that ain't gonna ever happen.
But yeah, I'll agree to that, sure.
Ain't no way in hell I'm gonna tell my wife
what I've been up to.
And I don't know what happened to James,
but whatever happened, if something came over me,
as we're having this conversation,
her and I back and forth, and she was really saying,
look, I know that you've got a lot of skeletons
in your closet that are keeping you in the dark,
keeping you in shame, it's keeping you hurting.
And you can trust me to be able to tell you,
or to be able to hear what you've got to say.
And I thought, well, okay, man, if you're,
I would much rather you just realize,
I got some shit in my back, in my closet
that I don't need to be exposed.
Let's just pretend like we both know it's there,
but we don't need to deal with it.
And that wasn't working.
So I finally came clean with her,
and to my surprise, she handled it extremely well.
And then I ended up going to work the next day,
and got a phone, I called her that night,
and started talking to her, and she had had a change of mind,
and told me that, I don't know that I can deal
with what you just explained, what you just expressed to me.
I don't know that I can handle that.
I don't know that I even wanna be married to you.
And I don't even know if I wanna carry this child anymore.
And my world just dropped.
I'm living up in the mountains in Crestline,
and I'm all the way downtown Anaheim
at station one headquarters, and I'm hearing this,
and I'm freaking out.
And so I called up my mentor,
and proceeded to just cuss him up one side and down the other.
I was so angry that he would even suggest
that I be that honest,
when really I had told him what was going on.
I figured, you know what, you know what's going on,
and why do I gotta bring my wife into this?
Why do I gotta tell her?
Can't we just let it go?
Well, anyway, I ended up calling him up,
and I ended up very upset, very upset,
very angry, and told him, I said,
I don't know how in the world I trusted you
with that advice.
That was the worst advice anybody could give me.
Now, because I listened to you,
my wife doesn't wanna stay married to me,
and she doesn't even wanna carry our baby anymore.
So what am I gonna do?
And these were his words, he said, Rick,
if you think God has taken you and your wife
on the journey that he has for this last three plus years,
only to drop you off at the doorstep of an abortion clinic,
you don't know my God.
I said, well, right now, that seems like the only thing
that I've got going for me.
Man, is because I've been honest, I'm done.
My marriage is over, my kids are gonna get raised
by somebody else, and I may not even have this baby
that we've been praying for, for so long to have.
And now finally, as my life starts to clean up,
we finally get pregnant, and now here she's telling me,
I don't even know if I could stay pregnant anymore.
So it started a journey with my wife and I,
she started to really work with Kevin's wife,
and I was working heavily with Kevin,
and man, lo and behold, within a year or so,
man, we were rocking and rolling back on track,
everything was going great, and it's because of that experience
that I was able to get pregnant.
It's because of that experience that by the time
I was in the fire service and going hard to the hole,
my mind was already in a good spot.
So I wasn't having to go and do all of that rebranding
and that rebuilding of the destructive nature of my past
while I was new in the fire service,
because I'd already done all that work.
So I guess in a way, having the tools to walk through it
gave me the ability that when I started to see things
that were affecting me in certain ways,
I was able to pull back, assess, find out what triggered,
go deal with that trigger, change the narrative
on that trigger, and change the paradigm
and walk through with a much healthier understanding
of mental health.
Well, firstly, thank you for sharing that story.
I think it's a very common story behind closed doors.
I mean, we know from the firehouse, we know the guys,
we're talking, bragging about strange and all that stuff.
Oh yeah.
However, as I alluded to earlier,
one of the least discussed elements
of the first responder mental health conversation
is what happened before you ever put the uniform on.
And this is exactly it.
You'd already not only had traumas,
but created resilience before you really entered
Anaheim Fire Service.
When you look back now, I mean, the sexual side,
it's interesting, I've known many, many people
that there was sexual confusion.
A lot of times that was sexual abuse when they were younger.
There's other times that, again, it just became an addiction,
no different than an opioid or alcohol or something else.
It was a way of filling that void.
And the way that you phrased it,
that hit was more important than the devastation
that it left behind, that you insert whatever drug,
gambling, sex addiction, it's the same feeling.
So when you look back, what were some of those traumas,
you don't have to be specific, don't want to,
but what were some of the things that you,
as I say, what was the pee under the mattress for you
that allows you to then start unpacking what was going on?
First of all, I didn't realize I had any trauma in my life
until I ended up going to that workshop in Long Beach,
learning through the power of commitment,
that there was trauma in my past.
And at that point, I thought the trauma
was geared at my dad.
And I thought that trauma was geared at my dad.
And I went through an exercise to train
or not train, but to rebrand or tell the story,
tell a different story behind why my childhood
was the way it was at that given time.
And my dad was a, he was a preacher, very approachable,
very likable, to me, he was always loving.
I know that I would do things as a kid
and my mom would end up telling me,
well, wait till your dad gets home.
My dad would come back from the office and my mom would say,
well, this is what Rick and Jim have been doing.
This is what Rick did, or this is what he did.
And next thing I know, it was requiring a belt.
So I got a lot of belts growing up.
And I was like, well, I'm gonna go to the gym.
That's growing up.
But I think the real trauma had nothing
to do with my dad, per se.
It had to do with how young my mom
and dad were when they got married.
I mean, can you imagine at 16 and 17 being married?
And then by the time you're 17 and 18,
you've got your first kid.
Well, and my dad didn't even know this,
but he had a kid before I was even born.
So when you look back at that,
And then my brother's being born just nine and a half months later than I am.
You got a lot of things going on in two very young people's lives.
My mom was the oldest of I think seven kids.
I think it was seven.
She was the oldest and her father was an alcoholic and had a very difficult time keeping a job.
By all intents and purposes, my grandmother went out, she worked to kind of make sure
that they were guaranteed the money because grandpa might have, you know, drank it away
on payday.
So my mom was thrashed at a very young age into watching her kids, her siblings, as though
they were her kids.
So she was not only the oldest sibling, but she was also the disciplinarian.
She was also the one that had to control all those brothers and sisters.
Well, what girl at 14, 15, and even 16, when you've got that many kids that you're responsible
for, when they don't listen to you, what's the natural response?
Well, back then it was like she would smack them around.
She would scream and yell.
And that was her parenting style.
So when I came along, I was just another one of her brothers and sisters.
I just happened to be a lot younger.
Well, she was only 17 years older than I am.
So the way that she responded to me when I was not doing the things I should have been
doing was with screaming, yelling, slapping, hitting, all those kinds of things.
And I grew up resenting her for it.
And that kind of brought me up not understanding from my mom's perspective.
I mean, how can I?
I'm a little kid.
And the struggles and the frustrations and the things that she was dealing with at a
young age.
And so it just caused me to feel like I wasn't loved.
I had no value.
Although playing baseball in Little League, I got plenty of that value.
I got plenty of that love.
I mean, I had great friends in my neighborhood.
I had a wonderful life growing up.
But just that little hint of trauma going way back to when I was two, three, four years
old started to develop in me a story in my own head about who my mom was to me.
And that caused me to go down that road.
That was the trauma in my past anyway.
It's such an important conversation.
There's that phrase, don't compare trauma.
And it's true.
I mean, I've had people on here who were literally boy soldiers.
One gentleman, Ishmael Bay, was a boy soldier in Sierra Leone.
His parents were murdered.
He was forced to kill because you have two options, kill or be killed.
That's it.
Hooked on drugs and then saved by the Red Cross and now is a UNICEF ambassador for child
soldiers.
Amazing.
I've got a friend who was the middle child and the parents had a boy and they wanted
a girl.
They had another boy, which was him.
And then they had a daughter and he fell in love.
And I've met his parents since and I still see it today.
This kind of lack of any maternal, paternal elements.
So it doesn't matter what that backstory is.
If it's trauma or if it's unaddressed struggles, then it needs to be addressed.
So it's powerful, I think, for people to hear because something seemingly somewhat small,
I mean, when you compare it to sexual abuse and something else, it's not at all.
We pigeonhole these things and label them and almost rank them.
But something, if you look at the hierarchy of needs, safety, security, love, all these
elements, if a child is raised not having them, then their barometer is skewed.
Then they go into the outside world and they're finding love from a gang or prostitutes or
whatever it is to fill that void.
But as you mentioned, it's chasing the dragon.
It's never filling it because you're never really addressing the thing beneath the thing.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
And, you know, I don't hold my parents responsible in any way, shape or form anymore.
I mean, there was a time that I did have anger and I did have some animosity, but that left
me years and years ago.
I can't even remember the last time I even felt that way towards my parents, both of
whom, you know, I've gone back and retold the story rather than the story of how a three,
four, five year old would interpret what was going on.
I went back and revisited that child trauma as an adult and I changed that story.
And that story is what I just told you.
You know, my mom young, parents young, you know, just trying to figure out life themselves.
And when you really get down to it, we're all struggling in that area.
We're all trying to find our way.
We're all trying to figure out this thing called life.
We all make mistakes.
Some mistakes are so detrimental to who we are as people and the relationships that we
carry from then on out.
That if we don't go back and readdress that and change the storyline, that actually is
more in line with the truth of what was going on rather than the illusion of truth that
we somehow interpret things to be when we don't deal with the childhood traumas in an
adult fashion.
Absolutely.
Well, speaking of parenting, you kind of led us through, you know, you had this turbulent
time, then you were able to just find these incredible tools and, you know, solidify your
marriage again.
And then December 2013 comes and just cuts you and your wife's or your family's legs
from under you again.
So talk to me about Michael, the man, and then kind of lead me through that horrific
day and the following weeks, months and years.
Sure.
Michael McClain Cheatham.
I tell his name.
I say his name.
We remember his name every day, and Mike was 23 when he was murdered.
Leading up to his murder, my son was going to be headed off to the Navy as a corpsman.
He was accepted and tested and was headed for boot camp to become a corpsman and wanted
nothing more than to go into the military and fight for our freedoms.
And I don't know if it was the week before or a couple weeks before he was actually supposed
to get shipped off.
He was out with his buddies and had a little bit too much to drink and tried to drive home
and ran through a stop sign and ended up crashing into some guy's yard.
A minor damage, nothing big, but I got a phone call from, it was this chippy at the time,
CHP officer out in California, called me up and explained to me what was going on.
And so I drove out to my son and sure enough, he was arrested that night for a deuce and
just completely changed the course of where he was headed.
And he had already been very heavily involved with trying to get people to wean off pharmaceutical
medication.
In his mind, pharmaceuticals were the root of why he was burying a lot of his friends.
They would be injured in sporting events, football, basketball, baseball, whatever,
and they would get put on painkillers.
And before you know it, they're addicted to these painkillers and docs take them off those
painkillers.
And the next thing you know, they're seeking help on the street side.
And so a lot of this stuff was turning a lot of his friends to heroin and a good handful
of his friends were being buried at a young age.
And so he got into the cannabis industry and started to develop the different strains that
could help offset different ailments.
And I knew that he was going in that direction.
I just didn't know to the degree at the time.
And I didn't even know if I really agreed with it yet.
And I tried to talk him out of it several times to just this is not the time.
This is still too early in the cannabis industry for you to be doing what you're doing.
And he had a mobile delivery service out in Corona Riverside area and was getting pretty
well known.
And he was also living in a mother-in-law quarters that I had in the back half of our
property.
And he was living there.
And I addressed him one time I went to I said, look, man, I can't stop you from doing this.
I mean, no matter what I say to you, no matter what type of information I give you, from
my perspective, from what I see on a day to day in my profession when it comes to cannabis,
when it comes to weed, when it comes to drugs in general, there's a black market that is
dangerous.
And I said, I'm fearful of what could happen if you continue going down this road.
I said, so what I'm going to ask of you is sit down and tell me your why.
Why are you doing this?
What is it that makes you so passionate that you're willing to risk all this because it's
your pursuit?
It's what your purpose is.
So just explain it to me.
And he sat down for the next hour and a half, two hours and proceeded to tell me his why,
why he was in the cannabis industry.
And with tears running down his cheek, he said, Dad, I'm tired of burying my friends.
And I've got the cure to get them off the pharmaceuticals that are killing them.
And he started telling me story after story after story of people that he's helped wean
themselves off all of the antidepressants and the painkillers where they could actually
be functioning as a parent again.
He told me one lady that one girl that he was, was this client that or patient as he
referred to it, that was so lucid during the day from all the medications, she couldn't
even watch her own kids.
And he would show up to deliver the product to her, the medication to her.
And she was already passed out from the drugs that she was on keeping her sane and kids
running wild.
And he said, as I started to develop this relationship with her pretty soon, she was
weaned off of all those bad pharmacies.
And now she's on a regiment of cannabis that I'm prescribing to her.
And now she's a functioning mom.
And then he talked about the professionals that he deals with.
And I mean, I didn't know, I mean, lawyers and doctors and cops and firemen and all these
people that he was telling me, he didn't tell me who they were.
But he says, there's a lot of people out there, dad, that are turning to cannabis as an option
to the pharmaceutical industry.
And after he told me all that, I said, well, I cannot deny your why.
And I can see that this is your passion.
And one thing I know about passion is passion will drive you like no other instrument.
I mean, it will literally, when you find your passion, you find your why.
Why are you here?
And he had found his.
And I only, what I told him was I said, I realized that you have a strong desire and
a strong passion to help people with this.
I said, but there's so many people out there that are going to see this totally different.
I said, but primarily there's people out there that know that even though what you're doing
is legal, there's a black market that can take your product and completely turn it around
and be willing to hurt you or even kill you for what you have.
And within a month, he had moved out of the house because I couldn't have him doing it
in my house.
I mean, I fear if someone came to my house and saw you growing back there, and I mean,
he wasn't growing in the outside, he did indoor grows.
I said, man, they'll take my pension away.
I'll end up, you know, probably getting fired, probably get arrested because it's going on.
I said, son, you cannot do this at my house.
And so he ended up moving out and he moved out into an apartment.
He had this guy that was now his delivery driver.
And he brought him in to teach him how to grow indoor quality medical grade cannabis
and set the guy up in his house, converted his garage into this indoor grow room, paid
off all of his previous bills for water and electricity because he tried to do it on his
own before he got connected with Mike and lost everything.
I mean, he was terrible.
So Mike made a deal with him, said, look, if you'll do this, I will teach you how to
do what I do.
I will set you up for success.
I'll pay all your previous bills.
The only thing I ask of you is that the first grow, the first harvest is mine.
And then after that, I will buy from you and you will be my grower.
And everything was on the up and up.
Everything looked good until it wasn't.
And all the product was at my son's apartment.
And this fella ended up coming back from the day's deliveries.
And he had stolen his brother-in-law's 38 special.
He had premeditated, fixed the weapon with a homemade silencer by taking a water bottle,
stuffing it full of microfiber towels and taping it to the muzzle of a 38.
And Michael got up.
They were both watching TV and Michael got up to go use the restroom.
And as he got to the restroom, this guy, the murderer, ended up coming up behind him and
tried to shoot him.
And because of the silencer, homemade silencer, the microfiber, the tape on the muzzle, so
it couldn't rack to reload, so he got one shot off and it missed him, hit the water
faucet in the bathroom and ricocheted up into the ceiling.
And then at that point, the fight was on.
And so this guy was almost twice Michael's age.
He probably outweighed him by 75 plus pounds.
And Michael, like the cops told me, Michael fought for his life.
And as he was struggling to get to his room to where he kept his weapon, the guy picked
up Michael's skateboard and clocked him over the side of the head with it and proceeded
to beat him over the head with his skateboard and then took his belt off and strangled him
and left my son next to his bed and then took the nightstand that was there and put it over
Michael's head so he couldn't see it.
I'm not sure what the reasoning behind that was, but he ended up putting that nightstand
over my son's head and then played possum as though he was fighting for his life.
In the scuffle of all of that that was going on, the downstairs neighbor heard Michael
scream for help and called the police.
And so Corona police showed up to my son's apartment and along with Corona fire, one
of the gentlemen there by the name of Jim Steiner was the captain on that call and was
a friend of mine, was also their union president.
And so even though all that was going on, I still had people who I had come to know
and respect who were on that call with and saw everything that they were dealing with.
And then the man ended up playing possum next to my son and pretended like he was the one
that was beat and he was just protecting, he fought in self-defense.
They ended up taking away arresting him that night and next morning is when we found out
what it actually happened and went to the police department to discuss what the next
steps were and everything.
And they just started to ask a lot of questions about who this Frank character was.
And I had no idea.
I knew he was working with Mike and had no idea to the level and what was going on.
He kept that stuff away from me.
I don't think he wanted to get me to be afraid of what was happening.
But nonetheless, the guy was arrested and had the second shortest trial, a conviction
in a trial in Riverside County history.
It was just a little over a year.
He was convicted and off to prison for pretty much the rest of his life and leaving us to
deal with the aftermath of being a victim of a violent crime and the trauma that that
throws a family into.
And so here I am, now my early 50s, I think I was 51 at the time, and dealing with the
loss of my oldest son and the trauma that it was causing his brother, Kyle, who he knew
his whole life revolved around Mike.
Those two were so tight and so close.
And they did everything together.
And I'll even tell you another little story about that.
They were so close that for the first four years of Kyle's life, Kyle didn't even have
to speak because Michael spoke for him.
So he just sat back and Kyle just observed everything that was going on around him and
didn't have to engage in any communication because his big brother was there.
He would come up and ask us for something and we couldn't even understand what he said
because he wasn't speaking.
He was just talking and just pointing.
And his brother would interpret, oh, he wants this.
I'm like, how do you understand what he's asking?
He goes, I don't know.
That's what he wants.
And sure enough, I'd ask him, is that what you want?
And he'd shake his head.
Yeah.
So their bond was almost more than just through language.
It was almost telepathy.
These two were so close that their thoughts were entwined with each other.
And to watch what happened to him and to see his world cave in was just heartbreaking.
And then my daughter, who was 13 at the time, she's 23 now.
She's the same age as my son was when he lost his life.
So at 13, to see what she went through breaks a father's heart.
And then to see what my wife was going through breaks a husband's heart.
So as a dad, as a husband, I wanted to help everyone get through what was going on because
I knew we were about to go into a world when a crucible of life that is enough to take
most families out.
In fact, most marriages end in divorce after the loss of a child.
And I didn't want that to happen to our family.
And so I pulled our whole family together and I said, I want you all to promise me,
promise me that we will not allow this to break our family apart and that we will do
anything and everything we can in our power to come together and work through it.
And we all agreed.
And as much as I wanted that to be the case, I knew that I had to start speaking that.
I had to start saying that.
Otherwise we were going to end up just spinning out of control.
So I wanted to verbalize it, get it out there into the world.
Take it.
We will not let this break our family up.
We will work through this.
We will come out of this.
We will get on the other side of this.
We will become an influence to help others going through this.
And I just kept saying that over and over in my head.
And my family agreed with me that they would not allow this to break us up.
But watching what my son had to go through as he navigated that, people have no idea.
It's hard on the parents.
Yeah, it is.
It's hard on the parents.
But in so many ways, it's even harder on the children, especially a brother and a brother
that were so close.
And it literally drove my son into a tailspin where he had to now start fighting his own
dragons and his own demons.
And we navigated through a lot of shit.
And he came out on the other side recently, just recently.
It's been a 10-year journey for him.
And one of the things that helped him to get through it is he was hired by Anaheim Fire.
He got hired by our department.
Yeah, but unfortunately, because of all that he was going through at the time, he got put
in that position very quickly because we had the ambulance program at Anaheim and my son
got hired with that.
So the first ambulance program with Anaheim, my son got hired with it.
So he was starting his career, wanted to be a fireman, and everything was moving in the
right direction.
But he had no fire experience.
He only had his EMT stuff.
So he didn't have a lot of skill set on the fire side.
Well, I was already out here in Tennessee and he was still in California.
So I wasn't able to really pour into him as far as training goes and what he needed.
So he ended up going through the academy and unfortunately he was not successful and they
had to let him go in the academy.
And that rocked his world.
And it put him in a place where he had to start dealing with that trauma.
And he did.
And he called me up back this last August and explained to me a lot of the stuff that
he was dealing with and the trauma that I had caused even as a dad.
And we walked through it and we worked it out and went through counseling.
We still do that.
We still counsel together even to this day.
And he's now taken that story and revamped his own history.
And now he's got his first season under his belt with CAL FIRE.
He's getting the fire training that he needs to get now and to finally see him at that
level of been over 10 years now.
And he's starting to get his groove and he's starting to move in the direction that makes
a dad so proud.
But I just keep remembering back to that challenge, do not let this break our family up.
And as hard as it's been, our family has stayed together.
My wife and I have stayed connected.
We've watched our children struggle and it's okay.
We just love them.
We love them through it.
We don't try to criticize them or condemn them or judge them for stupid things that
they do or say.
But we just encourage them to continue to move forward and don't stop.
And it's been very inspiring as a dad to watch both of them deal with their own shit and
their own trauma.
But at the same time, they have the resources of their mom and dad to talk to them about
it, which in many cases you lose that after the death because parents ended up, they end
up divorcing.
And that brings in a whole new set of traumas that you got to deal with.
So I guess all that to say, that was the story that happened with Mike.
The 10 year journey after that has created the opportunity for not only me and Kelly
to go through this together, my wife, but to watch our children as they navigate through
it as well.
Well, firstly, again, thank you for sharing Mike's story.
The takeaways from what you guys dealt with, but also this is another opportunity to bring
to life someone who was snatched from the world.
But I think what's so important or so powerful about your family's journey is again, that
post-traumatic growth conversation.
I think when it comes to mental health, it's almost like we got our trouser leg caught
in 2015.
We're trying to move forward, but it's like, oh, stigma, stigma, stigma.
We're way beyond that now.
Not everyone, but most of us.
It's like, how do we find the tools that are going to help?
And again, whether it's cannabis, psychedelics, ayahuasca, equine therapy, EMDR, whatever
the thing is.
There's so much out there that we don't even know about, at least I didn't know about until
I was thrust into it.
Exactly, exactly.
But I think it's that hope conversation.
You can't change what happened, but you can change the way that you react to it.
And your trauma from being a little boy, which arguably again, is a theme that comes up over
and over again, multi-generational trauma, the environment that your parents were raised
in, and their parents, et cetera, et cetera.
But also the hope, the resilience that going through the crucible, going through that trauma
with your son now on that fire journey.
He just wasn't ready when he first went, but now he's ready because he was forced to go
through that.
So I think there's such a powerful takeaway.
One time did you say, oh, did I mention it was fun?
No.
You know what I mean?
It's going to be horrible, but the hope, that beacon of light, that post-traumatic growth,
that resilience that is forged when you are forced to go through that trauma and heal
from that trauma and have that extra strength that you've got, that extra layer of scar
tissue that you never would have had before.
That is out of such a tragic story, a beautiful ending to it.
I would say ending's the wrong word, but a beautiful ripple effect of Michael's death.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
Grieving is so different for everyone.
Everybody grieves differently.
I knew that my grief could take me down a dark path, but I also knew from my history
that you can change that storyline.
You can, for lack of a better word, rebrand what happened.
It doesn't have to be the final act.
It's just something that happened, and then based off of that, it propels you into a new
era or a new journey of life where you have to find purpose and meaning.
Finding that purpose and meaning through the death of a son, I don't even know if I've
ever have found it totally, but I do know that his death set me free from the bondage
of religion.
It was after his death that I was able to finally know all the stuff that has been swirling
in the questions and the concerns and the inconsistencies that the paradigm of religion
puts out there as well-intentioned as it may be and as pure as it might be from a position
of doing what's best for other people, there's so much in the jargon of religion that does
more to disable us to find that purpose and move forward and gives people a reason or
justification to hate, to not forgive.
The hardest thing in the journey for me was forgiving the man that brutally murdered my
son.
I knew that the minute that happened, I knew that my next journey was going to be a journey
of learning how to forgive like I had learned how to forgive myself because I know how wretched
I was.
I don't want to say evil, but for the lack of a better word, what I was doing to my wife
was evil.
It was hurtful.
It was self-centered.
I could see that I didn't want to do that, but yet there was something taking me down
that road.
When it came to Frank, I had to come to grips with that and say, okay, this is what you
believe.
Now, do you really believe it?
I mean, is he forgivable or is it justified to hold on to the anger and the resentment
and the bitterness and the hate that you have for this man?
Believe me, going through the trial, I literally sat on the front row with a wall between me
and maybe about 10 feet of space between where he sat at the defendant's table.
There was more than one occasion I would look around to kind of see where all the bailiffs
were and calculate in my own mind how quick I could go over there and take this guy out
before getting caught.
What kind of damage could I do before getting taken down by the cops?
Those thoughts came through my head.
As I'm wrestling with all that during the trial, I knew I can't live my life like that.
I'm going to have to learn to forgive even this.
That was my journey, was learning how to do that.
Forgive the man that killed my son and love on my own family enough to where they too
could get to a place, maybe not a forgiveness if that was the case, but at least they could
get to a place where they could function with a purpose.
That was the mindset at the time.
It's an interesting perspective when you're talking about religion versus your specific
individual faith or spirituality.
This is where I've just been for a long, long time.
I was raised in the Church of England.
I went to Sunday school and watched my parents not really seemingly believe themselves, but
they took us to church and gave us every opportunity to be pulled into that.
That particular way of presenting the teachings to me didn't resonate even as a little boy,
but I've been incredibly spiritual my whole life.
To me, you just walk outside and see nature.
To me, that's God's work, my God, the one that I believe in.
When you have, for example, a nation that's supposed to be so faith-based, whatever their
faith is, and yet you hear the rhetoric on homelessness or addiction or sex workers,
it's not what Buddha or Jesus would say or do.
This is where I have that disconnect.
It's like, well, hold on a second.
Every Sunday, you tell me you're in this building and you tell me you're this fucking amazingly
Christian, Muslim, Jewish, whatever person, but then you walk out the door and you don't
seem to understand the core tenets, which for me is a white belt Bible understander,
for lack of a better word, get, love, community, compassion, acceptance.
Where's this disconnect?
So not picking on any particular group, but this is where I feel that that pigeonholing
gets dangerous.
And then you start saying, oh, well, God loves everyone except the gay, so whatever.
And then you really fucking lost me after that point.
But it's that disconnect.
If you're not being a good person, if someone says to you, what do we need to do about the
addiction crisis or the obesity and your answer or the immigration, whatever the answer is
anything less than what Jesus would reply with or, you know, whoever your your deity
or your prophet is, then you've missed the point.
If it's not coming from love and community and kindness and empathy, to me, you've missed
the point.
So that's where I love this kind of the stoke bespoke version of spirituality.
Why should mine be the same as my wife's, the same as my son with three different types
of people on our own journey, with our own trauma and our own passions?
And so if the tenants are there, that to me is the most important thing.
And if you're in whatever the churches that we just mentioned and you're a beautiful,
kind person, then your religion is working for you 100 percent.
Absolutely.
But if you're not, then maybe just maybe it's time to kind of think, oh, can I can I take
the things that are working for me, but also take some other things and get myself back
onto a road where, as they say, you know, what would Jesus do?
I'm not talking about singing songs about him.
What would he actually do?
He'd be anointing the poor and raising the fallen.
He wouldn't be judging and building walls.
Exactly right.
I think the words he said was, you know, you go out into the world and you try to teach
them how to have a relationship with God.
And one of the tools he used was, first of all, you got to know who God is.
So let's define him first.
And once we define who God is, then we can have a roadmap to follow.
And here's who God is.
God is love.
Period.
That's who God is.
It's love.
So when we act in love, we're being godly.
When we act in judgment, criticism, anger, resentment, bitterness, hostility, and the
whole gamut of what our flesh, our physical nature finds as normal or natural, those are
things we do out of fear.
And so for me, it became very easy to dissect what was being spoken.
I looked at things through two lenses, fear and love.
And I came to the agreement with myself in understanding that anything that is acting
out of love was acting out of God, and anything that was acting out of fear was acting out
of my own insecurities where I need to start working at why am I fearful of this and start
dissecting it and start doing the work.
There's only two emotions that I know of.
It's fear and love.
But each one of those emotions, those are the root emotions.
But each emotion has a core or a set of other emotions that stem from that.
So they're either a positive emotion or a negative emotion.
And the negative emotion is what drives us down away from love.
Whereas love pulls us away from the negative emotions that we can classify as our flesh
or our natural being or the natural state of what we are and what we strive for.
And looking at through those two lenses gave me the ability to look at my own religion.
My dad was a preacher in this particular church.
My uncle was a preacher in the church.
My grandfather was in the church.
I've got four generations that went back almost to where this denomination began, although
they won't tell you they're a denomination, they're a non-denomination.
They just don't have any central headquarters or somebody over the entire organization.
They're all independent, which is a beautiful thing.
It really is.
But when I started looking at it through the lens of fear and love, and then I looked at
the results, what were the results we were producing?
Because I know what the power of commitment produces, it produces results.
So if this is who we say we are, and this is what we say we believe, then we should
have an influence in the world and the world should start changing to be more like the
loving God that we profess to teach.
But what I saw was the actual opposite.
I saw more division.
I saw the lack of unity.
I saw the judgment and criticism of not only other religions, but other denominations within
my own religion.
And then I was coming from a group of folks that I'm not trying to badmouth or bash because
I am not.
I love the denomination I came out of.
They did so much for my development into understanding the scripture and interpreting it in a way
that works.
On the other hand of that though, it becomes very legalistic.
And love, as much as it's a proponent of who we need to be and who God is, we are also
justified in righteous indignation against the gays or against people that we don't
think God loves.
And when we get to a place in our lives where we can say, well, God favors me more than
he favors you, then we ain't serving God anymore.
I'm just sorry.
You can't.
Love doesn't do that.
Love does not favor somebody over somebody else, regardless of what they're doing, because
God knows my situation.
And going through addiction and going through the death of my son, there's a lot of things
that, you know, I'm certain that what I was doing and what I was thinking from a religious
point of reference, I was certain that I was wrong.
I remember my wife even saying, what if Michael's in hell?
And I told her, I said, baby, we don't got to worry about that.
I said, hell doesn't even exist except in the minds of those who want to believe that
there is a fear that we have to stay away from.
And so they use it as a fear to keep us from moving in a direction that will by nature
help us to understand the spiritual principles that are being taught in the Bible.
Love your enemies as yourself.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
And for God's sake, I mean, the very people that nailed Jesus to a cross after, you know,
putting them through a mock trial and convicting him on lies and beating him and opening his
back with leather straps so that blood was just gushing down his backside and then throw
a linen garment on it so it coagulated to the backside of his skin.
And then to rip that off after the scabs had coagulated to nail him on a cross and, you
know, raise that cross up and kick it into a four foot hole after his hands have been
nailed to it and just starting to rip the tenon.
It's a part of a, I mean, you just think about what he went through.
And his words, not mine, his words, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.
That started to question my own understanding of if they can be forgiven and if I can be
forgiven then everybody can be forgiven.
The question is, is forgiveness something that I have to literally ask for and accept
or can my life naturally cause me to go and go, you know what, that ain't working for
me no more.
I got to, I'm not feeling love.
I'm feeling resentment.
I'm feeling anger.
I'm feeling hostility.
I'm feeling all these things.
And that has to be what changes our focus.
Instead of trying to dial in on the dogma and trying to take scripture and apply it
literally in every single case, you know, I'm going to get a lot of heat from a lot
of the religious folks out there, but the reality is this.
If I believed what I was taught, then I would have no hope of going to heaven because every
time I did what I did, I did it knowingly and I chose it.
So how does a guy that chooses to cheat on his wife, not with indiscriminate affairs,
but with prostitutes, strip clubs, pornography, and rip a family apart, if I can be forgiven
of that, even when I was in my guilt, even when I was still doing, I mean, like I said,
my most vivid prayer, I was literally looking for prostitutes.
I was driving the street looking for prostitutes, crying, looking and asking, God, please help
me.
I don't want to do this.
I don't want to be doing this and did it anyway.
So had I died at that very moment where I'm crying out, please help me.
But I still continued.
Sorry, dude, you're going to hell.
Don't care.
You're done.
That's a hard thing for me to understand because I'm very honest with who I am.
And I know that my journey is despicable as my addiction was.
It's made me who I am.
And without it, I wouldn't be Rick Cheatham standing here today talking to you.
I wouldn't be that guy.
But it took me that experience to become who I was to get into the fire service.
And it was through that fire service journey that I was able to deal with so much trauma
and so much tragedy on the people we respond to that that was able to be parlayed into
what was going on with my own son and our own family suffered that tragedy.
I mean, it's such a powerful perspective and I couldn't agree with you more.
And if people have issues with what you said, it doesn't matter because you're in your
own journey as well.
And they can say it.
I don't even care anymore, man.
In fact, most people don't even they won't even come up and talk to me about it anymore.
They know that trying to talk to me about it now is I'll listen, but you're going to
get nowhere real fast.
And I'll ask some questions that you're not going to be able to answer and you're going
to go back to just dogma.
And whenever you interpret our current standards of religion today by what was written 2000
years ago in a different time, a different culture, a different people, a different land,
everything was different.
And you want to take everything and say this is literal.
I mean, for God's sake, we're waiting for Armageddon right now.
Everybody everybody I hear saying, oh, wow, and the end's coming soon.
The world's going to burn up and blow up.
And you know that Jesus is going to come back and all this stuff.
And I just sit back and I shake my head and say, well, that's not how I see it.
That's not how I see it at all.
In fact, it's that very mentality that has got people so fearful that the predominant
emotion today in Christian circles is fear God.
That is what we do.
We fear God to keep his commandments.
No, I'm going to start preaching here in a minute, and I don't want to do that.
But you know, fearing God, how do you fear love?
I just curious.
I mean, if anybody loves me unconditionally, no matter what I do, they're going to love
me unconditionally.
What does unconditionally means?
That means without condition.
He loves me without condition until I die and I didn't get baptized and I didn't believe
the way I was supposed to believe and I didn't go to the church I was supposed to go.
Sorry, man, you're going to hell for the rest of your life.
What kind of God is that?
God is not love.
I'm sorry, it's not love.
But he's a just God and God being just is loving.
Well, that's your God.
My God is the guy that was nailed on that cross and said, Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do.
Just like I didn't know what I was doing when I was nailing them to the cross.
And it was through the experience of those consequences that changed my behavior, not
the doctrine that I read in the scripture.
Absolutely.
There's a guy, Wayne Dyer, who I loved, absolutely loved.
You familiar with this work?
Phenomenal, man.
Phenomenal.
And I loved it.
I forget how he phrased it, but he was like, I don't think that God is a withholding God,
meaning that he's got the answers to your prayers, but you have to kneel down and say
enough prayers first before he goes, all right, then go have this stuff now.
And I was like, that's it.
And to try to tell somebody who's gone through the loss of their son that because your son
didn't go to the church that you thought he should have or believe what you think he should
have or was acting the way you think he should have, that somehow he's in fear of judgment
for condemnation.
Man, with that kind of fear out there, there's no wonder this world's in the mess that it's
in.
It's not because of the people that live here.
It's because of the belief systems that we've bought into.
We've bought into a lot of lies, and those lies are destroying the fabric of our society.
And if we would all just come together and say, hey, look, here's what God is.
He's love.
How loving are you today?
And be honest with it.
Well, I'm judging this man over here because I have the right to.
Well, who gives you the right to judge?
Righteous indignation, righteous anger.
I'm sorry, man, but I can be angry and I can be upset.
And believe me, I do.
I am.
However, it doesn't grab me the way that it did at one time and hold me locked in to that
fear-based mentality.
It set me free since Michael died.
I've been set free from that.
And I truly sought after that relationship with God in a way that became so real that
it was undeniable.
And I can go for hours on the stuff that God has taken me down different roads and different
paths that you cannot deny His existence.
And if He was doing that, and I'm not practicing what you think I should be practicing as my
religious heritage, then how in the hell am I getting this?
How is this deity influencing me and causing me to go down these paths that I would have
never...
Who tells their wife they've been cheating on them with hookers?
But God told me to do that.
He spoke it into my life through the words of my mentor, and I trusted Him enough to
do it.
And when you step out on faith and trust something bigger than yourself, and you find out that,
wow, that's real.
That just happened.
It doesn't turn you off to God.
It does just the opposite.
It fires you up.
It excites you.
It motivates you.
It inspires you to know that the God I serve is so real that I can have a communication
with Him.
And it's not just me praying to Him.
He actually communicates back through my own thought and through my own conversations with
comparing love and fear, love and fear.
And when I'm in a fearful state, it's cool.
The question is, what am I learning?
And as long as I'm learning in that fearful state and I'm not becoming a victim in that
fearful state, I'm going to have success.
Absolutely.
We have hit two hours, but we've got one more conversation to have.
People listening are like, well, okay, well, at least Rick's life from growing after losing
his son remained stable and happy until forever after.
However, talk to me about the accident that once again threw an incredible wrench into
everything for you, physically, mentally, spiritually.
Yeah, it just completely threw me back into a whole new mindset of trying to figure out
how to dig myself out of a hole.
But five months after I retired to Nashville, I came back from the restroom at one in the
morning and had a sinkable.
And from what I'm told now is my head hit my bed, the side of my bed and whiplashed
my neck back and broke C4 and five.
So I had a broken neck at C4 and five, was unconscious, woke up.
My wife was over me.
She had heard me fall and she ended up asking me if I was okay, but I'm sitting down face
down, but I can't move.
So she grabs my head and she kind of helps her and gets me on my backside.
As soon as I got on my back, I started to go to corticot and all of my extremities started
to come in and I knew that that was not a good sign.
And I told her, I said, I think I broke my neck.
I can't feel anything.
And she says, no, you didn't.
And so she takes my arms down to my side and sure enough, they came back up again.
And there was a running joke in my house.
You never call 911 in our house.
Don't you ever call 911.
You better be dying if you're going to call 911.
It sucks being a firefighters family.
It does.
It really does.
Well, she said, I think I'm going to have to call 911.
I said, yeah, this is the time.
This is when you got to do it.
This is the time to do it.
So long story short, I ended up breaking C4, C5.
I was paralyzed from the chest down, spent two and a half months in the hospital learning
how to feed myself, wipe myself, shower myself, everything for nearly the first two, I'd say
the first month and a half, I couldn't do any of that.
I was completely dependent on everyone.
And when I first got in there, my therapist came to me and asked me, what do you want
to accomplish while you're here?
And I told her, I want to walk out of there.
I want to walk out of this hospital.
And she says, well, then we got some work to do.
And so we just went to work.
And I was doing extra therapy on weekends, but even with all the therapy, that's not
what got me through it.
What got me through this, James, and you're going to understand this, is my fire family.
I'm 2000 and some odd miles away from Southern California.
And I just got my family here.
Just bought this house.
I was just getting the bottom half of my house turned into an Airbnb.
And I had guys flying out here from California, helping my wife with all the stuff that needed
to go on at the house and getting it ready and prepped.
And they were at my bedside the entire time I was in the hospital.
I had somebody at my bedside every single day I was in the hospital.
Sometimes I had two or three, sometimes I had five or seven.
And they were just, I had this revolving door of seeing my buddies showing up at the hospital.
And then they were there for me to walk out of the hospital.
And then when I got home, I had people staying with me at the house to make sure I was getting
to the doctor's appointment.
So the brotherly love, the love of that family, the love of these people who went out of their
way, bought plane tickets to come out here and support my wife and I and my family.
If that's not an act of God, I don't know what is.
And some of these people you wouldn't say are very godly people, but they sure showed
a lot of godly love to my family and to me.
In fact, one of the nurses that I had said to me, I don't know who you are, Rick, but
you are obviously a loved man.
And I said, well, why do you say that?
She says, I have people that come in here in your condition who have family that live
30 miles away.
And I never see their own family here, but you got people that are flying in from California.
And I've never seen so many people visit a person while they're in the hospital.
And your people are coming 2000 miles away.
She said, you must be a very loved man.
And I said, yeah, I guess you're right.
I guess you're right.
They love me.
I said, but it doesn't surprise me.
I said, because the family I come from in the fire service is very loving.
When our family suffers, everybody comes together.
And that's pretty much every fire family I know, they will move heaven and hell to help
a brother in need.
And they do it with such precision and such professionalism that it takes people by surprise
when they see it firsthand.
So when this nurse saw what Anaheim Fire was doing on my behalf, she had nothing but, I
don't know who you are, but you must be very loved because I don't see this from family
members who live just in the neighborhood.
But that caused me to go into a very deep depression now, because now at the end of
my 50s, I'm sitting back now, I've got a broken neck.
I can't feel anything from the chest down.
My hands don't work.
And from a guy who was a truck captain, a contractor who swung a hammer most of his
life and made a living with his hands to not be able to do that, it not only did a mind
game on my physical stature, but it brought me all the way back to when Michael was murdered.
And I thought to myself, man, my 50s have sucked.
I start my 50s with burying my son.
I end my 50s with breaking my neck and not being able to walk.
And there was a side of me that just said, man, maybe everybody in religion was right.
Maybe I'm just suffering because I'm being punished.
And I knew that couldn't be true because I'd had way too many experiences that proved that
otherwise.
But nonetheless, those were the things that I was fighting against.
And so I found myself becoming a victim again.
But this time I became a victim and I couldn't find my way out.
So it's been May 1st to be three years.
And the last two years have been a living nightmare of me trying to crawl out of this
devastating mindset that I'm a victim of my circumstances.
I'm useless.
I'm worthless.
I have no value to offer anymore because I'm not the man I used to be.
And I ended up getting affiliated with a group here in Nashville.
It's a real estate investment group.
And I was getting plugged in with them because I wanted to get back into real estate.
I wanted to get back into building stuff.
I wanted to get back into investing in properties and try to get my money.
But I could not get my head out of my own victim mentality until I went to this group
of folks and they had a real big segment on mindset.
And there was a guy that spoke.
His name was Anthony Trucks.
He was a former NFL football player.
And he talked about his life and his journey and what he struggled with.
And he wrote a book called Make Shift Happen.
And it's all about taking whatever has happened to you and shift it.
Shift it to the place that you become the instrument of success and not be the victim
of your circumstance.
And he was speaking to me.
And so I started that journey back.
And it took me two years to crawl out of it.
And that's probably a little more than two years, but in the last six months, it was
like I finally penetrated through that veil and got back to where I was after Mike died,
got back to where I was after my addiction, got back to where I was as I was trying to
become a fireman.
I was starting to use those same tools.
But it helped me build on what I had already been able to develop.
And this one, I felt as if this was it.
Either I was going to get out of this or I was ever going to forever be a victim and
I would just be off into the lala land somewhere, never to come back and be my normal self again.
And I just couldn't see going through everything that we've been through to have that be my
end of the story.
And so here I am.
I'm on that journey, overcoming that mindset once again for the third time.
And this time, knowing that it's a lot easier this time than it was the first time and the
second time and the third time.
But the injury was different.
Before I had my physical abilities.
But when you have all your physical abilities taken away and you are at the mercy of everyone,
that's a different mind to find yourself in.
And that's where the battle for me truly took place.
And when I look at all my brothers and sisters in the fire service, we all go through these
battles.
We all go through these crucibles in our life that push and pressure and cause us to revert
back.
And hence we got PTSD, we got PTSD, we've got all these mental health issues as a result
of the traumas that we're facing, not only in our own lives, but in the lives of those
we are called to serve.
And that when you start to develop the mindset of regardless of what happens, you will not
be a victim, but you will be victorious.
Then the game changes.
Then the shift happens.
And so I just followed kind of what Anthony Trucks was saying and make shift happen.
And so I've been trying to make shift happen for the last two and a half years.
And now I can walk, I can take care of myself.
I'm independent.
I got my license, I can drive.
I can even tinker around with my hands.
My hands are coming back, but they're very slow to move, but they're coming back.
I can feel myself coming back and I'm excited to come back.
And I know that there's a lot more to do out there in my story.
And I'm just plugging away and just trying to be useful in any way I can from here on
out telling my story, using my past, whatever it is, as an instrument to try to give hope
and inspiration to those around me that no matter how bleak it is, there's hope.
There's hope.
Hope's powerful, man.
It's a powerful, powerful feeling.
It's a powerful emotion.
So there you go.
Thank you.
I mean, such a powerful story.
I just want to pull one thing out of what you said because it's something that I've learned
over seven years of these conversations now, but it was very powerful.
I mean, you had all these tools in your toolbox already, but with this loss of physicality
and it can be a complete paralysis that you had, or it can literally be a back injury
or being fired or promoted even, but this loss of identity that a lot of people struggle
with, especially when they retire, but this creation of this feeling of burdensome, and
I think this is really under discussed element of the suicide conversation, is of course
there's that wanting suffering to end and that is obvious.
People are just going through hell in whatever shape or form and they want it to cease, but
the brain being miswired by trauma, whether it's physical trauma, loss of a child, whatever
it is, being miswired to the point where it actually convinces the individual that they
are a burden to their family.
And it could be, again, loss of physicality, like you talked about, is a really, really
dangerous place.
And I think those, we talk about, oh, if you're struggling, just give me a call, the whole
suicide conversation.
To me, if you are having conversations in your own mind that you are a burden to the
very people that love you, that is a huge red flag for you to pick up phone and start
finding the people that you want to be able to talk to.
Because once the brain has convinced an individual they are a burden, that is what I believe
is behind a lot of the suicides.
People are like, oh, selfish, so cowardly, how could they?
When you believe that you're the problem, in that mindset, I argue it's a selfless,
courageous act.
It's wrong to a healthy brain, 100%, but to that individual, it's probably terrifying,
but they're doing it because they think their family is suffering because of them.
So I just kind of want to pull that out.
That burdensome that you were exhibiting is the very kind of mindset shift I think a lot
of our first responders suffer with when they're in crisis.
Right.
I agree 100%.
Although I didn't feel, I mean, I felt like I was a burden, but I didn't feel like I was
a burden to the level that my wife is going to leave me or I was a burden to my family.
I was a burden from the standpoint of my frustration.
I was so frustrated that I couldn't do what I was doing, that I was frustrated with myself.
And I put so much burden on myself that it affected my wife in a negative way.
But I never felt like that's it, I'm checking out.
However, when I was trying to overcome my sexual addiction, I was very easily persuaded
with that kind of talk.
I would just be much easier if my wife didn't have to deal with me right now.
I've screwed up my marriage so bad.
My kids are, I mean, how could I do this to them?
And I just didn't have the courage to do it.
So what I was hoping for is that as I would drive up the mountain to go home or I was
in a snow storm or something, maybe I could just have a flat tire, my tire come off, I
could slide off the road and I could die a tragic death in honor and just have it be
done.
That way they would never say, oh yeah, he just killed himself.
Those things did cross my mind at that time.
But after going through what I went through with my neck, I was more angry at me that
I should have done something different.
Like when I was in the bathroom and I started feeling like I was getting, my sinkable was
coming on, I should have called for my wife's assistance.
She could have helped me.
She's a nurse for God's sake, but no, I had to do it on my own and here's my consequence.
So the burden aspect is a definite element, 100% for those who are going down that road
of suicide.
I was just very fortunate that I didn't get to that point in this injury, which to me,
if I had gotten to there, James, I think you're right.
That would have been the easiest way out.
But when you got the love of all those brothers and sisters showing up to your freaking room
while you're in the hospital, cheering you on, pulling for you, doing fundraisers, raising
money, doing all the things that firefighters do for their own and for those that are just
citizens, we do it for them too.
That kind of camaraderie, that kind of fellowship is enough to pull anybody out of the dark
corners of the crucible of life.
And I thank them every day.
I mean, I tell you, I just cannot thank my brothers and sisters enough for what they
did for me.
And to this day, I don't even know that they know just how much they did for me.
I mean, I've told everybody, I've thanked them, but it's those dark times that when
the brotherhood comes together and there's nothing but love.
Like I said, man, when you're demonstrating love at that level, you are God, you are being
loved.
And those guys were God for me.
I can tell you that.
So was my family, my wife, my kids.
They were here as much as they could be.
My wife was there every day.
She slept in the hospital with me.
I mean, she was my advocate in the hospital.
And when you've got that kind of support, you're a very blessed man.
And unfortunately, not everybody has that kind of support.
And maybe that's where we can change and turn the corner is finding those folks just by
looking at where they are, knowing that they're probably going to be feeling some stuff and
just be a voice and an instrument of compassion and love.
I couldn't agree more.
And that is the perfect place for us to round up this conversation.
So before I let you go, I'm sure there's people listening that would love to reach out to
you, where are the best places online, social media, et cetera, for anyone that kind of
contact you, if at all.
Well, I mean, I don't have anything other than my private stuff, but I mean, I'm on
Facebook, I'm on Instagram.
My email address is Ricky C, R-I-C-K-Y-C, AFD as in Anaheim Fire Department at yahoo.com.
Ricky C, AFD at yahoo.com.
Send me an email.
And man, I'd love to chat with anybody if anybody out there is struggling with addiction.
I got a pretty sympathetic ear or anything for that matter.
We have gone to some pretty deep and powerful places.
But as I've pointed out many, many times now, two things.
One, my admiration for your courageous vulnerability.
I mean, these are the voices that we need now.
We're debunking this, you know, boys don't cry, rub some dirt, and seeing the reality
of what it's like not only just to be a man or be a woman, but to be a human being.
But also I understand as well that when we revisit some of these stories, that it also
pulls at the scab a little bit.
So I also just want to let you know how grateful I am that you shared your story today.
So I want to thank you so, so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
I appreciate that so much, James.
And I appreciate what you're doing out there.
You got a love for the brotherhood and that love for the brotherhood is the purpose for
why you do what you do.
And you become an instrument of God in doing so because of that love.
So I commend you.
And I say keep it up, brother.
You're doing a great job and you're helping a lot of folk.
Thanks for having me.