Locked In with Ian Bick - I Was a Cop Involved In Multiple Shootings — Then I Lost Myself to Alcohol | Michael Martinez

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Michael Martinez grew up in San Diego and started getting into trouble as a teenager before turning his life around and heading to Hawaii for college. His goal was to serve and protect — but his past made getting into law enforcement a challenge. While waiting to be accepted, he worked animal control in San Diego County before finally joining the San Diego Police Department. Within his first two years, Michael was involved in three officer-involved shootings, an experience that led to severe PTSD, alcoholism, and a complete personal breakdown. This episode dives deep into the reality behind the badge — the trauma, the toll, and the long road to redemption. Michael opens up about how he rebuilt his life, saved his family, and learned that asking for help isn’t weakness — it’s survival. #PoliceStory #TrueCrimePodcast #AddictionRecovery #FormerCop #PoliceShootings #MentalHealthAwareness #LawEnforcementLife #redemptionjourney Thank you to BLUECHEW, AURA FRAMES & PRIZEPICKS for sponsoring this episode: BlueChew: Get 10% off your first month of BlueChew Gold with code LOCKEDIN. Visit https://bluechew.com/ for more details and important safety information Aura Frames: Exclusive $35 off Carver Mat at https://on.auraframes.com/LOCKEDIN. Promo Code LOCKEDIN Prizepicks: Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/IANBICK and use code IANBICK and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! Connect with Michael Martinez: Email: [e-mail] Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ Shop Locked In Merch: http://www.ianbick.com/shop Timestamps: 00:00 Trauma Begins: Michael’s Early Struggles & Childhood Impact 01:27 Who Is Michael? Upbringing, Family Life & Early Influences 05:57 Growing Up Tough: Life Lessons, Trouble & Survival Skills 10:44 The First Turning Point: School, Identity & Finding Purpose 13:05 Starting Out: Security Work, Corrections & Law Enforcement Dreams 17:02 Becoming a Cop: The Application Process & Early Obstacles 24:58 Craziest Animal Control Stories + The Career-Changing Phone Call 27:32 Rejection, Pressure & Balancing Family Expectations 34:13 Joining San Diego PD: Training Academy & Rookie Life 43:54 First Days on Patrol: Real Calls, Adrenaline & Family Adjustments 51:40 The Rookie Reality: Hardest Challenges New Officers Face 01:00:00 First Officer-Involved Shooting: What Really Happens 01:17:38 The Aftermath: Trauma, Marriage Strain & Drinking Begins 01:31:04 Workaholism, Emotional Distance & Alcohol Escalation 01:39:07 Second Shooting: Inside an Active Shooter Incident 01:55:53 PTSD Symptoms: Nightmares, Paranoia & Home Life Collapse 02:01:39 Third Shooting: Risk-Taking, Burnout & Hitting Rock Bottom 02:16:06 The Breaking Point: Career Consequences & Support Arrives 02:23:11 Intervention, Treatment & Admitting the Problem 02:33:21 Recovery Journey: Rebuilding Family & Helping Other Officers 02:52:11 The Power of Police Wellness Programs & Mental Health Support 02:55:30 What He Learned: Advice for Officers, Families & Survivors 02:56:46 Fourth Shooting Revealed: How His Recovery Came Full Circle 03:01:00 Gratitude, Support Systems & Final Thoughts on Healing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, you there, in the baby registry rabbit hole. The thing experienced parents agree on, a Nanette smart baby monitor. One camera, one app for video, breathing motion monitoring, and personalized sleep insights. All in one place. Check in from anywhere. Get real-time safety notifications and capture every sleepy smile and good night kiss. The best part? Those insights help you get more sleep. Starting night one. Add it to your registry or shop at Nanit, N-A-N-I-T-com. Hey, you there, in the baby registry rabbit hole. The thing experienced parents agree on?

A Nanit smart baby monitor. One camera, one app for video, breathing motion monitoring, and personalized sleep insights. All in one place. Check in from anywhere, get real-time safety notifications, and capture every sleepy smile and good-night kiss. The best part?

Those insights help you get more. more sleep, starting night one. Add it to your registry or shop at NANET.com. Hey, you there, in the baby registry rabbit hole. The thing experienced parents agree on, a Nanit smart baby monitor, one camera, one app for video, breathing motion monitoring, and personalized sleep insights. All in one place. Check in from anywhere. Get real-time safety notifications and capture every sleepy smile and good night kiss. The best part, those insights help you get more sleep, starting night one. Add it to your registry or shop at NANET.com. It was horrible. Like it was those nightmares, the paranoia, the clearing my house at two or three or four o'clock in the morning. Do you think those years of waiting to actually become a

cop made you a better cop in the long run? I felt like my sweat was like as thick as syrup. Like it felt like, it felt like slime coming out of my pores. What do you think was the hardest thing to just to as a rookie cop. I was like hyperventilating. I was trying to take deep breaths and I felt like I couldn't get enough air in my lungs. Tell us about the first significant event that happens in your career. The alcohol never ever filled me. It worked every single time. Within his first two years as a San Diego cop, Michael Martinez was involved in three separate shootings. The trauma nearly destroyed his life, turning a decorated officer into an alcoholic on the edge of losing everything. But what happened next might be the most powerful comeback story we've ever heard. Michael, welcome to locked in.

Thanks so much for flying all the way out from San Diego to be here today. Oh, man, it's an absolute pleasure. Thank you for, thank you for having me. Yeah, and thanks to Steve Murphy, connecting us with another great law enforcement officer. We love these law enforcement stories. They're great. And the audience loves them too. Yeah, shout out to Steve Murphy. He's a solid, solid guy and I ran into him. I ran into him doing a Southern California game conference and he reached out to me and we got this all. I went on his podcast and he recommended me to you and he was like, dude, these guys are doing good stuff for law enforcement and so I'm all about it. Yeah, any introduction by Steve we know is like the real deal. He'll tell us what someone's not the real deal.

No, he won't even bother introducing. He goes through like a whole vetting process. He's very like interesting in that regard. Like before I even got introduced to any of his people in a circle, I did his show and he got to know me and then we had him on here first. Because you don't want to vouch for someone and then you have a bad experience on that person's show. Like if you came all the way out here and it wasn't a legitimate podcast or something that

would suck. Yeah. And thanks to your wife for the chocolates. Oh yeah, absolutely. She's from Hawaii. So that's, that's her thing. She takes, she takes chocolates everywhere we go. She's, uh, she, you know, she meets new people.

She passes those out. And, uh, and so for when I came out here, she's like, hey, are you, are you taking chocolates? I was like, I'm not taking chocolates. Like, these guys don't want any chocolates. And she's like, take them a freaking chocolate. And I was like, no, I don't have any room in my bag. She's like, take them a freaking chocolate. I'm like, all right, let me take them.

Well, tell her we said, thank you very much. I will. I will. And we're not going to turn down chocolate. Where are you from? I'm from San Diego, born and raised, born and raised in South San Diego. family families from from there and yeah born and raised and went to high school got into a little bit of trouble in high school and you know I did I did well enough overall where I was able to go

to college in Hawaii and that's where I met her what was your upbringing like did both parents in the picture any siblings yes so I have I have older brother two two older stepbrothers or half-brothers, I should say. And both my parents were always in the picture. My dad, he was a hard-working guy. I remember growing up and he was just like never home because he was like always working like two, three jobs. He had like two full-time jobs.

He had a freaking part-time job. He did work on the side for, I mean, he was like a jack-of-all-trades. Like he knew like plumbing and landscaping and election. and electrical work. Like he knew a little bit of everything. So, so my dad was probably one of the, you know, he was the one that kind of instilled that, like, hard work ethic, that solid work ethic. Like, get your ass up, go to work, you know, go to work. My mom, she was, obviously, she was in the picture as well.

she was always worked long hours so uh but you know both both my parents were were in the picture and um and yeah grandparents uh i was raised a lot but my grandparents too spent a lot of time with them uh and yeah they were it was like a it was like a family thing right we you know they all took care of us and yeah if there's anything if there was one thing you could change about your childhood what would that be oh that's a good question um It would be a couple of things. You know, now as an adult, you know, as a father myself, looking back, I would have spent more time with my dad learning, you know,

learning how to do things, like learning how, like the electrical work, landscaping, you know, learning how to work with my hands. I got into a lot of trouble when I was in, when I was a younger kid, try to be a gangster hanging out with my cousins and uncles, because, you know, I come from a family where both sides of the family, where both sides of the family are, um, are,

are, are wrapped up in that. Some of them are, are still are. Um, but by the time that I was born, you know, my,

my, my, my parents, not to, not to call them out, but both my parents, they had their, their,

their, young, in their youth, um, with the neighborhood and, and, and, by the time I was born, they were both already out of that lifestyle.

Um, they were both already working, but, you know, cousins and uncles, uh, not so much. They were still involved in the,

in the neighborhood. But, you know, it's not cool to do yard work and hang out with your dad who's a, who's a hard worker when you're a teenager, when you're trying to, when you're trying to be cool, right? When you're trying to hang out with the homies, when you're trying to be a gangster, I'm like, dude, I'm never going to do yard work. Like, I'm never going to need to learn any of this shit. I'm not going to need to learn how to, you know, cut wood, you know, cut wood or, or do

landscaping work. Like, I'm going to make money and I'm going to have somebody else do that for me. And I wish I would have spent more time with him, you know, just learning things. And I wish I wouldn't have grown up so fast. I think I grew up really fast. Again, hanging out with the crowd that I hung out with, hanging out with cousins and uncles and, you know, trying to be that, trying to be that gangster and, you know, the girls and all that stuff. I think I just grew up fast.

I wish I would have been a kid. I wish I would have enjoyed being a kid. Do you think having that experience of almost going down the wrong path has made you a better police officer today? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You get to, you know, you, you see that not everybody, not everybody is bad. Everybody deserves second chances, right? And that you, you know, dealing with that type of clientele at work, it's, it was, was it was easy. Like it was easy for me to talk to gang members or talk to criminals because I hung out with them as a as a as a youngster. Some of my family members were that, right? Um, drug addicts. Like, you know, you and I knew the lingo and I knew like, I knew what, what was what and I knew the game

a little bit. So it was easy to, it was easy to kind of almost transition into that, into that career. Do you think there's some law enforcement officers that kind of forget where they came from? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You get to, your gun and badge, you get a little bit of power, and all of a sudden you think that, um, that you're better than everybody else. And in reality, cops aren't better than anybody. We, we're human. Everybody's human. We make mistakes. Uh, we, we, we, uh, we have addictions. Uh, we, um, uh, we have same issues as every single human being on this planet. Uh, we're, we're, we're no different than anybody else. So I think sometimes,

people get into this career and they think that, you know, think that their shit doesn't stink. And that's not the case. How do you end up getting through your gangster phase? So, interesting enough, I got into a whole bunch of fights in high school. My parents pulled me out. I had to go to a Catholic high school. So now I'm going from a community, you know, a community school, right? It's free.

And now they're put me into a private. high school where they have to pay for me to go to school. And I still got into fights when I was when I was there also. But I remember my 11th grade year, the counselor, the school counselor, she pulls me out of class. And she asked me, hey, what are your goals when you graduate from from high school? What do you plan on doing? And I told her something like, I'm just going to kick it, like I'm going to kick it on the block. I'm going to kick it with the homies. Like I'll, I'll probably go get a part-time job. Maybe I'll go to community college.

And I remember her giving me this look like, you're a stupid ass. You know what I mean? You're a dumb kid. And I remember her looking at me. She said, hey, you know, your overall grades, they're good enough where you may be able to get into a four-year university. And for me, I don't remember myself being a good kid.

I remember doing my homework. Like homework wasn't too hard. like I did bad at test. I still do bad at test. Like I'm awful at test, but I did my homework. Like I did my homework. It was pretty easy. I wish I would have applied.

Sometimes I still think, like, if I would have applied myself when I was younger, like, how different life would have been for me. You know, I wonder, I wonder what that would have been like. Like, if I would have studied, if I would have hung around with the good kids at school, the nerds, like the smart kids and, you know, not fucking up at school. like I wish, I wonder what would have came of me. And, but she told me, she was like, hey, you know, your overall grades, they're good enough where you may be able to get into a four-year university. She gave me this book and it had all the Catholic universities in the entire nation. So I take that book home. She's like, bring it back to me tomorrow.

And I was like, all right. She's like, circle the schools that you're interested in going to and bring it back to me tomorrow. I was like, all right. So I remember sitting at home. it was at night i you know i would sneak like beers into my into my house like there was a just a liquor store that would like sell like alcohol to underage kids and you know i would i would go buy i bought a couple of beers and i'm sitting in my room and i'm drinking a couple of beers and i'm flipping through the book and i just remember thinking like okay i hate cold weather i'm a south

san dieaigua i do not like cold weather this is too cold for me right now it's freezing out here So I was like none of the East Coast schools anywhere where it snows, anywhere where it gets super cold, like I'm not going to. That's just not my cup of tea. So I get to the California schools. And I remember, you know, just looking at these schools and thinking, I need to get the fuck out of California because I'm fucking up. Like I was a fuck up. I was hanging out with the wrong crowd. I was doing things that I shouldn't have been doing.

and I was like if if this lady is really about giving me a second shot at life, I need to take advantage of it. I need to get out of California. So I get to the last couple of pages was Alaska and Hawaii. So of course, right? I'm not going to pick Alaska. I picked Hawaii. I'm like, let's see if this lady is really about it, right?

Let's see if she, you know, let's see what tricks up her sleeve that she has that she could pull some strings and get me into the school. So I circle Shamanad University of Honolulu, which is a Catholic university in Hawaii, bring it back to school. And it felt like she just, I mean, the ball just got rolling right afterwards. She helped my parents and, you know, fill out all the FAFSA paperwork. She helped me write my essay to the school. And next thing you know, I get accepted to Shamanah University of Honolulu. And never been to Hawaii before.

It was definitely a culture shock, but right after graduating high school, like two months later, I found myself in... Hey, you there in the baby registry rabbit hole. The thing experienced parents agree on? A Nanit smart baby monitor. One camera, one app for video, breathing motion monitoring, and personalized sleep insights. All in one place. Check in from anywhere. Get real-time safety notifications and capture every sleepy smile and good night kiss.

The best part, those insights help you get more sleep, starting night one. Add it to your registry or shop at Nanit, N-A-N-I-T-com. Hey, you there, in the baby registry rabbit hole. The thing experienced parents agree on, a Nanit smart baby monitor, one camera, one app for video, breathing motion monitoring, and personalized sleep insights. All in one place. Check in from anywhere, get real-time safety notifications,

and capture every sleepy smile and good night kiss. The best part, those insights help you get more sleep, starting night one. Add it to your registry or shop at Nanit, N-A-N-I-T-com. Hey, you there, in the baby registry rabbit hole. The thing experienced parents agree on, a Nanit smart baby monitor, one camera, one app for video, breathing motion monitoring, and personalized sleep insights. All in one place.

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I was studying psychology, and the reason I picked that was because of her. I wanted to work with at-risk teens. I wanted to work with, you know, that was the population of kids that I wanted to work with or the population of people I wanted to work with. So I started to study psychology, and when I, you're broke as a college kid, my parents, you know, low-income, I come from a low-income family. So they were like, you know, I wasn't getting an allowance or anything like that. So I started working right away.

And I got a part-time job working as a security officer at the Queens Medical Center of Honolulu. And it serves as the state's trauma center, but it also serves as like the psychiatric center for like the state or, you know, especially for Oahu. So Honolulu PD, they would bring in their psych patients. and I quickly learned that none of these people were psych. Maybe they were, maybe they were, but they were all high on meth. Like every single person they brought in, they were high as shit on math. So when the handcuffs came off in the emergency room, the fights were on. Like, you know, patients were fighting patients.

Patients were, or, you know, the patients that we call them patients, but it was like the folks that Honolulu PD brought in, they were fighting nurses and they were fighting doctors. and they would call security. And then here we come in and we run in and we take the person down to the ground and we, you know, we fight them. We strap them down on the gurney with the leather restraints. We helped get them medicated. And I was like, holy shit, the adrenaline rush. Like, I love that adrenaline rush, right?

Like, I'm getting paid to, like, you know, break up fights, like take people down to the ground. And they would fight back. Like, they weren't just like letting us, you know, take them down. Like, they were fighting back. They would escape from the, from the rec center. they'd be running down Punchbowl Street and then we are chasing them on foot. We take them down to the ground.

Like we're fighting them in the middle of the street. Freaking cars are honking and we're throwing handcuffs on them. We're walking them back to the emergency room. You know, we're fighting up like, we're breaking up domestic, you know, domestic violence issues that are going up on the,

going on at, you know, the other floors, family fights, you know, that go on. And I was like, holy crap. I don't know if I want to work with at-risk teens anymore, I think I might want to be a cop. And it was like, and I never thought about being a cop. When I was real young, probably like 12, 13, I remember thinking like I never wanted to be a cop, but I was like, maybe I could be a homicide detective. And when you're young and you don't know the process, I thought like, okay, I could just become a detective. Like I could just apply for a law

enforcement agency and I could become a homicide detective if I have a college degree. And I know it's stupid to think about that, but now I know, and I get sometimes people ask me, you know, hey, how do I become a detective? I'm like, well, you've got to be a cop first. You know, that's a promotion. You need to be a cop first. You can't just become a detective. But I remember watching that movie seven with Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt. Is that the cowboy movie? No, no, no. It was like with that, where there, there was a one murder and he's killing a whole bunch of people and he's going by like the different like um um like the seven i think it's like the seven sins in the bible like gluttony and and lust and all kinds of so he's killing all these

people i remember watching that movie and thinking like damn that would be cool to be a homicide detective like deal with dead bodies and blood spatter and all that stuff so um so i never thought about being a cop other than a detective but now when i'm working at the queen's medical center and you're rubbing elbows with Honolulu PD officers and some of the security officers that I was working with, they got hired with Honolulu PD. And I started tossing around the idea like, man, I think I want to be a cop, the adrenaline rush,

like chasing people, fighting people. Like, that's right up my alley. Like, I could do that. And I started tossing around that idea. I applied for state corrections. I applied for the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility, and I got picked up. And so I remember I was like, man, I think this is going to be my dream job.

Like I'm kind of a cop, right? Correctional officer. I'm kind of a cop. And I'm working with at-risk teens, right? It's the, you know, they house the worst or the worst like kids, you know, with the most violent crimes, longest sentences, whatever. This is, this might be my dream job. And, man, I remember the first day, like working out on my own, you know, you do your, you know, your phase and you, you know, you're teamed up with another, you know, senior officer. you go around the modules and that like last for about a week or two and then you're cut out on

your own and I remember the first day working alone and I was like I fucking hate kids I fucking hate this population like I I do not want to be work work with at-risk teens I do not like this population that it takes us it takes a special person to deal with teenagers right it takes a special and I realize that I'm not that special person like that's not that's not me I'm not that I'm not that person. I don't have that patience, especially at that time, right? I'm in my 20s. Fellows, listen, Blue Chew took one look at the competition, laughed and said, nah, we're going gold. Blue Chewold is the newest innovation from the number one chewable ED brand, and this thing is a unit. We're talking a four-and-one formula designed to bring energy, connection, and

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That's promo code lock. Locked in, visit Bluchu.com for more details and important safety information. And as always, we thank Bluchu for sponsoring the podcast. Was there something specifically that happened? It was just like the kids didn't play by any rules. You know what I mean? Like there was no rules in my mind, you know, hanging out with gangsters and like hearing the stories.

Like in my mind, I was thinking like these kids are going to play by the rules that I've heard like my uncles and my cousins will talk about like you know prison and and jail rules right where like you can't just go pop off on anybody like you got to ask for permission like there's there's a set of rules you can't just go and hit anybody right um and i just in my mind i thought that these kids were going to play by the same rules as adults and i was i was i was mistaken like they were even like you know christmas they would pop off right and that's like the most peaceful usually it's the most peaceful time when you're locked up during the holidays because nobody wants to you know nobody wants you know visitation and all that stuff to be broken out phone calls not to you know you

not being able to you know make phone calls and stuff and and in my mind I'm just like okay Thanksgiving is coming up like it's a week away like all these kids are gonna they didn't give a shit about any of that and there wasn't that much that we can do like yeah we could we could lock them up in their in their cell for a little while but they'd find their way out like in a in a day or two you know what I mean and it was like there was like no punishment. So I was like, what am I, like, what am I doing? Like, I'm, it's like fighting an uphill battle. And this is back in, I don't know, like 2006, 2006. So you can just imagine in today's world, like there's even less punishment. There's less that, you know, correctional or youth

correctional officers are able to, are able to do. It must be, I could just imagine that it must be harder. I've talked to people who who work with juveniles and they're like, man, it sucks. Like, there's no, there's no punishment. So when I was working at the Hawaii Youth Correctional facility, the people were cool. The kids were cool. Like, it was just, it was just not my cup of tea. It wasn't just my, it was just not my cup of tea. And I just remember thinking, I think I'm going to be a cop. I think I'm going to apply for a law enforcement agency. And I started to apply. I started in Hawaii first, applying for Honolulu. P.D. for for Maui PD. Um, my background, I was a little too honest, uh, in my background.

Uh, I put everything down on paper. Um, and I'm glad that I did because now nothing could come back and bite me in the ass, you know, um, nothing could come back and bite me in the ass now, but I threw everything down on paper. You fill out this packet, it's as a PhD or a PHS past history, past history questionnaire or past history statement. It's like, 40, 50 pages of, you know, tell us all about the citations you ever had, moving citations, parking citations, what school did you go to, all the addresses that you've ever lived at, family background, your parents, do you have anybody in your family who's ever been arrested, anybody who's involved in gangs, do you, what drugs have you, you know, tell us about the

drugs that you've done every single drug, every single time? And I'm thinking, every single time like even weed they're like yeah even we like every single time that you did it like tell us about it so i was a little too honest i'm like let me tell you all about it like let me let me let me print out extra pages you know let me tell you about all the crimes that i've committed that i never got caught for everything from like stupid shit to like you know egging you know throwing eggs at a house on Halloween or something or, you know, you know, taking my mom's car without permission, right? You know, grand theft auto or something. And in my mind, you know, I'm thinking like, oh, these are crimes. Technically, these are crimes, right? But it was just joy riding, but it's basically

the theft of a vehicle. So I put everything on paper. So Honolulu, PD, Maui, God, I applied for San Diego PD, San Diego Sheriff's Department, Long Beach, Border Patrol, back in in 2008 or 2009, I applied for a whole bunch of different agencies and I kept getting disqualified. San Diego PD, San Diego Sheriff's Department, they were the two big agencies that I was applying for because I wanted to eventually come back home to San Diego. So they disqualified me multiple times, both agencies. And they would give you a letter and say like, hey, you know, you're disqualified for five years. You can't reapply for five years.

You can't reapply for three years, two years, one year. Different agencies gave me different letters. And finally in 2016 or in 2013, I moved back. And she was my fiance at the time. She's my wife now. But excuse me, my fiance, she moved back to her and I. We moved back to San Diego. And I got picked up with San Diego County.

animal control. And I did that for a little under two years. And in 2016, San Diego PD, they gave me a shot. So how long were you in corrections for in Hawaii? Just about two years. Okay. Yeah, probably a little, a little over two years, maybe like two years in a few months. And you went from straight there to animal control? Tell us about animal control. I don't think we've ever had an animal control cop on the show. Yeah. So, uh, so. Especially in a big city like San Diego. So I was working for San Diego County Animal Control. And, you know, to be honest, that was a fun. It was a fun job.

The people that I worked with were fun. The calls that we went to, the calls that we investigated, those were fun. I've always been, I realized that I've always been a shit magnet. And when you get into my story, right, you know, folks are going to find out a little more as to why I'm a shit magnet. But in Animal Control, one of the most. significant things that happen in animal control that I don't I don't actually talk about it a lot is there was five there was a there was a there was a like county fires that happened back in 2014 or 2015 out in east county San Diego everything was burning out in like alpine um like

hamul hacamba area and I respond and obviously we're like animal controls considered first responders like we're rolling out there with the sheriff's apartment with CHP. We're helping evacuate homes. We're helping evacuate, you know, the animals, the livestock, horses and loading them up onto our trailers. And it was, it was crazy, like loading up chickens or whatever it may be people that have animals out there. And I was driving down this, this highway. It was like a one lane, one lane highway. It's in the middle of nowhere out in the mountains. And everything had already been burned. So we're driving, I'm driving through. And that particular day, I had a ride along with me. And she was with the, a news agency in San Diego. She was doing a ride along with me to,

she was helping cover, cover the fires. And I have a ride along with me. And I see, there was a fire, fire truck passing me on the opposite direction. And they kind of flag me down and I lowered my window because it's still, it's like smoky out there. And so I had my windows. up. I lowered it down and the fire guy tells me he's like, hey, right as you go around this bend, there's going to be a, it's an emu. There's going to be an emu. It's like a huge ass ostrich, right? There's an emu and it's burned and it's still alive. It's walking right in the middle of the road. And I was like, okay. So I'm thinking, shit. I know in the academy, I never really had to deal with those in my career up until that point. So I remember I was like in the academy

I remember, you know, ostriches and emos, like one kicks backwards and one kicks forward and they have long ass like nails. They'll fuck you up. You know what I mean? And I was like, I was like, shit, which one was it? I'm like looking at my cell phone and I have no reception out there. And I'm like, well, let's try to figure out like, you know, I'm going to roll the dice and see what happens. So I start rolling around that bend and I see, I see the emu. and it's off onto the side of the road.

And it's, I don't know, it's off into the side of the road. And I park my car. I get out and I had that ride along with me. Like, she sets up her camera. So she starts, like, she starts recording. And as I'm, like, trying to get close to that emu, and it was, it was burnt. Like, it's, like, its feathers were, like, melted. It was, it was fucked up.

And, uh, as I start to, like, walk over to that, there's this, like, burnt down, uh, almost It was like a shed. It was all like broken and burnt down. And it was like, it was off, off in a little distance. And this guy comes out. He's like, hey, get the fuck off my property. And I'm like, I'm like, hey, bro, I'm just trying to get this bird. And he's like, get the fuck off my property. This is private property. And I'm looking. I'm like, I'm like, like three steps onto the dirt from the road. I'm like, this can't be like, his house is like way out, you know, that shed or whatever it was. It was way out, you know, kind of a distance. This, I don't think this is his property. I was like,

like dude just give me like 10 minutes let me try to capture this bird my plan was to just like to put it down right to euthanize it because it was all burnt it was messed up and um and so he didn't say anything he walks right back into his shed he comes out with a fucking shotgun and he's like get the fuck off my property and he like points the gun at me and i look over to the lady and then he ends up like putting the gun up in the air and shooting like firing off around i was like oh shit we're not armed You know, animal control. We have like a, we have a baton or something, right? Baton and pepper spray, I think.

And I was like, oh, shit. So like she grabs all her, her shit. She just like jumps into the, into the car. I run around. And then next thing, you know, I'm like driving off. And this, I'm looking at my review mirror. This dude's like popping off rounds in my, like I see the, the, the shotgun.

And I was like, holy crap. So I, you know, I put out, you know, hey, I'm being shot at whatever. And the cavalry comes like CHP and border patrols. and the sheriff's apartment. That was one of my crazy, interesting stories, and that's just the beginning of my career. And I don't talk about that much. I don't have an opportunity to talk about that much,

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Those insights help you get more sleep. Starting night one. Add it to your registry or shop at Nanit, N-N-I-T-com. In a couple of months after that, I got hired. Why would that guy shoot at you? So out there, it's like the Wild Wild West. I was like, apparently he thought that I was on his property.

We wear the tan uniform, so we look like the sheriff's apartment. We wear at the time, the animal control we wore. I don't know what they wear now. We wore the green, you know, the green pants with the tan, you know, uniform shirt and the, you know, the badge, the star badge. And are you armed too? We're not armed. Oh, so like out here, I know. know like animal control it's like an actual cop okay from the like say the Danbury police department

someone there would work animal control um so in your case your guys aren't armed no we're not armed uh we have um we have like arrest powers like we could write citations like we we can make arrest we never like actually made physical arrest we have like PD or the sheriff's department make the make the physical arrest but um but yeah we didn't we weren't we weren't armed so was he charged with attempted murder? I thought he was going to be. He was charged with like discharging a firearm, like negligent discharge of a firearm and some other like, you know, he pleaded down to some other stuff.

But he thought, I forgot what his story was. His story was like he didn't know that I was animal control. He didn't know that I was like a law enforcement officer. He thought that I was trespass. I was like some stranger trespassing on his property. But it was crazy. Have you ever responded to one of the? those like crazy cat lady type houses or hoarders or anything like that yeah yeah those are those are

nasty like you're you walk into a you walk into a hoarder's house that has cat cats and you all the the cat urine has like what is it ammonia or something like that and you it'll feel like menthol in your eyes like even even breathing it's it's it's freaking nasty yeah it's some nasty stuff your your eyes were water up um sometimes you can barely breathe like the first thing you want to do you just start opening people's windows. Like I've gone to people's houses where just trash and just mess is like stacked up to the ceiling.

There's cat shit on the ceiling. There's cat, like literally like on the ceiling. There's cat shit on the walls. There's like dead rats just linger. I mean, it's sad. How do people live like that? I don't know. Because it's California,

do you also respond to like mountain lion calls like in the house or what snakes? Snakes, yeah. Like rattlesnakes. Yeah. Like in the house? I've never had to deal with a mountain line or anything like that happened, like where they leave the back door open and the mountain line comes in? I never heard of it, but I mean, I'm not at San Diego.

I've heard of it happening like up in, like, L.A. or like some other, some other areas, but I never heard of it happening in San Diego. I wouldn't even respond to that. And then I was seeing videos of like the, is it mountain lines or coyotes that hop the fence and grab people's dogs? Both. I've seen, I've seen coyotes. Yeah, coyotes hop my fence. So, yeah. That's nuts.

Yeah. All right. So you do that and then you finally get the call. to transfer the sheriff's department? San Diego PD. Oh, San Diego. So, yeah. So San Diego PD, they gave me a shot.

And it took years for me to get hired because I kept getting disqualified. But whenever that, you know, three year or two year or one year mark would come up, whenever they would, whatever was placed on that letter, I would reapply. Because I knew that that's what I wanted to do. I was going more into it for the excitement. excitement of the career. It's something different. It pays good. But I'm like, man, I can, you could do good stuff. Like maybe I can become a cop and go back to the community that I was born and raised in and make a difference. Like maybe change the, change the way that, you know,

some of the teenagers or the community thinks of police officers. Maybe I can be that, that one person, right um that's what i thought do you think that's the wrong reason to become a cop like chasing the excitement how you were thinking about it years before when you're still in hawaii um no uh i i i think i think a lot of times not a lot of times i think some people may come into the profession not knowing that it's going to be high adrenaline that you're going to be faced with dangerous shit dangerous people um that you're going to be going to be faced with dangerous shit dangerous people um that you're have to make split-second decisions that you're going to have to be you're going to have to fight sometimes that you're going to you might have to use force against people sometimes i think people

come into this profession and they don't really realize what they're getting themselves into the adrenaline rush it may not it may not it may impact them in a negative way they might they may not be used to that type of that type of adrenaline rush like getting into a fight with somebody at work is not normal, right? That's not normal. And some people, I don't think, I'm not sure if some people are prepared for that. So I think, I think it's important to, to chase, not chase that rush, but to get into it not only for the excitement of the job, but for, you got to want to help people. I think at the end of the day, when you're hiring people, agencies are hiring people, you need to hire people that want to help people. You need a higher

alpha type people, people that are going to run towards that gunfire, right? They're going to run towards a bad guy that's armed with the gun. You know, whatever it may be, you need to hire those type of people. You can't hire people that are going to shy away from violent situations, you know, going after a parolee who is telling you like, no, they're not going to cuff up. what are you going to do? I think it's important to hire people that are again, that are alphas

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Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I think everything happens for a reason. God has his plan as to win and where and why. It was when I got the call that I was getting hired, it was humbling. Because I didn't think that somebody like me, the way that I grew up, all the stuff that I did as a, as a, as a, young, dumb kid that I would have the opportunity to be a cop. I thought I was going to continue to get, continue to get disqualified for all the different agencies that I applied for. So it was, it was humbling.

God has, God, God, God does things on his own time and, and, and I'm glad that it happened the way, the way it happened. But it definitely, and it definitely matured me too, because I went in, God, I was like, 29 or 30. So I had some life experience under my belt. I had some work experience under my belt. I had been working, you know, corrections, animal control. So I had been in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the responder field for a little while. So I think it, it prepared me to do the job as a, as a police officer. So I think that a little bit of time of continuing to get disqualified, um, because it took me like seven, eight, nine years to finally get, to finally get hired. So did you ever find out why they finally decide to let you get hired? I just remember getting a phone call from my background investigator.

And I answered the phone and she said, she said, Mr. Martinez, you know, this is so-and-so. She said, Mr. Martinez, you have a very interesting and extensive background. And I was like, she's going to, she's going to disqualify me. I know it. And before she could say anything else, I kind of butted in. And I said, ma'am, I understand that the San Diego Police Department, you guys don't hire angels. And I'm far from an angel. But you guys say that you hire honest people.

And for the past, you know, seven, eight, nine years, however long it's been, I've been nothing but honest. There's no skeletons in my closet. Everything is on paper. Everything I've done, it's on paper. It's all there. You're not going to find anything else in my background. And so, yeah, she gave me a, she gave me a shot. So what happens once they finally let you and you go to training?

Yeah, so you go to the academy. It's a regional academy. So you have different recruits from different agencies. You have the Sheriff's Department, San Diego PD, Chula Vista, La Mesa, National City, Escondi. You know, like you have agencies all within San Diego County that go to a six-month police academy. And it's not a live-in. You go home. It's at a college out there.

Would your wife think or your fiancé at the time about you actually getting into the police department? Yeah. So when I first went to the academy, I was a brand new dad. We had our first son. He was a baby. And I had just gotten married the year prior. So there was a lot of life changes. I think she was all about it.

She was super supportive. We needed the money. So she was like, heck yeah, you're going to get paid. You're going to, you know, her and I, where I'm like, heck, yeah, we're going to both, we're going to get paid more than when I'm getting paid at animal control. So, yeah, let's do it. So she was supportive of it. The question that I get a lot is family.

So I still had family that was involved in the streets and, you know, they, They used drugs involved in the in the gang life. And nobody ever really gave me a hard time. They gave me a little shit like, oh, watch out the hood us coming. Like, oh, here comes the cop. But other than that, some people kind of stopped talking to me, which was, it's fine. It is what it is. And, you know, we would see each other on Christmas or family, you know, holidays and stuff,

family functions, my grandma's birthday, stuff like that. but nobody ever gave me, nobody ever really gave me a hard time. How do you feel the training was? I expected the academy to be more difficult. It was, for me, you know, I was looking at, you know, YouTube videos. I'm like, damn, they're going to smoke us for like a month, two months, right? It's going to be nonstop. Let's just say this.

I expected more. There was days that it was, it was tough. but I was expecting to get smoked. But I did it. So once you finally pass training, tell us about day one on the job. Yeah. So I pass training. We start phase training.

There's San Diego, well, not just San Diego, but agencies. Most agencies have four phases of training. It's a month each phase. and when I first started, they don't do this anymore, but when I first started, they had, they had like in-service training, which they teach you about, like, you know, how to use the computer and all the database systems and, you know, different, you know, just San Diego PD related, uh, related things, very like agency specific type things that, I think we did that for about a week or two. And then afterwards, I had two weeks of, um, oh, God, it wasn't called

phase training. It was called, it was like pre-phase. It was like pre-phase. So you did two weeks. I did two weeks at Western Division. And then you do another two weeks at Eastern Division. And then we started our phase training. So our phase one. And I did, you know, one, two, three, four phases. I went to southeastern division, mid-city, northern, and, or it was northeastern. So I did my phases and San Diego PD we at the time there was nine different divisions. Today we have 10 divisions now, but we have nine divisions and I think it's during our third phase. They allowed us to pick our top three choices of which division we would like to be assigned to once we graduated from phase training. And it's not a graduation like a ceremony.

You just like you finish your last day of phase training and you're done. but um so they allow us to pick your top three choices of which division you would like to be assigned to and depending on how well you there's a whole bunch of things that come into play but a lot of it is how well do you do at during phase training um you know where do you live like they're not gonna if you live in orange county which is you know the county north of san diego they're not going to assign you all the way to southern division probably even if you want it because as a brand new rookie cop you're still you're still learning it's a lot of to learn you're going to be you're going to be doing a lot of overtime and they're not going to

you know that's like a two hour three hour drive with traffic sometimes right so they're not going to send you all the way down by the border they're going to try to work with you so i pick southern division as my number one choice southern division south san diego it was where i was born and raised our southern neighbor is tihuana our northern neighbor is the city of chula vista and i wanted to go back and and give back to the community that I was born and raised in, right? That's, I mean, now I'm a cop. You know, I could go. I know the, I know the area where at least I thought I did. I knew the area. I'm going to go back to work in the community that I was born and raised in. And I got it. They picked me up for, for Southern Division. It was my number one choice,

and I got picked up. And what would a typical day be like for you? So for me, my career, my career was pretty unique. My first day on the job, out of phase training, I'm a real, I'm a real cop. My first day, I'm working graveyard shift. I come into work. Again, I'm a brand new cop. A couple days prior, I had just, like, you know, loaded up my locker and got a brand new locker and I'm feeling good.

I'm coming into work and all my shit is all creased up. My uniforms all on. and pressed and my boots are all shiny like I'm feeling good like I shaved my head like I'm I'm excited I'm nervous I'm scared right I don't know anybody at Southern Division I didn't do a phase over there but I I was born and raised there right so I get in there I'm working graveyard shift so we start at excuse me we start at 9 p.m. we get off at 7 o'clock in the morning and I got there early I'm changing into my uniform. And I always tell this story when I'm at different conferences. I'm changing into my uniform. And I remember, you know, the OGs start to like trickle in. People start

walking in. And I said, I told somebody, I was like, hey, good morning, sir. I mean, good afternoon. I mean, good evening. It's 7 p.m. But I'm like nervous and I don't know what to say to these guys. They don't know who I am. And I remember somebody looking at me, like, telling me, hey, dude, shut the fuck up. Don't talk to us. Put your clothes on. Like, you have no pants on. Like, you know, put your shit on. And I'm like, all right, cool. So I put my clothes on. I get into the lineup room. And as people start trickling into the lineup room, my sergeant, I didn't know he was my sergeant at the time. He gets up into the podium. And he's a hard ass, you know, squared away, you know, fit, fit guy, ex-Marine, you know, former Marine. And, and he's up at the podium. And like,

lineup is about to start, like, in a minute. And my phone. keeps going off in my pocket. And I finally look at my phone and I have a whole bunch of missed calls for my wife. So I look at the text messages and the first text message my wife sends me is why aren't you answering your phone? And I'm thinking, what do you mean why I'm not answering my phone? I start working like 30 seconds. That's why I'm not answering my phone. It's my first day on the job. Like I'm a real cop today. Like I'm not in phase training. I'm on my own. And the second text message, she sends me is hello with like a shit ton of question marks i've gotten those text messages before that's when you know that you fucked up right i'm like dude she's pissed off like hello with like a whole

bunch of question marks the next text message she sends me is my water just broke i'm on my way to the hospital site my wife got pregnant again when i was you know during you know um during the academy and and during phase training i remember sweating and i haven't even started my first day on on the job like we're in line of work hasn't even started and i remember raising my hand up and i'm like shaking and and and i'm like sitting right next to the sergeant at the podium and he looks at me he's like what i said sir i'm so sorry to tell you this my wife's water just broke right now she's on her way to the hospital and everybody in line up was like busting up laughing and i'm sweating i'm like i'm like how can this happen on my first day on the job how can this happen

and he everybody's cracking up and he looks at me he said well you better get the fuck out of here then And I'm like, all right. So I got the fuck out of there. And my wife gave birth that night to our second son. And I always say this, I should have known the way that my first day on the job started. I should have known that the rest of my career was going to be a shit show. And it has been life and work has just been, it's been abnormal, let's say the least. But that's the way my first day on the job took about a week and a half off of work.

and came to work and I hit the ground running. I was involved in everything that was going on at Southern Division. Every day I came to work, it was like a show on cops every single day. Foot pursuits, vehicle pursuits, gangsters, dope, guns, you know, use of force. And my first day on the job, my first day back to work after my wife gave birth to our son, I was partnered up with my with my buddy Amir and he was like the senior he was more you know obviously more senior than me he's my buddy now I didn't know who he was at the time but we respond to a burglary in progress where these two guys took like assault rifles from the house

and my first day on the job we're chasing these dudes through the park we're jumping over fences were chasing them through the street and these guys are like and they ended up being teenagers. They're armed with like, you know, rifles. And I was like, whole. And this is my first day on the job. There was like thousands of rounds that they had like dropped in the park and, and we're like picking up all the all the rounds. And I was like, holy shit.

Like this is my first day on the job. And from that day on, man, it was just like, it was just like one thing after another, after another. But I'm just a regular patrol officer. Like, you're still handling. all your, you know, your domestic violence, your petty thefts, your, you know, your, you know, domestic violence, petty thefts, your vehicle collisions, your transient calls. Like, you're still handling all the regular police work.

Like, you're just doing the police work. I remember when I was in phase training, one of my FTO, excuse me, one of my FTOs told me, take care of the OGs when you get out on your own. cover them on stops. You go and you take their paper. Don't ever let the OGs get stuck on paper. Take care of the OGs. And I started to build my reputation.

And they told me that's the best way to build your reputation. Take care of the OGs. Handle your own beat, but handle everybody else's beat. Your sergeant lets everybody out early on Thanksgiving, on Christmas, on New Year's. you better be the last one driving out of that division. You're a rookie, act like it. And I took it to heart. This is coming from, you know, OGs, senior guys.

And there was something about the OGs and the senior guys that that was easy to do. That wasn't hard because coming from the environment and the way that I grew up, like, oh, geez, you respect them. Like, you listen to them. You listen to their advice. You listen to what they have to say. So I was like, oh, that's easy. Like, I'm going to take care of the OGs. And I did.

like I would be getting stuck on paper. You know, I'll be taking reports, taking reports. And, you know, I'm stuck at the end of my shift doing three, four, five papers. And I type like this. Like, I don't, you know, guys at work, like, they just look at the screen and they're typing like this. Not me. I'm like typing like with my, with one finger, you know, real quick. And I still make mistakes.

So, um, so it just took me, it, it took, uh, it took a lot of time to get into the groove of things. But I feel like I got into it, I feel like I got into it pretty quick as far as like the, the, like the fast pace, like the, the fast pace of proactivity. I got exposed to a lot of stuff really early in my, in my career, in the beginning of my career. What do you think was the hardest thing to adjust to as a rookie cop? The schedule, the like the graveyard shift. the very early on in my career like the first month i i know this now looking back of my career but i didn't know how much information i wanted to share with my wife about my shift and i didn't know

how much information that she wanted to hear um i didn't know if she wanted to hear the details of you know the dude that smoked himself or the sid's deaths or the you know the the drowning or the I almost did this. There was, I remember one time coming home, and it was like 11 o'clock in the morning. My wife was a stay-home mom. We had two young boys at home. And I came home at like 11, 11 in the morning. And we normally get off at 7 in the morning, but you're stuck on overtime doing paper.

And I tell her, you know, I come home and I'm excited. And then I was like, I was chasing behind some gangster. And, you know, he was running from me. He turned the corner and I'm chasing him. He reached into his waistband. And he tossed him. gun, but I thought he was going to turn around and shoot me. And I unholstered and I almost shot him in his back like crazy ass, crazy ass night. And I remember her like, like just looking at me like,

dude, I haven't eaten breakfast. I haven't slept. Like I haven't brushed my teeth. I haven't shower. I don't care about your like take the kids, you know, take the kids like help me out. Like I don't care about your story right now. Like cool story, but you need to help me out. And I realized that now, looking back at the beginning of my career, that our conversations became shorter and shorter and shorter every single day. You know, I would come home and I couldn't even make, I had no gas in the tank. I couldn't even make simple decisions. But she would ask me, like, are you hungry? I'm like, yeah, I'm hungry.

What do you want to eat? I don't give a shit. Like leftovers, order pizza. Like, you want me to go pick up some food? you know she would ask me like how how was your night how was your how was your shift did you do anything crazy i'm like no i was busy i'm tired uh it was crazy like the conversations became shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter when i came home but her night didn't even we never even addressed it i don't even i'm positive that we didn't even notice it i only noticed it now looking

back at him like dang it was like the first month like the first month of my career the It already began impacting home life. And I didn't know what that feeling was of not being able to make a decision to being, you know, being completely empty, no gas in the tank. I never felt that. I never felt that working as a security officer. I never felt that working as an animal control officer. I never felt that working as a youth correctional officer. Never felt that feeling in my life.

So I didn't know. Like I didn't know what it was. I think that's probably the adjustment that most people don't realize is happening in the beginning of their career. I think that's probably like the biggest adjustment. It's a shift change in adjusting to home life, going from work and then going back home. Like you're no longer a cop. We think we are. We think we're cops.

Like when we get home, we think that we're still like we still have the authority. And my wife was like, you don't run shit here. You know what I mean? You don't run shit here. Like, don't tell me to sit down, stand up, turn around, you know? I didn't. But in your mind, you're like, you know, you still feel like you, that you have to play that part. I think it's just automatic.

I don't think we even think about it. We just get home. We start barking orders to our kids or, you know, family members and stuff. And we don't realize that you have to adjust. Like, you're a cop for work. You might have the power and the authority to tell people what to do. what not to do. I need you to stand here, not there, whatever it may be. Pull over. Give me your license and registration. But when you're at home, you're just dad and husband, you know,

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Prize picks, it's good to be right. Tell us about the first significant event that happens in your career. Yeah. So eight months into my career, I'm a still brand new rookie. I'm out of phase training. Eight months, May 27th of 2018. I come into work, still working graveyard shift, and my wife calls me, and she says our oldest son, he was about two years old at the time, he just fell off this plastic slide. He's holding on to his right arm.

I think he broke his arm. I'm going to take him to the emergency room. So I said, okay, it's graveyard shift tonight. It's going to be a slow night. I will go meet you at the hospital. when I clear a lineup. And why the hell did I think May 27th of 2018, Memorial weekend, graveyard shift,

a Saturday night was going to be a slow night. I was going to have time to do anything. I was young, dumb, and stupid. So I go into lineup, we clear lineup. I go load my car. We log onto the computer and my partner, my partner and I, who's a main character of my story

because he was with me on a whole bunch of my incidents. We log on to the computer. We have a domestic violence call holding in our beat down in Sanicidro. We go down in Sanicidro. We handle it. It's a big nothing. We're about to walk away. There's no crime.

Nobody's going to jail. And as we're clearing the call, my partner and my sergeant, they were both 10-4 that I was going to go to the hospital check on my son. And as we're clearing the call, dispatch puts out that there was a Hispanic male on the north side of our division, armed with a knife. running around the intersection, chasing people in vehicles. And this is like 10.30 at night. So, and my partner and I, we never shied away from, you know, he was more senior than me.

And we never shied away from anything. So we're like, let's go, let's go help out. Let's go handle it, you know. By the time we get there, it's going to be all done anyways. It's not even in our beat. So we're not going to take any paper on it. Somebody else is going to take the paper. So we start driving up there.

Another, they update the call that Border Patrol has. one at gunpoint. So Border Patrol happened to be driving through the intersection. Bad guy chases a wrong car. Now they have them at gunpoint. So we get there. And when we arrive on scene, it's myself and three other San Diego PD officers that were on scene. And a shit ton of Border Patrol officers running around, they're running around everywhere.

And there was a point where the, when we walk up to the scene, Border Patrol has the suspect at gunpoint but he had already been pushed the suspect had pushed him all the way up into the intersection and there was a bunch of bushes around him right behind him there was nowhere else for him to go and I remember thinking like oh damn he's going to shoot him

because the suspect kept going like this making like movements like he was going to rush him and um and he didn't and for whatever reason that border patrol he decided not to shoot him and I'm not I don't Monday morning quarterback anybody. That shit's been done to me.

I don't do it to other people. The people that talk the most shit as to like, why didn't that person shoot? Those are people who haven't been involved in anything. And the people who have been involved in shootings or have been involved in critical incidents, they don't talk shit because they know like, hey, I wasn't there. Like, I probably would have done this, but I don't know. I wasn't there. I wasn't breathing it.

I wasn't smelling it. I wasn't seeing it. I wasn't hearing it. Like it's hard, you know, you can't judge most of the time, right? You can't judge, you know, somebody as to why they did it or why they did something because you just, you just weren't there. You weren't seeing what they were seeing, whatever it may be. But for whatever reason, that BPA agent decided not to shoot the suspect. We end up shooting four taser deployments.

Three of them impacted the suspect, ineffective. There was about 10 beanbag shotgun rounds that went off ineffective. We were giving him verbal command. man, as I dropped the knife, get on the ground, everything was ineffective. There came a point where the suspect runs away. I go chasing him. He runs right back into the intersection. He's kind of bouncing around.

He's looking at, you know, all four San Diego PD officers, including myself, that are standing in front of him. And he kind of like runs, kind of like rushes us a little bit and backs up. We don't shoot him. And he's kind of bouncing around, bouncing around. He's like looking around at all four of us. He's bouncing around. And then I remember just locking eyes with him.

And everything just. went silent. The way I explained it or I described it is like the world just stops spinning. I went completely deaf. I didn't hear anything. I remember locking eyes with him and I remember thinking he's going to run towards me right now. He just had this look in his eyes like he was going to run towards me. He does. He run towards me. I start firing a six-year veteran and then his trainee all three of us shoot the suspect as he's running towards me and i remember when i was firing i remember watching every single one of my brass getting ejected out the side of my gun i mean it was it was tumbling like in slow motion in the air the smoke from my gunlight was rising up like i remember

seeing the smoke like just slowly rising up when as i was shooting i i remember like i felt like i remember watching every single round going down range impacting the suspect he drops to the ground he's holding the knife in his hand still i'm yelling hey drop the knife we got to get your medical attention and he he he doesn't drop the knife but he starts to he starts to his belly starts to like do this like quiver like it starts to like shake and you could tell by the time he hit the ground his belly started to kind of like bloat like it was getting filled with blood like his belly started to like It was already rising. And his belly starts to kind of quiver.

And his arm gets like real, like rigid. It goes right up in the air. And then he goes limp. At the time, I didn't realize that he was dying, like he was dying. He was dying in front of us. We go in, we take them into custody. And fire comes in. And I always say this joke.

Fire comes in because they're not first responders. They're second responders. They wait for us to clear the scene, make it safe for them. And then we, but they're still the heroes, so I can't talk shit. We're not the heroes. They are. They come in, they start working on the suspect. And my adrenaline is through the roof.

I mean, I'm like, I felt like my sweat was like as thick as syrup. Like, it felt like, it felt like slime coming out of my pores. I was like hyperventilating. I was trying to take deep breaths and I felt like I couldn't get enough air in my lungs. I'm like pacing back and forth. Like, people were asking me questions. Hey, did you, did you shoot? I said, yeah, yeah, I shot.

And as I'm pacing back and forth, fires working on the suspect. The suspect, his head never moved, but his head is like tilted to the side. And I remember him tracking me back and forth with his eyes. And like, it was from the moment we both locked eyes with one another to the moment that he died, it was like we never stopped staring at each other.

It was just this weird, it was weird. And again, I went completely deaf. I didn't hear my rounds go off. I didn't hear anybody else's rounds go off. I found no recoil in my gun. It was a trip. So suspects ends up dying right in front of me, in front of all of us. And the entire homicide process starts.

We get taken back to, you know, Southern Division, the chief and the captain, the lieutenants. They walk up to us, hey, you know, good job. We're glad that you're not hurt. My peer support officer comes. And my peer support officer, he was. an OG. Jeff, he was an OG. He had been in four officers involved shootings in his career. He had did like 29 years on the department. I remember him walking up behind me. He was like, hey, man, I'm Jeff Sterling. I'm going to be your peer support officer. And I've been in four officer

of all shootings. And I'm here to, I'm here to walk you through the entire process. I'm not going home until you go home. If there's any questions that you have, I'm here to help you. I'm here to answer them. I was like, all right, perfect. our lawyer comes and I sit down with my lawyer we watch our body worn camera footage you know I give her my statement and then we watch our body worn camera footage and then uh you know she's like yeah you know what this is a good shoot you could go ahead and give your statement to homicide and then we got transported back to the scene to do a walkthrough with our homicide unit and it's basically like hey you know that the person laying in the middle of the street that's the person I was shooting at I shot this direction I shot this about this any rounds. I think I was here when I started shooting. And it's, it's pretty brief. But I remember when we went to do the walkthrough, the community was already out. And I remember this is Memorial weekend on a Saturday night. The community was already out. And I remember hearing, like, people yelling, you fucking killers, fuck you pigs, you fucking pigs, you fucking murders.

and I just remember that, I remember feeling a certain way about that, hearing that, thinking, damn, the community that I was born and raised in, the community that I thought I was going to make a difference and a positive difference, the community that I thought that we're going to, I was going to be able to change their mind

or their perception of law enforcement now has so much anger and hate for me. and I was trying to save my life. Like the guy's running towards me with a knife. Like I thought I did the right thing, but not in their eyes. And it fucked with me a little bit. That I remember that immediately like, wow, like, that's fucked up. Like, they don't even know what happened.

And they're calling me a murderer. They're motherfucking me. You know what I mean? It was, it was, and for an eight-month cop, like, I'm a baby cop. Like, it was a lot. I get taken from, I get transported to headquarters. I provide my homicide statement. And then, you know, you submit your, you go into this, to the lab, you submit your firearm and all your magazines.

You give your gun up. And then you go into this big white room and they take pictures of you. You put your back up against this wall. It's like, you know, like prison photos, right? You put your back up against the wall. There's measuring tape on the wall to see how, you know, tall you are. And they tell you, you know, look straight ahead at the wall. the camera, click, click, put your arms out, flip them over, put your arms out. And now the

same pictures that I used to take of the criminals when we take them to jail, when we're trying to identify, you know, when we're trying to document them as gang members, when we're identifying them, you know, taking pictures of their tattoos, whatever it may be, now those pictures are being taken to me. And thank God I had my peer support officer there to explain it. He was like, hey, dude, there's two reasons why they're doing this, civil litigation. the family's going to come back and say, well, how did my family member know that that was a cop? Did he identify himself as a cop? Was he dressed like a cop?

Did he look like a cop? Did he have any other tools on him that he could have used to subdue our loved one who was having a mental health crisis? He wasn't a criminal. He was just having a mental breakdown, right? Could he have tased him? Could he have used his baton? Could he use his pepper spray? Did he have to shoot him?

So civil litigation. And then he said, and, you know, civil litigation and you're a homicide suspect. You just killed somebody. It's a homicide case. And it was like, thank God I had him there to explain that to me. So for an eight-month cop on the job, that was a lot to deal with. It kicked up protests. It kicked up marches.

Not like, you know, not like, you know, the George Floyd, you know, protest. Nothing. It wasn't to that extent. But for an eight-month cop on the job to have people marching from the location of the OIS going down to Southern Division, you know, blocking the entrance. Like they were, you know, writing letters to the mayor to the chief's office. Like they were, they had, you know, they knew more information about me than I thought they knew. They knew my first, middle last name, my date of hire, my current work schedule. Like for an eight-month cop on the job, that was a shit ton to deal with.

And here I am thinking I was going to make a positive difference in my community. and now I have people marching, you know, calling out my name. And it was a lot. Like, it was a lot. My shooting happened around 10.30 at night on a Saturday. I didn't get home until Sunday at 1.30 p.m. Long-ass. Long-ass process.

Long-ass day. I was tired. I get home. I'm drained. I'm exhausted. Take a shower. start bawling. Let me back up a little bit. My son, my two-year-old son, he ended up breaking his arm. He had a little blue soft cast on his arm. And I remember walking into the house. And I'm exhausted.

And I remember him walking up to me. And he wrapped his left arm around my left leg to give me a hug. And I remember feeling absolutely nothing. I remember kind of just looking down at him. I saw the broken arm. I saw the cast. I looked down. I kind of just kind of like pushed him off. And, and, and, I go take a shower and I just start crying. And it just came out of nowhere. I mean, I'm like the ugly cry, right? Like the, you're sucking in your body. And I was like 10, 15 minutes.

Like I just was crying. And I get out. I go to sleep probably for like five or six hours. Woke up like, you know, like around five, six o'clock. And there was things that people told me. the night prior after the shooting that uh that resonated with me it stood out there was three people who told me almost the exact same thing um my peer support officer another guy who was on my squad he was on vacation at the time he had been involved in three officers involved shootings and a guy that i met

during face training he had been involved in one officer involved shooting and they all told me the three three almost verbatim don't drink any alcohol Give it a couple weeks before you drink any alcohol. Number two, stay off of social media. Don't read the comments. Don't read the blogs. Don't read the newspaper. Don't watch the news.

Nothing positive is going to come out of that shit. Don't do it. And the third thing they told me was tomorrow you're going to feel like shit. And it's perfectly normal. Your body created all these chemicals, adrenaline, dopamine, right? Your body's trying to flush all that stuff out. Drink a lot of water, get a good workout in, sweat it out. You should start feeling better in about three to five days.

So when I woke up the next day, or when I woke up later on that evening, after I got home, I absolutely felt like shit. I had the worst headache. That was my chief complaint. I was nauseous. I was numb. People were calling me and texting me. Hey, bro, how are you doing?

How are you feeling? I was like, dude, I'm good. I don't feel shit. I didn't feel shit towards my son's hug. I didn't feel shit towards his broken arm. I'm not scared about the process. I'm not second-guessing what I did last night. I'm good.

I think I'm good. I was nauseous. I couldn't eat that that night. I had a headache. My headache was the worst headache. It was a very unique type of pain. Nothing I've ever felt before. It was just a very different type of headache.

It wasn't like your hangover, your migraine, your flu. It was just unique. And I didn't say nothing to anybody. and life just kind of went on. We were placed on ice for like a total of five months, waiting to be clear by the district attorney's office, by the department. Nobody in the department was telling us what was going on.

We didn't know if we were in trouble. We didn't know what was happening. It took about two months, probably longer than two months for the department to release our body-worn camera footage. All during this time, those these like protests and marches are kind of happening. And again, they're not big, crazy, you know, protests, but they're protests.

They're marches. They're marching down the street. Some of them were planned. Some of them were unplanned. And for an eight-month cop on the job, man, it was a lot. It was a lot to deal with. My temper at home started to become shorter and shorter. I was more irritable.

I didn't know what it was, though. I was feeling like shit every day. I had a headache every single day. I'd find myself, it was like my brain and my body wanted peace and quiet. And I didn't know where to get it. With two young boys at home, there's no peace and quiet during the daytime. Like they're running around, you know, they're screaming and crying and playing and throwing stuff, right? They're kids.

And I would find myself, like, yelling at them like, hey, quiet. Like, shut up. Like, you know, and my wife would, multiple times, my wife. times my wife would step in like hey it's it's noon like they're their kids you know hey it's 10 o'clock like whatever it may be um they're kids but i wanted everybody to shut the fuck up and to sit the fuck down watch the cartoon be quiet don't move don't talk watch the movie my brain wanted it was like starving for just peace and i didn't know where to get it uh it wanted silence my brain started to become more and more like life at home became more and more kind of chaotic.

Like it was just, I was just more and more irritable. And I didn't know what that was. I didn't know what was happening. And people would call me my peer support officer. He was like, he was an OG on the peer support team. Solid guy. Great at peer support. But he would call me, hey, bro, how are you doing?

How's the wife? How's the kids? How's a family doing? I'm like, oh, everything's good. Because you don't want to, you don't want to be the bitch, right? You don't want to be a bitch and be like, oh, my God, I have really bad headaches. You know, I'm not, I'm nauseous every single day. Like, my kids won't shut the fuck up.

You can't, like, you're not going to, you're not going to go and complain as an eight-month cop on the job. You're not going to, you're not going to complain about anything. You're like, hey, this is a good shoot. Hey, bro, I'm good. I'm good. Everything is good. My wife is good. I'm good.

I'm doing fine. And that's just the way I played it off. And I had, my chief complaint was the head. It was every single day. Every single day. I woke up with headaches, man. I fell asleep with headaches. Nothing got rid of them. Tylenol, drinking caffeine, taking naps. At home, that's all my wife saw was that I was taking more naps. I was an asshole every single day. I was becoming more and more of an asshole. I was irritable. And then that's when the alcohol came into play. So two weeks after my OIS or about two weeks, I took it to heart. The OGs told me stay away from alcohol, so I did, right? I get invited to the bar, even though I felt like shit, I still went. And I remember drinking my first beer.

And it was, and I'm not over-exaggerating. It was like the second or the third sip, like literally drinking it. And the headache was like gone. immediately. And from that day forward, I started drinking alcohol every day. It was like a miracle drug. It never,

it's never ever failed me. It worked every single time. The headache went away. The nauseousness went away. I ate at the bar that night. I was smoking and joking. I felt like myself. I was talking shit to guys,

like messing around. I felt like I could laugh again. I started drinking once, you know, at home, I started drinking beers at home because I felt like, like, and I did. Like, I would drink beers and I would play with my kids because the headache was gone. Because you, you're feeling like shit.

You don't feel like playing. You don't feel like laughing. When your headache, head is hurting that much. When you're nauseous all the time, you don't feel like laughing and playing and rolling on the ground. But when I had alcohol in my system, I was like that fun dad again. Like I felt alive. I felt like I could have conversations with my wife.

I had energy to, like, do shit around. around the house, you know, clean up the house, like, you know, you know, uh, do the, do the chores. Like, do, you know, take out the trash, like without being asked. Like, it was not, it was no problem drinking a couple of beers. Everything was good. And that caused issues at home almost immediately. Because, you know, a couple of, you know, first couple of days, it was no, no big deal. But, um, I'm drinking, you know, two, three, four beers every day now. And I didn't drink alcohol normally every single day off duty. That just wasn't, I drink alcohol,

but I wasn't drinking every single day. So my wife would be like, hey, is that your second or your third beer today? And I'm like, don't you ever fucking question me on what number of fucking beer this is? Like, you have no fucking idea what I'm going through.

Don't question me. You never questioned me before. You have no idea what it's like for me to shoot somebody and kill them, to sit there and watch them die. Your department is not backing you up. Where's the department? Release that body worn camera footage to the public.

Is somebody from the department going to get in front of the media and explain to them what happened? You guys going to have our back? You have no idea that I'm waking up feeling like shit every single day from the moment I wake up to the moment that I go to sleep. You have no idea what I'm going through. You have no idea what it's like to have people protesting, your resignation, your termination, marching and shit through the street. Don't you ever fucking ask me what number of beer this is? I could fucking drink as much beer as I want.

You don't have any idea what I'm going through. But it was impossible for my wife to know. I never told her. She knew, obviously she knew that there was marches, like it was on the news. She knew that I had got into a shooting, but she didn't know that, she didn't know how many rounds I shot.

She didn't know that everything slowed down. She didn't know that I didn't hear my rounds go off. She didn't know that I sat there and I watched the guy die. She didn't know that I was having headaches, that I was feeling like shit every single day, I didn't let her in. I never let her into my world. I didn't tell her anything, but I expected her to know. I didn't tell her shit, but I expected her to some magical way know exactly what I was going through. And it was impossible for her to know. And she became that bad guy. She became the one that doesn't understand. It wasn't me. It was her.

and so the arguments kicked up and normally it was around the alcohol you know normally it was around like hey this is your your third beer and it's you know 11 o'clock in the morning but the headaches started as soon as I woke up you know and and nobody knew yeah nobody knew i was i was beginning to suffer in silence and i kept it under wraps and nobody nobody at work knew Yeah. Did it affect your performance at all at work? No. In the beginning, in the beginning, no. I think later on down the line as we get into the story, there was things that people started to realize, but it was hard for them to kind of put their finger on what was going on. But I kept it under wraps. Like I kept doing my job and kept plugging away. and again, we were giving the acting, we were giving an acting detective position

for an eight-month cop on the job, even the rookie, right, the kid that was in phase training. We didn't know what the fuck we were doing. We're like, acting detective. We barely know how to be a cop, let alone like acting detective, you know, hey, you're going to do misdemeanor pack. What's a misdemeanor packet?

I don't even know what goes in a misdemeanor packing. You know what I mean? Where the hell is the DA's office? Do you want me to drop these off at the DA? Where is that at? I don't even know where anything is at. So, yeah, it was, it was an interesting start to my career. Being benched for that long in the beginning of your career,

do you think that affects your progress? Absolutely. All the shootings that I was involved in, I was always placed on as an acting detective. And it became almost as a punishment. I don't think it was that was done on purpose. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't done on purpose to punish anybody. But for me, it felt that way.

And that's the reason why, and today we don't, the department doesn't do that too often anymore. But for me, it was like, that's the reason why today I don't, I don't, I don't want to promote to be a detective. My future goal is to be a sergeant. I'm trying, I'm trying to skip detective. And even though all the OGs and people would, you know, people at work are telling me like, hey, you know, these are people that I respect, right? These are people, you know, captains and lieutenants.

They're like, dude, you got to be a detective first. It's going to open more doors for you in the future. And I'm like, I know. But just that word detective, like for me, it just left a bad taste in my mouth because it was always like a punishment for me. At least it felt that way. Again, the department, they weren't punishing me or any of us,

but it just for me it felt like like a punishment. Like now I'm back acting detective again, you know? So and it does, it does. Like you're eight months on the job and now, now you're out of work for five months. That's nearly as much time as you have on in the field. And now you don't have any police work. Like you just been out of work.

And it does take a little while to kind of get back into it just to do the, you know, relearn the computer. And like, you know, just, being out of work for five months, it takes a little while to kind of get back into the rail of the things. So what happens next after those eight months? Yeah, so the five, five months, five months. So they, they eventually cleared us during those five months. I was involved in an off-duty incident. My wife and I are driving over this bridge. I see a girl on the opposite side of the rails. They tell us in the academy and in phase training and they tell us all the time,

Do not get involved in off-duty incidents. Do not get involved unless you're going to shoot and kill somebody. Like if there's a domestic violence or something, call 911, be a good witness. While I got involved because I'm a shit magnet, I decided to get involved. My wife was with me in the car. It turns into this big fight on this bridge with this girl. And PD gets there. We take her into custody.

And for me, I'm just like, oh, the adrenaline rush, right? Like, I haven't had an adrenaline rush hit in two months. And now I get back into the car. I'm like, all right, babe, let's go eat. And she's like, I'm not hungry anymore. Like, we're not going to dinner anymore. And I'm like, well, I am. So that wasn't a critical incident for me.

And the reason why I bring that up is because that was a critical incident for her, and I never acknowledged it. I didn't realize how much that incident had affected her, which eventually affected our marriage, completely ignored her, like completely ignored what she had just. saw what she had just gone through she wasn't around violence growing up like i was she she she didn't the adrenaline rush the way it affects me didn't affect her that way um she was afraid

she felt helpless hopeless like she she saw things that i don't remember happening like when i grabbed when this girl she she ended up climbing over the rails and she tried to run and dart into traffic and get hit by a car. And when she did it, when the car started swerving around her and a car started to stop, she ran right back at the rails that she was originally at. She ran right past me and she was going to jump over. And I grabbed her and we did this twirl. And I guess my back hit the rail. My wife thought that her and I were both going to flip over the, you know, the rail on the bridge and land onto the five southbound freeway. I don't remember that happening. I don't remember getting on top of this girl. When I was punching her, I was trying to knock her ass out because I was trying to,

trying to gain control of her. I didn't have any weapons on me. I had my gun on me, but I had my handcuffs or anything else. So I'm trying to gain control of her and I can't. She's like kicking me and scratching me and like head budding me. And finally like I'm going to knock her ass out. Well, when I'm sitting there punching this girl, I don't remember guys pulling over on the bridge and they were like huddled up in like three or four dudes and they were like going to go beat the shit out of me. They thought I was like beating my wife or my girlfriend out in the street. She saw all this and I never acknowledged that. Like I just never and then life just kind of went on.

We, um, we, you know, again, I'm drinking every single day. That incident happens. I get released back out to the field. And of course, hey, are you doing, you doing all right? You're ready to go back out to the street? Hell yeah, I'm ready to go back out to the street. Send me back out. They send me back out to the field.

Um, my partner and I, we go, we, we, we, we call it kinging up. So we're in the same car together. Uh, and we go out there and we, we start getting after it again. Right away, man. you know the vehicle pursuits the foot pursuits the gangsters the dope the guns like every single day we're getting something right now we're getting like pats on the back and add a boys at work and you know the sergeant is calling me out during lineup like hey talk about that pursuit you guys got into talk about the gun that you got off that proactive stop and so like and me and my boy like we were

like we were he was he was he had like a year or maybe less than a year on than i did uh so we're still brand new but we're out there we're out there getting it boom my like first first second month back out in the field, my son's diagnosed with autism, the one that broke his arm. So now we have a therapist at our house all day long, six days a week. My brain is already chaotic. Everybody at home is already irritating me. I can't even drink at home without somebody bitching and complaining to me, right? So I avoid home.

I start avoiding home because work was so much easier to deal with than my kids. you know, ABA therapy, doing all these different therapies, like, trying to teach my son how to, how to talk, I think they call it the Pex Board. It's like a, you know, they point to what they want to, like, do or eat or whatever it is. It's like their way to communicate. He was, like, nonverbal. He's not anymore. I can't get him to be quiet for a second anymore. But at the time, like, he was, like, nonverbal until he was, like, three years old. And, but it was, like, chaos. It was home was just chaotic. Arguing with my wife.

I felt like I was walking on eggshells. This therapist is telling me, hey, you got to do this and not this. You're doing it wrong. The kids are loud. Everybody's always screaming. Everybody's always crying. Like, so I avoided home.

Started hanging out with anybody and everybody other than my wife and my kids. Started going out, drinking, you know, going to dinner. And then again, now you're like in the end crowd. right because now i got into a shooting i'm out there getting it me and my partner were out there hustling so it's like hey you guys want to have a couple of beers with us and as a rookie you're like oh hell yeah like i'm in i'm in i'm in um go to dinner go to after you know go to go to go to parties and and and and i started to do that and uh um none of that helped my none of that helped my marriage

but i thought that it was working it i thought it was working i thought the alcohol was working and it it did the alcohol worked every single time and a lot of times it does like it took away the headache it took away the nauseousness it took away that numbness it never failed me the alcohol never ever failed me it worked every single time um I get into a second off-duty incident that same year in 2018 I almost shoot this guy that I almost ran this guy over who was skateboarding. He was skateboarding through the intersection. I was turning into the intersection.

I almost run him over. He starts gang banging on me. He lifts up his sweater and he has a sought off shotgun in his waistband. And I'm off duty. I throw my car into park. I'm telling him, get on the ground, get on the ground. He's not following any of my directions. It was two times that I almost shot him.

Once he turned his back to me, he started, you know, he had his hands up. And he started walking up this driveway. There was a corner house, and he's walking up the driveway, and his hands begin to, like, drop lower and lower. So I walk up to him, and I almost shoot him. He ends up raising his hands back up in the air. He walks across the street to an apartment complex parking lot, starts walking towards this group of people that I didn't know. He didn't know or I don't think they had any relation, but he still armed that shotgun in his waistband. And I finally made a decision like, I'm going to shoot him in the head.

So I start walking up to him. I was going to shoot him point blank in the face. He's staring at me. Those people were directly behind him. My goal was to get right in front of his face, pull the trigger because I couldn't miss. I only had one shot. My backdrop was those people. I couldn't miss that round.

So I was going to get right on his face and pull the trigger. And I was good with it. I was like, this is going to be a righteous shoot. This is going to suck. I'm off duty. I'm going to shoot somebody in the freaking head right now. I just had people protesting for a good shoot. But shit, I can't let it.

this guy get close to these people he's still armed the shotgun i start walking up to him some girl comes right in between him and i her and i we start fighting over the shotgun that's in this guy's waistband boom it comes loose i'm holding on to the shotgun she ducks on the ground he goes running i go chasing him the shotgun slips out of my hand pd gets there we end up fighting this guy we take him into custody and uh this was the moment where i get i get taken in now as a victim of a crime. I forgot how they wrote it up because I was telling the guy, hey, San Diego police, get on the ground.

The gang unit guys, they, uh, they interview me. And after the interview, uh, one of the OGs tells me, he's like, hey, man, he's smiling at me. He goes, hey, this is a good off-duty incident. And I'm like, I got like nine months, like 10 months on the job, right? I'm like, dude, I've just been involved in one off-duty incident. I was involved in a shooting and now I'm involved in this shit. And I'm like, okay, what does that mean?

And I'm nervous. And he's like, dude, he's like, this is a real gangster, real gun. You're not under the influence of alcohol. I hadn't been drinking that night yet. I drank afterwards, but I hadn't been drinking that night yet. And then he said, and he's not banging your wife, is he? I said, shit, I don't think he is. Let me call her and ask, right?

But because normally off-duty incidents for cops, it's alcohol is involved. Domestic violence, boyfriend, girlfriend, you know, that kind of, you know, that's the, that's like the perfect recipe for a disaster for off-duty incidents for cops. And I get out of that interview and the guys at Southern Division were like, damn, Mike, you're a fucking shit magnet, bro. You shot some dude a couple, a couple months ago. You tried pushing that girl off the bridge. And then now you're just fucking with this guy who's trying to go home. And like everybody's like laughing and they're talking shit. They're like, dude, you're a shit magnet.

Leave some work for us. And that was all fun. Like normally I would laugh and I laugh at that to this day. Like it's all fun and stuff. But in the moment when they were telling me that, I was like, dude, I am a shit magnet. Like, why is this happening to me? Two off-duty incidents. I don't hear anybody else at Southern Division or at San Diego getting involved in off-duty incidents.

Why is this happening to me? Why me? And I started, that's where that term like shit magnet, I started to, to like question, why me? Why is this happening to me? So that was, that was my first year on the job. My first year on the job, I'm drinking every single day. Not, not, nothing crazy, but I'm having, you know, two, three, four beers every single day. Life at home is falling apart.

I'm being non-existent at home. I'm working more and more overtime. I'm trying to avoid home. My goal every day was to leave the house when everybody was still asleep and to get home when everybody went to bed. So I didn't have to talk to nobody. I didn't have to hear the kids cry.

I didn't have to be involved in any kind of therapy sessions. I didn't have to have a, you know, a therapist telling me, hey, you're doing it wrong, you're doing this. I didn't have to hear the bitching and complaining and the arguing and the fighting with my wife about how many beers I had. I started working more and more overtime and I avoided the house. I avoided my family, my kids. Hey, you there in the baby registry rabbit hole. The thing experienced parents agree on a nanit smart baby monitor.

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Those insights help you get more sleep. Starting night one. Add it to your registry or shop at NANET, N-A-N-I-T-com. Quickly became just an absent husband and an absent father. So how bad does the drinking get for you? Yeah, so the drinking, the drinking starts to get pretty, pretty bad. So I'm drinking alcohol every single day at this point. Again, not a lot.

One, two, three, four beers at the most. I'm not getting drunk or anything crazy like that. But 11 months after my first officer involved shooting, I got involved in a second officer involved shooting. And it came out as an active shooter. So this is on April 3rd of 2019. This is around 1 o'clock on a Wednesday. My partner and I, the one that I was with the first time,

we have some guys stopped in a vehicle. I'm searching the car, and a radio call comes out. And so in my ear, the dispatcher puts out all units be advised. One caller is reporting an active shooter down by the San Jacidro Trailer Park. Hispanic male is armed with an AK-47. He's actively shooting. So we get bogus calls down in San Cedral all the time. People are high on meth. You know, you have your psych, 5150s psych folks that, you know, they call in like, hey, there's people chasing me with a gun. There's people chasing me with a knife. And, you know, we get there and somebody's just hiding in the bushes. They lock

themselves in the jack-in-the-box bathroom over by the border. And they're just high. We get these calls multiple times a week. So we were on the north side of the division and when this call came out. So I remember like getting out of the car, like sticking my head back out the car, I looked at my partner and I was like, what do you want to do, bro? He's like one caller reporting an active shooter right across the street from Willow Elementary School that's, you know, the school would be on lockdown. The school has a protocol on how they get a hold of our dispatch center.

We'd be getting way more callers than just one caller. I was like, he's like, you want to wait for a second? I was like, yeah, let's do it. Let's wait for a second. So stick my head back in the car. I started digging around again. And I kid you not, man. Within a matter of seconds, dispatch gets back on the air.

And she says, all units be advised. We have multiple callers now reporting an active shooter at the San Francisco Trail Park. Hispanic mill is armed with an AK-47. He is actively shooting and hiding behind vehicles. So my adrenaline, you know, your heart starts pumping. I'm like, holy shit, right? this is game time. This is what we trained for, you know, the school shooters, these active shooters.

I look at my partner and they had like a, like a pipe and I had found like a pipe and dope or a little bit of dope or whatever. And I go back to the driver. I say, here, bro, get the fuck out of here. I give him his shit. He gets back in the car. And we all, you know, we get in our car. We start, excuse me, we start heading down to San Ysidro. And, you know, we're rolling lights and sirens. And I remember putting in my mind, this is going to be fucked up. Because when I get this, I've been through this trailer park multiple times at this point in my career. Early in the morning, late at night, there's always kids out there. They're riding with chalk on the asphalt. It's a super poor Hispanic trailer park community.

There's kids riding with chalk on the floor. You know, they're jump rope in. They're walking with each other. They're playing soccer. Like there's always kids out there. When I get there, there's going to be kids laid out. And the way we train, any law enforcement officer, you don't help the victims first.

We contact the suspect, because there's still a suspect outstanding, right? We contact the suspect first, and even if there's a kid that's dying, gasping for air, shot, needs help, walk past that kid, contact the suspect, don't look down at the ground. I remember I kept telling myself, don't look down at the ground. So we get on scene our air support unit, Abel, we call it ABLE, our air support unit. was overhead. They spotted the suspect on the south end of the trailer park and he was drinking a soda. He wasn't armed with any, any weapon. So we get out. I throw on my hard plates. I snap one side of my hard plates and I'm trying to snap the, it's like an external vest. It's for higher caliber weapons or higher caliber rounds is supposed to protect you from, but it's not going to protect you

from an AK-47 round. But I'm trying to snap the other side and I can't get it. The buckles won't snap into place. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on? I know I gained some weight. You know, I've gained some weight over the past like year. I haven't gained that much weight. Like this thing should snap into place. I didn't realize that I had kept my body worn camera. It was still on my uniform. And I forgot to take it off and put it on the external on the outside. So those couple of inches didn't allow like my my buckles or snap into place. So I'm like, fuck it. I don't know what's going on with this thing. Abel gets back on the air and they put out all units be advised.

The suspect just picked up the AK-47 and he's walking northbound through the trailer park. So northbound is where we were at. We just didn't know where northbound he was going to pop out of. So I'm like, fuck it. I don't know what's going on with these buckles or with this hard plate. So I grabbed my AR, I charge it. And my partner that I was with, he goes one way with one officer. He goes to the right.

I go to the left with like a 26 year veteran. We split up into two teams of two. And I immediately spot the suspect on the far west end of the trailer park. And he has the AK-47 down to his side. And I remember him looked. And there was like this, like a wooden fence, but it's all broken down. I could see right through the wooden fence. There's also a chain link, like a chain link fence close by.

But I have a clear line of sight of the site. of the suspect and he has a clear line of sight of me he's looking straight down at us i'm looking straight at him he's kind of like marching with the AK 47 he can i remember him bringing raising the AK 47 off up and then the round goes off boom and it was the loudest fucking round i've ever heard i don't know if he've ever gone shooting you forget to put your ears on and like you know and and most cops have done that right you forget to put your ears on and like you're like oh shit like everybody started shooting and it's and it's loud it was louder than it was the loudest the snap in the air like the this crack like the it was like the air just cracked right in my ear

and i remember hitting the deck and i come back up to take the shot from 100 yards away and the suspect runs right back into the trailer park so he he goes into the trailer park i no longer see him the hunt the hunt is on now we're like okay i knew this was real the whole whole time. I knew it was real, but now it's really real, right? He just fired off around like it's real. I go into the trailer park. My partner and I, the guy that I was with, we turn on to this kind of road alley in the trailer park. I'm expecting that suspect to be on the far end where I had originally seen him. He was a lot closer this time. And he had the AK-47 down. He's looking right at me. I'm looking right at him. I have no cover. So I'm in the middle of the road. My partner

is standing right next to me and off to his right is some cars. So there's cover to his, there's cover to his right. And the suspect's looking right at me. He's kind of like marching within the, he's like raising up the gun a lot more exaggerated than he was the first time. I give him commands to drop the gun. He doesn't drop it. I remember him like kind of like turner, like he like kind of like turns to kind of like look at me he just does this like weird and he's like raising the gun up and i fired four rounds from my ar one strikes him in the thigh i think the round went in his thigh and it came out of his like like uh like butt cheek area um another round hit him in his chest came out of his back and then another round um hit the back of his head

I shot four rounds. The other round, obviously I missed. The suspect immediately drops to the ground. We walk up on him. And I remember when I raised my AR up and I was looking through my red dot, I remember the suspect being right in front of me.

Like I was like, there's no way I'm going to, I mean, I was like, holy shit. Like he's right in my face. He was like 10, 15 yards in front of me. He was right up in my face. And as we walk up on him, He obviously drops to the ground. We walk up on him and he was already, I knew he was dead.

He was already discolored. Like his skin was already like yellow, like going yellow. His like tongue. I remember his tongue was like kind of like sticking out of his mouth a little bit. His tongue was already purple. I remember his eyes were kind of like open, but it had that like that glaze. Like he was, he was dead. There was a little bit of.

flesh and like hair hanging off the back of his head. There was a small little pool of blood behind his head. I knew that he was dead. And, but after we shoot somebody, we still need a render aid to that person. We need to try to save him. So I started doing CPR. All the blood starts to come out. And then the entire homicide process starts for me just 11 months, 11 months later.

That's when the alcohol began to, uh, began to kick in. Yeah, I just, I had gotten, I got into my second officer involved shooting within 11 months from each other. And is there anyone that's there to support you? I know there was the peer support officers, but further than that, are they assigning you to like a psychologist or a mental health therapist or anything like that? Yeah, so we have critical incident debriefs. And that's, that's done through our, our focus psychological services and peer support and all that stuff is, is, there, it brings everybody who is directly involved in that critical incident, all the, all the players that were directly there, including our dispatchers, we all come to, to the debrief, and we all kind

of put the pieces of the puzzle together. It helps answer a lot of the questions, the unknowns, like, oh, where were you, you know, you were standing there or I was standing here. I shot because of this and somebody else may have shot because of a different, you know, reason or they saw something difference so it we do that but there's no like mandatory like hey you have to go to you know the psych the psychologist or you have to go to counseling um before you come out to the field but our peer support so i get assigned uh one of the og gang detectives nestor um and both of my peer supporters i still talk to them to this day um awesome they're both retired but awesome awesome men and and he calls me he's like hey is anybody peer supporting you and then I was like no I just

literally just got into a shooting like three minutes ago like nobody he's like I'll peer support you and before I hung up with him he said hey Mike have you called your wife yet and I said no I haven't called her I'll shoot her a text he's like no dude call her she needs to hear your voice she needs to know that you're okay call her and let her know that you're okay and this is coming from an OG gang detective, right? I was like, all right, I'll listen to you. Well, there's a problem with that. Me and my wife aren't doing well.

We're arguing all the time. Life at home is falling apart quick. We hadn't spoken to each other in three days up into this point. And that was a short argument. We had gone, we've gone two, three weeks without saying shit to each other. If it had nothing to do with the kids,

we'll walk right past each other in the house and not say anything to each other. So this particular day, it was three days. We hadn't spoken to each other. I called her, told her I had been involved in a shooting. I get transported back to Southern Division. And when I got there, it felt like a hero's welcome. The chief, the executive chief, all the assistant chiefs, captains and lieutenants.

Southern Division was filled with brass. This is on a Wednesday. It came out as an active shooter across the street from an elementary school. So everybody in their mom is coming down to Southern Division to assist. I get there and you have like chiefs and captains and lieutenants like shaking my hand like giving me a hug patting me on my back man good job job well done you're a hero you save lives today we're proud of you you should be proud of yourself all kinds of good stuff there's nothing wrong with that that's all good but I didn't feel like a hero I had a headache that day I felt like shit

I felt like shit every single day at work this day was no different um And I couldn't understand why, why was this happening again? I know how rare one officer involved shooting is. 87% of every single, and maybe now they, I'm going to be on this podcast, maybe somebody can either correct it or they can, they can, uh, um, confirm it. I've heard this, this number three times. It was once at a, at a retreat, uh, once at a training and once at a conference. 87% of every law enforcement officer in the entire nation, including your federal law enforcement, you know, city, state, local.

87% will never be involved in an officer of all shooting. 87% will never do it in their entire career. And I just did it twice in 11 months. And I also been involved in two off-duty incidents. And I'm drinking alcohol every single day. I'm avoiding my family. I'm avoiding my kids. Life at home is absolutely chaotic.

I'm avoiding just being in my house. Why is this happening to me? Why me? And I go through the entire homicide process. I get home that night. And the OG, you know, peer supporter, he told me like, hey, don't drink any alcohol. Well, I drink alcohol every day now. Stay off of social media.

Don't read the news. Don't watch the news. Don't read the newspaper. Don't read the comments, the blogs. I did. When I got home, I read it. He was a million percent, right? Nothing positive comes out of that shit.

The third thing, you're going to feel like shit tomorrow. I feel like shit every single day. So bring it on, whatever life has to throw on me. I'll take it. I get home that night. I start drinking. I end up going to sleep. And I woke up that same, you know, or that morning at like 2, 3 o'clock in the morning.

And, dude, when I woke up, I had this. energy. Like, have you ever waking up and you just have like a whole bunch of energy? It's like three, four o'clock in the morning. You know that you're still tired, but you're like, I'm not going to sleep anymore, right? Like, you just, you're awake. You're awake. And I was like, oh, my God, I had all this energy.

I can feel it in my gut, like hyperness. And, but I knew that that was all normal. I know that everybody has different reactions to critical incidents. I've talked to people who, you know, they sleep. a lot. Some people sleep very little bit. Some people eat very little. Some people talk a lot. Some people have the shits for a couple of days. Like they, I mean, full blown diarrhea, like, you know, some people have no reaction to major critical incidents. Everybody has a different reaction. I knew that this was just a reaction that I was having to another abnormal situation that I was

involved in. And it was, it was normal. It was normal to have this reaction. From that night, that day forward, my sleep never went back to normal. I couldn't go to sleep sometimes. I couldn't stay asleep. I would wake up at two, three, four o'clock in the morning. And I'm tired. Like I'm dead tired. And I couldn't shut it down.

I was giving that acting detective position again for like another, like two. I was on ice for two months, which is like, it was, that's, that's okay. Like it takes some time for you to go back out to the field. and for the DA, the department to kind of clear you and look at everything and make sure everything is all good, make sure you're good before they send you back out to the field. And so I was on ice for about two months, and my sleep never went back to normal. I was giving that acting detective position. I would go to work sometimes with no sleep, 24 hours of no sleep,

tossing and turning all night, all night long, never go to sleep. There was a handful of times through this entire, you know, this entire process up until, you know, the end where I would go 20, two days without sleeping. And you, you feel like shit, like your, your clothes are rubbing up against your skin, you're uncomfortable. You feel oily and greasy after you shower. You feel like you have like fuzz or like on your ear or on your face. You're naturally paranoid.

There's like this natural paranoia. Like you can't look somebody in their eyes when you're talking to them because you feel like they know that you have been awake for two days straight. There's just, it's just a weird. There's just this weird paranoia when you just haven't slept. So started drinking even more. I'm putting down more than, you know, one, two, three beers. Like, I'm, I'm putting them down a little bit more because it was worth it. It worked.

I was able to go to sleep. It shut the brain off. Like it was, even though I felt little crappy the next day, even though I felt like, this is probably not the healthiest way to do it, it shut the brain off. I was able to get a night's rest. So I thought. And I'm going to learn something eventually. down the line.

But I was able to shut the brain off. I was able to go to sleep. It was worth it. Nobody knew what was going on. Nobody knew what was happening. About two weeks after my second incident was when the nightmares kicked up and those were fucked up. I'd wake up crying.

I'd wake up like kicking or like punching. like I would like kick and I'll like or like I'll like punch and I'll like wake up. Sweating. I'd wake up with like my my back, my my my sweat dripping down my side of my my cheek. I'm like what the f like I've never had that happen before. It felt like I had just like ran a marathon like in my my heart beating out of my out of my chest. You feel your your heart beating out the side of your neck. I was able to hear and feel my heartbeat out of my eardrums.

I would wake up from my nightmare sometimes, jump out of bed, I'd run over to my drawer, I'd grab my gun, I'd run into the kitchen, I would open the blinds, and I'd sit out there, and I would look at stare at shadows

in the middle of the night. I swore to God that the reason that I had just woken up from my nightmare was because I heard something outside. I thought the homies found out where I lived. I thought social media put my address on blast, I thought somebody recognized me when I was out and about. They followed me home because remember, your video, my first shooting,

my video gets released to the public. Everybody knows what I look like. And not just me. It's any law enforcement officer. We get involved in a shooting. Your face is out there for the public to see. What you've done is out there. Everybody knows what you look like.

But I don't know what you look like. I don't know who's after me. I'm sure the family isn't happy with me. I'm sure family and friends probably are not happy with me. They know what I look like. I don't know who I'm supposed to watch out for, right? I was paranoid. So I would, I would, I don't even know where I left off at.

So I would, I would wake up from my nightmare, start looking at shadows. And I'd sit there and I'll stare at shadows. I mean, it's the weirdest thing. You're sitting there staring at shadows. And I'm like, did that move? Oh, fuck, that did move. I'm going to wait to that motherfucker comes up to the front door. And even if he doesn't have anything in his hand, I'm going to fucking blast him.

And you're like planning all this stuff out. And you're sitting there and you're looking at this shadow. And then you start to feel something trickling down your eye. Because when you don't blink for like two, three, five minutes, your eyes start to like water up and it just and I'm like you know I'm like wiping away like these like tears and I'm sitting there looking at shadows and my my hands are shaking my palms are sweating my mom I have my gun in my hand and and it was it was horrible like it was those nightmares the paranoia the uh you know clearing my house at two or three or four o'clock in the morning and I'm like doing like dynamic

entries into my living room and into my bedrooms because I know that I'm going to kill somebody inside my bathroom. I knew I heard people talking in my backyard. I knew they were there. I also knew that I was tripping. I knew that I knew that I was becoming more and more paranoid, but it felt so real. It when you're, In the moment, in the moment, you're like, is that shadow really moving? Or am I tripping? And then you're like, oh, fuck, I thought, I think I just heard. I think I just heard like a whisper.

I think I just heard. And it's, it's, if you've never, if you've never experienced it, it's hard to explain how real in the moment it feels. But in the back of your mind, you know that you're, you know that you're probably tripping, but there's somebody in your house. Like, there's somebody in my living room. So as time goes on, that's getting worse and worse. I'm not only clearing my house in the middle of the night,

I'm looking out at shadows. I start drinking even more. And now I'm getting fucked up. Almost every single night. Because what I learned quickly was if I got fucked up every night, the headache would go away. The nauseousness would go away. I'd be able to sleep and the nightmares went away. Now I understand that when you have that much alcohol in your system, your brain doesn't go into REM sleep.

It disrupts your REM sleep. Rem sleep is where you dream. It's where you have nightmares. It's the best quality sleep that you could get. where your body, you know, heals itself, right? Where your brain, you know, clears all the junk out. REM sleep is the best type of sleep. I was starving my brain from going into REM sleep,

which didn't help the paranoia because now, like, you're, like, pushing yourself into psychosis. I didn't know that. I learned all this later down the line. But in the moment, I was like, hey, it's working. The headaches go away. I'm able to sleep. The nightmares go away.

and the hangovers were worth it the next day. Throwing up that night, it was worth it. Feeling like shit the next day, it was worth it. Hey, you there, in the baby registry rabbit hole. The thing experienced parents agree on, a nanit smart baby monitor, one camera, one app for video, breathing motion monitoring, and personalized sleep insights. All in one place.

Check in from anywhere. get real-time safety notifications and capture every sleepy smile and good-night kiss. The best part? Those insights help you get more sleep, starting night one. Add it to your registry or shop at Nanit, N-A-N-I-T-com. Hey, you there, in the baby registry rabbit hole. The thing experienced parents agree on? A Nanit smart baby monitor. One camera, one app for video, breathing motion monitoring, and personalized sleep insights.

all in one place. Check in from anywhere, get real-time safety notifications, and capture every sleepy smile and good-night kiss. The best part? Those insights help you get more sleep, starting night one.

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Add it to your registry or shop at NANET, N-A-N-I-T.com. It was all worth it because you're just able to turn off your brain. Nothing else worked. How long until you go back on duty after the second shooting? Two months. So two months. And that was of nobody's fault but my own. The captain, lieutenant, my peer supporter, hey, how are you doing? How's the family doing? Are you ready to go back out? How do you feel about going back out? Oh, I'm good. I'm good. Send me back out to the field. I'm good to go. My wife's to stay home mom. We need the money. I need to work overtime.

I started working more and more and more overtime. It was to avoid home. I didn't get the attention at home. That ego, we need to feed our ego. All the pats on the back, you know, the guns and the arrest that you make. And they're like, oh, shit, bro. Hell yeah, that was a good ass arrest. You know, whatever it may be, that fed my ego more than trying to be a husband

or trying to be a father to my kids. I became a piece of shit dad. I was absent. I was an absent and piece of shit dad, father, husband, family member, stopped going to family functions. I got there really late, left really early, you know, or I didn't show up at all. By the time I went back out to the field,

my wife and I decided to divorce. The arguments at home, man were or uh they were they were they were ugly they were nasty um cussing each other out screaming and yelling you know you get home from work you get into a fight which is significant other you start screaming and yelling you wake up the kids you know my kids were small and you know when your kids are that small naturally they're going to go to mama right they're not going to go to dad they're going to go you're the bad guy even if i didn't start the fight even if you know even if I was the victim of the fight, right?

Like, it wasn't my fault. I'm the bad guy now, no matter what. We start going through the, you know, we decide to divorce. She takes the kids. She's staying with family and staying with friends and staying at hotels. And I'm doing the same thing. I'm staying, you know, we get into fights and I'm like, I'm fucking out of here, right? So I'll stay at family's house, stay with friends, stay at hotels.

You come home at midnight. You have to be at work. You start work the next day at 6 a.m. you get into a fight with your significant other. You don't go and call a friend at 1 o'clock in the morning or a family member. You stop doing that after the second week. That shit gets embarrassing. It's embarrassing to let people know like, hey, I'm not doing good again.

Like, we're getting into another fight. Can I crash at your house? So you don't do that anymore. You don't go and rent a hotel. You're only going to sleep for three hours. You've got to be starting at work at 6 a.m. the next day. So you just go crash out in your car.

I'd get in my car. I'd go to the police station. I'd rack out in the back parking lot. Nobody knew I was doing it. Nobody knew what was happening with me. But the fights, man, the fights were ugly. Trying to win my kids love. You know, because I knew that when we divorce,

she was going to take the kids. Maybe if I'm the fun dad, if I buy them toys and buy them candy, they would love me a little bit more than they love. their mom. Maybe they would want to stay with me and not stay with their mom because I'm the, I'm the fun parent. And, uh, there was all these things that I was trying to, I was living this like, I was just living this life of like, in here was just chaotic. But I'm trying to be that like stand up guy at work. And I was. I was. I was, I mean, if you needed something done, hit me up. I'll get it done. You know, you need, you need, you need, you need, you need, you

me to work overtime hell yeah sarge i got you i'm right here you guys are short today i got i got you i got i'll work overtime you could you could depend on me i'd get the job done um and uh and nobody nobody at work nobody knew what was going on i kept it under wraps obviously my wife knew that there was stuff that was going out with me she knew that um that i was drinking more uh She knew that, she knew that I was having, like, nightmare. She would hear me, like, you know, like making noises or, like, she would see me, like, you know, get startled at night. She told me, like, you know, there was times where I would see you and you, like, do this, like, twitches or you would, like, wake up. And, you know, I was all, I was all paranoid.

I was like a tweak. I was like a tweaker. I was like a sober tweaker. So, yeah, life, life got, life got bad. It started to, um, uh, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, eventually went back out to the street after two months. But again, nobody, nobody knew. And it was nobody else, nobody's fault.

I just kept it under wraps. I didn't say shit to nobody. What happens next? Seven months later, November comes around. Of that same year, 2019. And I get released back out to the street. I'm out there still getting it.

work. I'm getting, you know, like employee of the month. I'm getting, you know, supervisor and captain, you know, ride-ups, accommodations and add-a-boys during lineup. I'm not calling out sick. I'm not late to work. I'm working overtime. My reports, my investigations, they were on point. I was still being pro-act. I was handling my beat. I was handling other people's beat. Like I'm still out there. I'm riding under the radar.

Nobody has any idea, has any idea what's happening. What's happening with me. But when I got released to go back out to the field, my risk-taking behavior is skyrocketed. Stopping two, three, four gangsters at night, searching them by myself, not calling for backup,

finding a gun or two in the car, being the first one on scene. to the most violent calls without waiting for my backup, walking into an apartment complex or into somebody's house or into somebody's apartment, not updating my location with dispatch. I mean, you should tell them like, hey, I'm going to be, you know, I'm going to be walking into unit like 222 or whatever it may be just doing it, driving fast on and off duty for no reason.

My risk-taking behavior skyrocketed. and it wasn't because I I didn't want to commit suicide I wasn't there yet I always tell people that I was probably weeks from contemplating it I just didn't want to be around anymore

I didn't want to die I just didn't want to be here if I just wasn't around life would be better for everybody my wife my kid me that chaos the peace the most peace that i got was when i was asleep because it was quiet those people as soon as i wake up it's like oh man everything you know the your your day gets started right and it's and you just don't know what kind of day you're going to have the most

peaceful time was when i was sleeping and um i didn't want to commit suicide there's no honor in it. There's none at all. And I say this during my, my presentations that, like, nobody, and it's, it's very true. Like, I had people come up to me like, dude, you're fucking spot on. Like, it's so true. Nobody's creating a go-fund me for your family. If they do, nobody's, people aren't donating after you killed yourself.

There's no memorial. We're not doing a memorial run for you next year. The funerals are fucking awkward. They're odd. They're weird. They don't feel good. Everybody knows you killed yourself. I've been to them before.

I didn't want to commit suicide. But in my mind, I'm like, if I get killed on duty, vehicle accident, shot, killed, I'm a hero. That's honorable. That's an honorable death. I can go out like that. I could do that. That was such an easier pill to swallow.

And I knew that when I'm pulling these gangsters out of the car or when I'm yanking people out of the car searching them by myself, when I'm going into people's houses, you know where all your weapons are at inside your house. I don't. I don't know which drawer your weapon is at. When I'm yanking people out of a car, when I'm showing up first on scene to the most violent calls

where somebody's possibly armed with a weapon. I know that action is always quicker than reaction. You'll always get your gun out first before I do. You'll get that shot off first. I knew that. Being killed on duty was more honorable. I can go out that way. And so I just, that was the, that's, that's what I was living like in here.

Again, I didn't want to die. I didn't want to kill myself, but just if I just wasn't around, life would be better for my family. That screaming and yelling, that constant, you know, acid filling in your stomach for the moment you wake up because you know that you're fighting with your significant other. And they're gone. They're out of a hotel. They're not answering your text messages or phone. Like just everything, man. It'd just be peaceful.

A few months after my, I got released. out to the field was like November of 2019. I get, um, I go to a, uh, you know, a work function. I don't want to get too much into that, but I want to go into a go to a work function, uh, have too much to, uh, too much to drink. It wasn't anything, it wasn't a big. We weren't celebrating any, any, anything big. Everybody just had a, you know, a beer. It was a real quick little meetup. And, um, well, I had a little too much to drink. And the reason why is because I, I, um, I didn't have any alcohol at home. And I knew like, hey, I can't leave from this, this function.

Again, I'm going to get my fix here at the bar. So I started drinking, you know, beers and shots. And I hung out for like 30 minutes. And I mean, I'm just like taking it. Like, I'm just taking it down. And go home. The next day I come into work, my sergeant says, hey, after lineup, I need to talk to you in the office. I was like, all right.

So after lineup, we go into his office. And he's like, hey, what the fuck happened last night, man? Where did you go? I was like, I went home, Sarge. And he's like, yeah, but why did you drink like that? Everybody had a beer. One. You had like shots and beer.

Like, you were part. I was like a one man party. You know what I mean? He's like, he's like, you're the only one drinking like that. And I said, damn, Sarge, I didn't realize I was drinking like that. I'm sorry that I put you in that situation. I didn't mean to drink like that. It's a one-time thing.

It won't happen again. He said, hey, Mike, I don't know too many people on this department who I've been into back-to-back OIS as like you have so early on in their career. But if there's something that's going on with you, you need to tell me, I can't help you if I don't know. Sarge, I swear to God, everything is good. Wife is good. Kids are good.

I'm good. He's like, I can't imagine what's happening, right? I can't imagine what's happening at home, but I played it all off. Hey, everything is good. Everything is good. And he said, well, just know that I'm here. If you need something, come to me so that I can help you. I want to help you.

I said, I appreciate it. Everything is good. He sent me back out to the field that night. So November 7th, I party like a madman by myself. November 8th. He talks to me on November 9th, I get in my third officer involved shooting the following day. It was a home invasion robbery suspect. It takes a F-150 from the home.

The next day, shoots at somebody, shoots at somebody inside their car. The next day, shoots at a house, shoots at somebody inside. inside their house or something like that. The following day, we catch the vehicle rolling. It turns into a vehicle pursuit. And I'm number two in the pursuit. My partner that I was with, the very first part of my career, Amir.

So we're both riding in the car together that night. The F-150 drives into a cul-de-sac. The number one PD vehicle follows it in. I'm number two in the pursuit. I try to bottleneck that cul-de-saxe, so now the suspect can't come back out. And now it's like a face-off between his F-150, our SUV. And we're getting out of the car to conduct a hot stop, basically put the suspect at gunpoint, thinking that he's going to surrender.

He can't really get out anywhere. Well, he rams the front of our SUV. Excuse me. He rams the front of our SUV. And I remember as it's kind of like, it was like rolling back. This is 11 o'clock at night, by the way, on a Saturday night. my partner is getting out of the passenger side door and the F-150 floors it hits the passenger-side door shut. I see my partner stepping out of that door one second.

The next second, he is gone. I start backpedaling to the back of the SUV. And as the F-150 is taking out our passenger-side vehicle, I remember seeing this black object riding on the grill of the F-150. And I was like, holy shit, that's my partner. He just got ran over. I can't let him get dragged down the street. I mean, literally riding the grill, like riding the grill, like, I thought he was like laying sight because that's what it looked like.

I can't let him get dragged down the street, riding the grill of that F-150. So I unholster and bang, bang, bang, bang, fire into the vehicle. The F-150 continues driving off. Suspect ends up throwing a gun out of the car, out of the truck. and as I'm coming back around to reholster my firearm, I remember on the left side of my peripheral seeing this black object flopping on the ground. And I remember before even churning around

just thinking, that's my partner. He's probably not going to survive that. I need to render aid to my partner. I need to help him, but I don't want to. I don't want to help him. I don't want to look at him. I don't want to deal with him. I don't want to see him.

I have a lot of shit going on in my life right now. I don't know if I'm prepared to see or deal with what I'm about to deal with. Why is this shit happening to me? Three officer involves shootings now in 18 months. And I'm still a baby cop. Two off-duty incidents. Life at home is completely falling apart. It's already falling apart.

He's not going to survive this. Our squads are tight. Our family members know each other's family members. Our wives know each other's wives. We invite each other over to family functions. He just had a baby. He had just came back from baby leave with his firstborn son at home. What am I going to tell his wife tonight?

What am I going to tell that kid in six, seven years? Is it my fault that he just got ran over? Should I not have positioned my vehicle here? Should we have not gotten out to conduct the hot stop? And I'm thinking all of this, I'm telling you in a, like in a one, like in a millisecond, like all these thoughts and everything is going through my mind. And I turn around to render A to my partner who's flopping on the ground. And I realize that it's not my partner. It's the rear bumper of our SUV that's still attached to the rear driver's side.

And it's kind of flopping like on the ground and in the wind. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, I'm expecting to see a human. And I'm like, what the fuck? and then my partner comes on, he looks at me and I'm like, let's get back into the pursuit. So we get back into the pursuit. The suspect ends up ditching his car.

SWAT ends up getting him barricaded a few hours later, later on that morning in an apartment complex. The OG gang detective Nestor picks me up from the scene. He takes me back to Southern Division. And I remember saying something out loud, like, I can't believe this shit is happening to me again. and he pulls his car over and he looks at me and he's like, hey, Mike, if God didn't think that you can handle this, he wouldn't put you through it. And I remember hearing that and I remember thinking,

me and God, me and God party ways a long time ago. I stopped going to church after my first OIS because I'm drinking every single day. It's awkward, right? When you go to church, you've had like two, three beers. That's awkward. Stop going to church. The nightmares, the inability to sleep, the feeling like shit every single day, the hangovers, my marriage, my relationship with my kids

are a complete disaster. Stop praying, stop begging, stop asking God for anything because nothing changed. And when he said that, I was like, dude, me and God parted ways

a long time ago, like, there's no God in my life. And then he takes me back to the division. and there was a lieutenant that had told me, hey, you've been through,

you've been through this before. You know the process. It's not your first rodeo. I highly encourage you to take the advice of your lawyer when they get here. And I was like, holy shit. And I remember looking at my peer supporter and he's like looking at me

and I was like, dude, that doesn't sound good at all. Right? I'm in trouble. That doesn't sound good. And there was a reason why that scared the shit out of me. there was a female passenger in the car. So when the suspect was driving past us, he was driving passengers on this side,

and I'm on this side. But in the academy and in face training and when we're out in the field, law enforcement officers, we're expected to make a fucking decision. The worst thing that you can do is not make a decision. Sometimes we have some couple of minutes,

to make a decision. Sometimes we have a, there's a split second that we have to make a decision. And I made a decision. I made a split second decision to fire into that F-150 in an attempt to shoot and kill the driver

knowing there was a female passenger because I could not sit there and do nothing while my partner was riding the grill of that F-150 and was going to get dragged down the street. I couldn't do it. I couldn't. I couldn't. I couldn't not do anything.

So I made a decision. I go through the entire homicide process. Nobody's updating me on what's going on. Nobody told me that they ended up getting the suspect barricaded in the apartment. Nobody told me that they found the female down the street. She was not hit. She was hiding underneath a vehicle when they found her. Nobody told me that they found her.

So I go through the entire homicide process. It was really quick. Nobody was shot. Nobody was killed. my peer supporter tells me, hey, did you call your wife? And I'm like, what wife? I don't really have a wife at this point, right? I don't really have one.

And I said, yeah, I'll call her. We were going through the divorce still. We were living together. We were on talking terms that night, all that stuff. You know, we were still going through our divorce. I texted her, I said, hey, I just got into another shooting. I'm going to be late tonight. Crickets.

never got a response back from her. I make it home eventually that early that morning, and I come into an empty house. And I could tell that the kids, her, were going to be gone for a while. Like, there was a lot of stuff missing. And I just started drinking that night, trying to put myself to sleep.

And I couldn't. And Sunday comes around and I'm still awake. and I'm getting calls from family and squadmates and captain and the sergeant, the lieutenant, and the executive chief called me. He left me a message, hey, this is, you know, Chief Guadorama. Please give me a call back when you get this message. To this day, I've never called the man back. But he's retired, so I don't got to worry about it calling him anymore.

But I never called him. I was like, man, I ain't calling nobody. I wasn't answering anybody's texts, phone calls, nothing. I just wanted to be left alone. And I remember the captain calling me. He said, hey, give me a call back in five minutes. If you don't, I'm going to send some folks to your house, do a welfare check because there's some people that are concerned about you.

Nobody's heard from you. And I was drunk as fuck. Like noon, noon the next day, I'm drunk as fuck. And I call them, I was like, hey, Cap, like, don't send anybody over here. Like, I'm doing all right, man. I'm going through a lot of stuff right now. I'm good. He said, hey, are you going to be at the debrief tomorrow morning on Monday, tomorrow.

morning. I said, yes, I'll be there. So again, we do critical incident debriefs after an officer involved shooting. All the players that are directly involved, they get there, dispatch, all that stuff. We break down the incident. And a lot of good stuff, positive good stuff comes out of these debriefs. Let me backtrack a little bit. The second OIS with the AK-47, I realize, you know, these debriefs also help clarify what happened and why things happen because people talk like cops were we're the worst to each other like we think like oh man the community doesn't give a shit about us they talk we talk shit about each other like we're worse to each other sometimes than the people out in the community are are towards us um people monday morning quarterback all the time oh why why the fuck

did that person didn't shoot he was sitting there right next to you so the my shooting i was the second shooting the AK 47 one i was the only one that shot my partner that was standing right next of me, he didn't shoot. He saw the exact same thing that I saw. He didn't shoot. And people were like, dude, why the fuck did he not shoot? Like, well, in the debrief, I learned that

I was in the middle of the road with no cover. He was to my right. And to his right, there was cover, the vehicles. He thought as I began shooting, that I was going to get behind cover, which would have been to his right, I would have had to step in front of his AR to get covered. He didn't want to shoot me.

He thought that I was going to step in front of his, in front of his barrel. So that was a reason why he didn't shoot. And I'm glad. I'm glad he didn't shoot because if I would have, he would have blew the back of my fucking head off, right? So I'm glad that he didn't shoot. But everything happens real, real fast for people.

Sometimes things slow down. Sometimes things happen quick. He didn't shoot, which is perfectly fine. I had no problem with it, but other people did. People were talking shit. Once I found out why he didn't, not just me, but other people that were in the debrief,

were able to stop some of those rumors. Hey, dude, he didn't shoot because the only cover was to his right. If he would have been putting rounds down range, I would have stepped right in front of his barrel. He would have killed me, right? So you're able to stop some of these rumors. I also learned during that debrief that one of my rounds that I shot at the suspect entered a trailer that was right behind him

that was occupied by a moment. mom and like three of her kids. That, that, uh, that detail fucked me up pretty good because the kids were like as young as my kids were at the time and, um, I was like, man, these kids would never look at law enforcement the same. But there's a lot of positive things that come out of these debriefs. For this third OIS, my debrief was scheduled for Monday morning.

Monday morning at eight o'clock comes around. I'm supposed to be at Southern Division starting the debrief. I'm still at my house. I haven't slept since I woke up Saturday to go to work. I've been drinking for like two days straight now. You know what I mean? Or like a whole day straight. People were calling me and texting me, hey, dude, where are you at?

The debrief starts right now. I said, dude, I overslept. I'm on my way. Bro, I was trying to sober up. Like I was like, dude, you know, I got to be there right now. Like I took, I was taking a shower. I was trying to drink coffee. I was trying to drink water, like trying to hydrate.

But you can't, like you can't. There's no sobering up after. And then you haven't, I haven't slept for like two and a half days, three days already at this point, right? And finally I must got enough courage. I was like, all right, made my way down to Southern Division. And I walk into Southern Division and I'm like looking down at the ground because I don't want to make eye contact with anybody. Because you, everybody, as soon as somebody looks at your eyes, they're going to be like,

dude, what the fuck's wrong with this guy, right? What's wrong with this tweaker? And I'm like looking down at the ground and I'm making my way to the to the lineup room. And our wellness unit was there to greet me. Deanna, Deanna, she was a civilian. She's a dispatcher by trade, but she had gotten her alcohol. She was like an alcohol substance abuse specialist. She went to school for that and all that stuff.

She had, she has a history of, of alcohol use also. and she's been sober for like 20, 30 years. So she was there. She was on our wellness unit and the sergeant of the wellness unit was there. And as I'm looking down at the ground, they're like, good morning, Mike. And I look up like, what the, like, what the hell? And I was like, hey, good morning. And they had like, they were all like, what, how do you say?

Like bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Like, they were like wide awake. And they're, you know, they had like nine hours of sleep the night before. And they're like, good morning, Mike. They're like, hey, you're not in any. kind of trouble after this debrief we would love to have you come up to the wellness unit office and we're just just to have a conversation you're not in any kind of trouble and I was like dude the wellness unit office is at headquarters in downtown on the seventh floor the same floor that the

cafeteria is at the same floor that internal affairs is at and the same floor that the chief's office is at I was like fuck no I'm not I'm not not in the condition that I'm not going I'm not stepping foot over there I said, hey, I got a lot of stuff to do. I got to go to this debrief. I'm already like 45 minutes, an hour late. So I go in there, do my thing. I tell them, no, I go do my thing for two hours. I come out of the debrief and they're still there waiting for me.

And this time they're like, hey, you're going to come up and talk to us. Like, you don't really have a choice anymore. I was like, all right, make my way to headquarters. I remember parking in the lot. And I knew. that I knew the game was over. Like I knew, I knew that I was done. I had been involved in three officer-involved shootings,

two off-duty incidents, all within 18 months. I'm still a baby cop. I knew that I was fucked up. I knew that I was a liability to the department. All the hard work that I put into getting into this career. First of all, just changing my life around as a youngster. I could have gone one way and I didn't. Going to college and getting my degree and I ended up getting my degree in criminology,

criminal justice and psychology, got my degrees, working at the correctional facility, animal control, not giving up after getting disqualified and disqualified, finally getting hired, putting in all this hard work, building my reputation on the department as a baby as a baby rookie cop. I've already been involved in two OISs, now my third one. All this hard work I put in all down the drain. I'm going to get terminated. I'd been on long enough at that point to know that when we get terminated from this profession, nobody gives a fuck about all the lives you saved. Nobody gives a fuck about all the reports and the warrants that you wrote up and all the high-profile

investigations that you conducted. Nobody gives a fuck about your dope and the guns you got off the street, the gangsters that you got off the street, your felony arrest, your awards, all the medals that you wear on your Class A uniforms. Nobody gives a shit about all the bars

and stars and stripes that you wear on your uniform. Nobody gives a shit about none of that. People remember you by the way that you were terminated. Like, you, oh, shit. Oh, yeah, I know, Mike. He slapped the shit out of his wife, and he DV, He got arrested, right?

That dumb motherfucker, right? Oh, my God. Yeah, I know her. She got three DUIs. Like, what a dumb ass, right? That, and I was on long enough to hear these stories and hear people, you know, nobody ever said like, oh, yeah, so-and-so got terminated. But, man, what a good-ass fucking cop he was, man.

What an awesome, man. He saved lives. Like, he saved a girl from drowning. Like, nobody ever talks about people like that. Everybody talks shit about them, and I knew that it was over. And I walk into that. wellness unit office and man I'm defeated I'm sit down on a on a on a on a couch similar to this one a a little longer I sit down on the couch and diana walks up to me and she says how are you doing mike

i said i'm doing good how are you she's like i'm doing good she's like how's how's the wife and the kids doing i was like they're doing they're doing great doing great how's your sleep sleep's great i overslept today that's why i was why i was late to the debrief. I oversleps. Sleeps, sleeps pretty good. And she sat there and she stared at me for like, I don't know, probably like 20 seconds. Like it was like a very long, awkward silence. And I'm looking at her. She said, hey, Mike, we talk to a couple of people that love and care about you and your whole life is fucked up. And you don't even know it. Your career is about to be fucked up too. And now I'm like, oh shit, it's over now, right?

I'm like, I'm starting to sweat, man. I'm like rubbing my kneecaps. I started looking up at the ceiling. I was like, and the door was over here to my right. I kept looking at the door. I was looking at the ceiling. And remember, I'm paranoid. I've been awake for three days.

I've been drinking three days straight. I'm already paranoid sober with sleep. I'm already paranoid. Now I'm even more paranoid. I haven't slept. And I'm like rubbing my kneecaps. I'm like looking around. I'm like, you know, my ass is like wiggling in the chair.

and she said, you know, we talked to a couple of people that love and care about you, and we think that you may be having issues with alcohol, and it may be due to all the critical incidents you've been involved in. Months later, I talked to her, and she said, why did you keep looking up at the ceiling? And she's like, why did you keep looking at the door? They thought I was going to, they were like, is he going to foot bail on us? Like, is he really going to get up and run out the door? Like, run away?

Like, the cop is going to run from the cops, right? He's not even any kind of, like, trouble. why do you keep looking up at the ceiling? And I told her, I was like, I thought I was on an A&E intervention show. I truly, and I know it sounds stupid, but I was like looking. I was like, dude, am I being recorded?

Like, is there cameras? I kept looking at the door because two people were going to walk through it. The chief of police, I need your gun and badge. Or my wife and my kids, get some help. We love you. Please stop drinking. Go get some help.

So I kept looking at the door. I kept looking at the ceiling. And she said, hey, we want to offer you an opportunity to go get some help. There's a first responder only treatment facility in Los Angeles County. They deal with first responders dealing with PTSD and substance abuse issues. We think you'd benefit from it. I was like, I'm good. I'm not crazy. I can stop drinking any time I want. I don't have any issue. I'm good. Went home. She followed up on me multiple times that day, the next day, the following day, finally I said, fuck it. I'm going to go. So about three days later,

after Deanna kept following up with me and checking and she was trying to get me into the program. I finally decided to take the bait. I decided to enter treatment. I knew that I was going to get fired. I knew that I was going to be terminated, but I was like, you know, before I get terminated, I'm going to let the department fix me because I knew that I was fucked up. I knew that I was broken. I knew that it wasn't normal for me to drink that much just to do things like sleep. I knew it wasn't normal for me to cry in my sleep. Like I knew all this was not. not normal. So I went into treatment. I spent 26 days in inpatient treatment up in L.A. County. Got diagnosed with PTSD. I get there. I get to the program. And, you know, they're not going to,

a first responder only program is not going to search a cop's bags. They do. I brought all my firearms with me. And it's a funny story. I thought that I thought I was going to be like a, 5150 or us you know be considered like a psych like a psychiatric like a nutcase right and so that they were going to come and take all my gun so i brought them all with me i broke down the rails the barrels i wrapped them in my pants i was like smuggling them in and um so they found all that it was lunchtime um i get there and i start to meet all these guys and they're all oh geez and i won't i won't shoot out the the agencies that they're with but there was folks from california agencies uh Texas New York, Alaska.

And I was the baby in there. And I remember one guy asking like, hey, bro, how much time do you have on? And I was like, I got puffed up my chest. I was like, I got three years on, homie. Why, what's up, you know? And I didn't even have three years. I had like two and a half. But when you're talking to OGs and these guys had like 15, 20, 47 years in the profession,

you got to just like, you know, you got to raise that, you know, don't say two and a half. Say three years. It sounds better. And then another guy, dude, what the fuck's wrong? with you. I was like, they said I'm drinking too much. And then another guy, dude, just stopped drinking. It ain't worth it. I'm like, motherfucker. If I could, I would. All right? I know all that already. So day one, I get to meet all the guys. Day two is when the work started. And I got to learn why every single one of those dudes were in there. And then they got to hear while I was in there.

And it was the first time that I learned about cumulative trauma, compound trauma. All the day, the stuff that you do with day in and day out of life work, out of all those guys, not one of them had been involved in an officer involved shooting. And I had been involved in three. And I was the baby there. But they were just as broken as I was, every single one of them. Some people were suicidal, substance abuse and not just alcohol and pills, but other stuff. Their kids didn't talk to them anymore.

divorce, like everything, right? I learned about cumulative trauma, the things that we talked about during our group sessions, you know, things that we and they brought up, you know, doing CPR on a dead baby. And there's nothing you're going to do for that dead baby. But you're going through the motions because the family is sitting there expecting you to do something, responding to a vehicle accident where the vehicles fully engulfed in flames and you're watching somebody burn alive inside, you know, the screams from a mother when she loses her child. Only one scream like it. A sister doesn't scream like that. A wife doesn't scream like that. But a mother,

when she loses her child, she screams from the depths of her soul, you know, vehicle versus pedestrians, where there's body parts all over the place, you know, watching autopsies of a two or a three or a four-year-old child way different than watching the autopsy of a of an adult right the internet crimes against children those detectives that have to watch you know kids get raped or molested or do sexual things you know over and over and over to their grandpa or uncle or their dad you know what i mean like all these things that these guys talked about they eventually broke and it wasn't just the work stuff when we get off of work after we have a hard long day a shitty day life doesn't just give us a time out. Life continues to go forward. We get into fights with our

significant others. We go through divorces. We have financial issues. We have medical issues of our own. Some of our kids are more fucked up than the people that we deal with out in the street. They have mental health issues. The substance abuse issues, their criminal activity, whatever it may be, gang activity. Life doesn't just stop when we get home. Life goes on. And that, And then what about all the things that we bring with us into this profession? You know, some of us have been to war and seen combat. Some of us have been molested and raped, grew up homeless, grew up poor, grew up with no parents, lost a mom or a dad at a young age.

Some of us didn't know a mom or a dad. We never knew our mom and dad, right? Some of us lost a real brother or a real sister at a young age. You think that doesn't fuck with us? That doesn't affect us into adulthood? we just learn to shove it all down and put it away. And then when we get into this profession, what we deal with out in the street,

we shove it down and we put it away. And then when we get home, we shove it down, we ignore it, we ignore it, we put it away. If you don't take care of yourself like me, like all these guys that I was in there with, everybody has a breaking point. And all these guys eventually they broke.

And I did too. So it was the first time I learned about, cumulative trauma. And I took advantage of everything that facility had to offer me from EMDR therapy, acupuncture and yoga and paint therapy and breathing exercises, meditation, you know, one-on-one sessions with the doctor. But the biggest, the equine therapy, they had horses out there. We were feeding the horses. But the biggest takeaway that I got was the group sessions, to being able to tell your story and open up to other men. These were OGs, guys that have been on way longer than I have.

Being able to open up to other men and talk about the things that I saw, the things that I doubt with, what I was going through. It was a life-changing experience. There was two biggest, big takeaways that I got being at the facility. One was I learned how to sleep. I remember they had me on medication for about a week because I was a paranoid freak. I was all anxious all the time. But the second week, I remember sleeping like eight hours straight, never woke up to pee or roll over in my bed or anything.

And I felt, I always described it like my brain. It took its first breath of just pure oxygen. There was this clarity that I had in my, when I was. I woke up, like that fogginess that was there every single day, all day long, it was gone. But there was this clarity, man, like this, like, just this, like, crisp thinking and, and being able to articulate myself and being able to understand what I was hearing. It was amazing what sleep, what, like, one night of healthy sleep could do, just one, that first night but I learned how to sleep and I also learned how shitty of a father that I had become

that um that that um all the time that I had squandered that my kids will never be that small I can't go back and do it over I can't go back and hold them nap with them put them to bed the way that I could have the way that I should have as a as a father I don't remember their favorite toys that they played with. I don't remember the favorite cartoons they watched on TV. If I was in any of the pictures on the holidays, I don't remember them. I avoided holidays because feeding my ego at work felt so much better than being a father and being a husband. I had squandered all that time that I'll never get back.

And I promised myself when I was in there that if I had a second chance to do it over, or if I had a second chance to make some of that time up, that I would never waste it again. And I got diagnosed with PTSD while I was in there. I was there for 26 days. I spent Thanksgiving inside there of 2019, got out a few days before Christmas. And my wife ended up, she ended up staying with me. and I've had these conversations with people or people have asked me, like, were you surprised?

And I was like, well, I was definitely surprised that she stayed with me. But if she would have left me, I wouldn't have been mad at her. I would have understood. Because she didn't sign up for all the shit that I had put her through. She didn't sign up for being married to somebody who had been involved in three shootings. she didn't sign up for none of that I did I signed up for this career if she would have left me I would have been okay I would have been okay with it I would have understood and I'm glad she didn't she stayed with me we started doing counseling you know individually we eventually did

marriage counseling together life started to get better I learned how to spend quality time with my kids putting my cell phone away you know Because that's a huge distraction. Even now, like, it's a bad habit. I'm not perfect at it. I still, you know, I still have a bad habit of looking at it. My wife has to remind me like, hey, phone. I'm like, oh, shit, all right, all right.

But I learned how to spend quality time with my kids. And, you know, life wasn't a chore. Like, it wasn't difficult for me to take them to school on their first day of kindergarten, their first day of first grade, their first day of second grade, be involved in the parent teacher conferences, open house at their school, when they get awards at school, like I take the time off.

And before, I would never even, I wouldn't do it. I was just never involved. Not because I had to work, but because I wanted to work. Again, feeding that ego, it was, it felt so much better than dealing with, with home life. But taking them to their swim classes or to jujitsu and taking them to school or taking them to go

get their hair, kind of sitting down and doing homework with them. And that's a, that is not fun. But I'm there. You know, I'm there and I'm present. I try to be. It's hard. It's hard. I'm not perfect at it at all.

My wife is perfect at it. But I'm not. I'm still like learning, but I'm trying to be there. And life got better. man, I became a, I eventually went back out to the field. Obviously, I was sober. I was feeling better. The symptoms were, you know, going away.

I became a member of our OIS peer support team, now responding to officer of all shootings, taking people under my wing, checking on them. And it's, it's been great. I became a field training officer. I became an FTO. My partner and I, we were awarded the Medal for Valor for the, the trailer park incident that we were involved in. And life was just, you know, and not only just my kids, but my wife, like being able to have

a conversation that didn't, conversations didn't turn into arguments. We learned how to kind of fight, fair, argue fairly. Things just didn't get blown out of proportion. I was able to talk about finances and what we were going to do next week. And this was stuff that I didn't have, there was no gas in my tank to even fathom or even try to think of having a conversation like that when I would get home prior to me going into treatment. And now I had the energy to do it. And I wanted to. That was the biggest thing.

It was, things weren't, it wasn't a task. It wasn't a chore for me. It was like, I want to take my kids to school. I want to be there on their first day of kindergarten, you know. It's been absolutely amazing. in 2021. Deanna, she came to me. She said,

how would you like to work at the wellness unit? And I was like, yeah, maybe like in 15 years when I'm all old and shit. Like, not right now.

I'm still out here getting it. I have a field, I have a, I have a trainee. I'm an FTO. I got a little bit of extra pay and we're still out here getting guns and dope and everything.

And she's like, no, more like two months. And I was like, well, let me talk to the captain first. We're short staffed out on patrol. We're short staffed as FTOs.

I highly, doubt that I'm going to get approval for that. So let me ask her. And she said, don't even worry about it. The chief of police already approved it. I was like, oh, shit, I guess I'm being volunteered to go to become a wellness unit member. And it's been awesome.

Like being, I'm still there to this day. You know, we're responding to officer of all shootings, you know, baby deaths. We're checking on officers. We're only there for employees and their family members. It's a one-stop shot for any employee and their family members to receive free resources that the department provides for free. And there are other, and I know this is going to

sound like I'm talking trash, but there's other agencies that are doing it, but they're not doing it as good as San Diego PD. We've been doing it since 2011. We've perfected it. You know, we, our wellness unit's a one-stop shot for anybody to get psychological services for free for the employee and their family member that they live with. Chaplains, we have, our chaplains are awesome. They're riding out. They're riding with officers daily. They're riding with the gang unit with K-9 unit. They're assigned to our homicide, sex crimes, child abuse.

Like they're at every single division. They're rolling to all the officer-involved shootings. They're rolling to all the baby deaths. They're at every single one of our debriefs. Our dispatchers have a chaplain assigned to their division. So our chaplains are peer supporters who are the best peer supporters in the entire nation. We have 175 peer supporters that are assigned to every part, nearly every unit of our department from gangs and canine and SWAT and SWAT

snipers and crime suppression teams and all 10 of our divisions. But we also have our human resources, our dispatchers, our crime scene techs. There's peer support everywhere. And these are men and women who are boots on the ground that are out there responding and taking care of other employees who may need some help, who may have gone to a gruesome scene or have encountered a pretty crazy investigation, and they're checking on them,

just making sure that they're okay. And if they're not okay, that they provide the resources that the department has available to them. The wellness unit, we oversee our alcohol and substance abuse program, PTSD slash PTSD, we could get people into inpatient, outpatient treatment. We could get people into law enforcement only AA meetings.

There's Christian faith-based meetings that we could set people up with. It's, yeah, I mean, we have our family wellness team, which is comprised of significant others, the significant other of an employee helping out a significant other. Sometimes wives can talk to wives and be on the same level compared to, you know, meet, me as a police officer talking to, you know, a police officer's husband about something. I'm not a civilian, you know, so it's like civilians helping civilians. It's awesome. It's, it's been absolutely rewarding to see, you know, again, San Diego PD, we're not perfect. We have a lot to work on. We still have opportunities to get better. But the San Diego

police department had that resource available for me to use, and I utilized it. And that's going to come to help me later on. And it doesn't just, it doesn't just help me, man. It's helped plenty of officers, detectives, sergeants, lieutenants, people who deserve the help and they need the help. If there's one thing you want someone to take away from your story today, what would that be? So I would say that there's no honor in suffering and silence. The only people that suffer is you and the people that love you, the people that care about you, the true people who actually give a shit about you. There's no honor in suffering and silence.

And there's an opportunity for you to get fit. to be restored, be built, get built from the ground on up. It's not easy. It's hard, but it's worth it. Like, we are worth it. You're worth it. You're worth it to your family. Sometimes people are in difficult life situations with their significant other

or with their family. And I've seen employees. restore their relationships, divorce, break up, and they get back together. Maybe not right away, but they get back together. But it's worth it. You're worth it. And let me just, let me, before I, are we going to,

we're going to end right now? Yeah, you can. Let me just, let me talk about the last, the last shooting. So I'm going to bounce, talking about the, how the resources were beneficial for me. The, um, that it's going to help me later on, about two years later on January 10th of 2022, I was involved in my fourth shooting. And I'm the wellness unit guy. I was working overtime.

Me and my buddy, we were working overtime. And early in the morning, and Monday morning at 7 o'clock in the morning, an armed robbery with a knife comes out over the radio. We're like, hey, let's go help out. By the time we get there, it's going to be done and over with. We get there. The suspect was last seen running down the alley behind the liquor. store. We start driving down in the alley. We see somebody loosely matching the clothing description like two blocks away, walking away from us. So as we start driving behind him, perfect timing, dispatch gets on the air. She updates the description of the suspect. And as we're passing this guy, he looks at me. I look at him and my partner's like, holy shit, dude, this is a good possible. I'm like,

yeah, no kidding. So we pull up, we get out to contact this guy. And before I could even say anything, he pulls out the knife from the top of his jacket and then he pulls out a gun he blades off everybody starts shooting he starts shooting i start shooting my partner starts shooting nixing you know something hits my chest i eat shit i fall on the ground and i'm like well i just got shot bad day for my wife and kids i roll over to the prone position and i start shooting from my stomach bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang slide locks back i run out of ammunition the suspect still bladed off pointing the gun at me my partner shooting another san diego pd officer arrives he's shooting the suspect i just remember everything going quiet and just thinking of myself god don't let me die here i know that i'm

gonna die i know this is it just don't let me die here let me let me die at the hospital and uh i decided you know i better be a hard target to hit so i do this this roll i'm like rolling on the ground trying to get the hell out of the way i reload shoot the suspect multiple times suspect drops to the ground hands up getting back up, pointing the gun, pointing it back at me. I shoot them three more times. We kill them.

And it was a, it was a moment of, when I got transported back to Central Division, it was a moment where I was like, man, all these symptoms are going to come back. All these, the paranoia, the PTSD, all this stuff is going to come back. And it never did.

And again, that was the reason why I want to bring up that, that if it wasn't for it to San Diego, Police Department's resources if it wasn't for the wellness unit and for the resources that were provided to me and were provided to other officers, I would have never made it to that fourth OIS. I wouldn't be, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be here anymore.

However, that would have played out. But I am, and I am because the department didn't get rid of me. again we're not perfect there's still room for us to grow and get better at what we do and as a department even as a wellness unit but but they didn't get rid of me and they could have and I'm grateful for that Deanna she didn't give up on me

she kept following up with me they put the perfect person on that unit to help me and I credit the department I credit the resources. I credit Deanna. I credit my wife and my sergeant, Oscar. My wife ended up after my third OIS.

She reached out to my sergeant. And my sergeant was like, damn, I knew. He knew something just wasn't right with me. He just didn't know what it was. There was a whole bunch of people that played a role in saving me. It was my wife, my sergeant, Deanna, the department, the resources, the wellness. unit. I didn't do it on my own. But at the end of the day, it falls on us. I got to give myself credit

because I put in the work. And I always say this that, you know, nobody can go to the gym for you and work out for you. Nobody can write your investigations. Nobody can make your arrest for you. You know, you got to do that shit on your own. You need to learn on your own. You need to put in that work and it's worth it. And if I could say anything to anybody who's on the fence, there's no honor in suffering and silence. There's no honor in killing yourself. Life can get better. Like there's,

when I was living in that darkness in 2018 and 2019, I never knew what waited for me on the other side. The joy that my wife, that my kids bring to me, being able to hug my kids, them telling me that they love me. And thank you for hanging out with me. Thank you for playing with me.

You know, all these little things that I didn't know that, you know, or I think, you know, all of this I would have missed if I would have done something dumb or something crazy would have happened to me. There's a, there's a way out. It's not easy. It's hard, but it's worth it. We are, we are worth it.

You're worth it. Michael, I appreciate you coming on the show today. Yes, sir. I appreciate it, man. Thank you guys so much for having me. And again, shout out to Steve Murphy for connecting us. And obviously that was via the Southern California gang conference. And again, I do conferences all over the nation now, gang and narcotic and different agencies and stuff like that.

So if I could be of any help to anybody, please share my information with him. And yeah, thank you. I appreciate you.