Locked In with Ian Bick - I Was A Cop - Then I Had To Survive Prison | Jeff Asher

Episode Date: July 30, 2023

Jeff Asher served in the United States Marines before becoming a Police Officer in his hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts. After nearly 16 years on the force and a series of reprimands regarding violent incidents with civilians, Jeff is sentenced to prison. In this episode we learn about Jeff's upbringing, serving during Desert Storm, life as a police officer and how a cop is treated inside prison. Thank you to FACTOR - America's #1 ready to eat meal kit - for sponsoring this episode. Go to: FACTORMEALS.com/lockedin50 and use code lockedin50 to get 50% off your first box. Connect with Jeff Asher: https://www.facebook.com/jeffyjewjagoff?mibextid=LQQJ4d https://instagram.com/jeffeyjewjagoff?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== https://www.tiktok.com/@jeffreyasher1028?_t=8ePModjnHCQ&_r=1 00:00 Intro/Factor  01:53 Childhood/Upbringing 06:48 Joining the Marines  10:12 Desert Storm 16:32 Ever seek help for PTSD? 17:56 Joining the Police  21:21 Police training 23:14 Veterans joining the force 25:02 Day One as a cop  28:43 Violence towards cops and relationships built with each other 34:22 Corrupt Partner  42:14 Factor AD 44:13 First Incident and Suspension 53:09 Returning to Work 57:05 Second Incident and Suspension 1:02:11 Third Incident that leads to arrest  1:08:09 Arrested  1:13:10 What was it like being a defendant? 1:20:13 Cop in Jail  1:27:17 Had to Fight in Prison  1:28:32 Treatment in prison  1:33:52 Life after prison Connect with Ian Bick: https://www.ianbick.com/ Subscribe to our membership program on YouTube to get early access to interviews, see behind the scenes photos & more: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRvVklIft6DMelVW18M0oBw/join Powered by Q29 Productions, LLC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At Hyundai of Glendale, lease a new, 2026 Hyundai-Tuson-S-C front-wheel drive for 269 a month, plus tax for 36 months, with owner's assurance in America's best warranty, 10-year, 100,000 miles, stopped by Hyundai of Glendale today or Hyundaiof-Glindale. 36-month lease, 4,49 to its signing, tax title license and dock fees extra, plus government fees and taxes, 7,500 miles per year, expires 6126, who available at this payment, pH 71529, pH 7159. Welcome back to Lockton. Guys, it's been like two weeks since I've been sitting here in the studio recording. We backed up a bunch of episodes and I had a couple weeks off. I actually just got back from Dallas, Texas, where I was filming a pilot to a new TV show we're working on.

Really excited to share more details when the time comes. But anyways, on today's episode, we have Jeff Asher coming from Springfield, Massachusetts. Yes, another guest from Springfield. We all know you guys love that chicky, chicky telly episode. This perspective is a little bit different, though, because Jeff was a former Springfield police officer for 16 years until an incident in which he attacked a civilian during an arrest, gets him booted off the force and fired,

and results in a prison sentence of nearly two years. Thank you guys for tuning into this week's episode, and also a big, big thank you to factor for coming back on and sponsoring today's episode for a second time. They were originally our first sponsor a few weeks back for the Chicky Chicky Tully episode and they came back to sponsor today's episode. I've been eating Factor Meals now for the last three weeks and they're absolutely amazing. I got one right here.

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Jeff, welcome to the show, another Springfield Mask guy. I don't know what is with all the Springfield Mask guys. I feel like in the last like three weeks of Welcome Out of Woodwork to come on the show. It's a popular city. And you're friends with Chicky, right? Yeah, I know Chicky very well. That's awesome. I love that you guys are all close or you guys talk to each other and it's all interconnected.

Yeah, for a bigger city, there's a lot of people that know each other. It's kind of a close city. Yeah. And your story is just as crazy as Chicky's story. I mean, a cop for 16 years and all this going to jail on the other side of the spectrum. So I'm really excited to dive into it today. Let's start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

childhood like? What's your family like? I grew up in Springfield Mass. My father was a fireman in Springfield. He's been retired several years. My mother worked for City Hall in Springfield, so another city worker. And my brothers are school principal in Springfield. So we're all, you know, we're all employed by the city at one point. But it was a normal childhood. Nothing crazy. Everybody worked. My father helped run a bar downtown Springfield, Donnie's Cafe, which is real popular bar. So we grew up in the bar. We got to know all the cops and all the firemen and all the politicians, the wise guys. They all hung out there. Everybody hung out in the place. But, you know, it was kind of a normal childhood, you know, I was a C student and, you know, just worked a lot of odd jobs,

landscaping and stuff like that. But yeah, nothing crazy out of the ordinary. It was just you and your brother? It's just my brother and I. He's three years younger than me. brother Keith. Okay. And how did you guys grow up like financially? Was it lower, middle, upper class? It was kind of middle class. You know, they both, my father and mother both worked. He worked for the fire department, but we lived in apartments for several years. And he was finally able to buy a house in Springfield back in 1987. And that was about a year before I graduated high school. Who were you closer to your mother or your father? Um, I don't know. That's a good question. Probably my father. Um, you know,

Only because we were both in the military, a lot to talk about when it comes to, you know, our deployments. He's a Vietnam vet. So probably my father. Did you know at a young age that you wanted to go in the military because of your father? Or you had no idea at that time? No idea at all. Interesting. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean. Yeah, go on. No, I didn't know much back then because Vietnam vets aren't very open about Vietnam. That's not something they talk about. You know, every once in a while you're running a guy. I'll tell you a couple stories. but most of the Vietnam vets aren't willing to kind of open up about what they experienced over there. My father was the same way.

He had stuff in the basement, his DD-214, his medals, but I would just kind of look at him, and he didn't want to talk about it. And I'm sure you were curious. That probably spiked the curiosity. Absolutely. And he never had a role in me joining the military or anything like that. This was all me. But some of it was because my father had served.

Did you have any aspirations as a kid at that age of what you wanted to do? I know as a kid I've always had aspirations. We want to be a firefighter, a policeman, anything like that. I wanted to be a firefighter. Okay. I wanted to follow my father's footsteps and be a firefighter. And the bar that my father worked at Donnie's was all cops and firefighters. But I will tell you, the cops that hung out there, bigger than life.

This guy, Tiz, was 6'3 Italian cop. And I'd look up at him and see the gun, his revolver hanging off his gun belt and just the sheer size of him. There's gold chains. Best guy in the world is. But he would look up to those guys. But I still didn't want to be a cop. I just looked up to him because they were cops. I still had no clue what I wanted to do.

More firefighting, I think, than anything. And middle school, high school, what kind of kid are you? Are you getting into trouble? Or are you just going through, like you said, you were a C student? Anything exciting happened? No, I mean, it was kind of, you know, we get in fights and stuff like that. But it wasn't crazy. I mean, I got along with everybody.

You know, I got a mouth. So I love getting along. with everybody, all the different clicks I could kind of talk and intermingle with everybody. So I never really had a problem going through school. I didn't get in much trouble. Little stuff heading in the high school, little things, but nothing crazy. Yeah, you're very social. I could tell that about you when you said, oh, I don't text. I like phone calls and we hit it off right off the bat. It's always a good sign in a person when they're able to do that. Some people are the opposite and they're like, oh, I only text and they can't

respond well on the phone. So that's good. So high school's fine. When do you decide to join the military? Did you go to college or did you go straight to the military? I did one semester at Stick. It's a community college in Springfield. I've never heard of it. Yeah, STCC.

It's a small community college. I go there for, I think, three months. And I thought I was failing. I thought that my grades were horrible. And I'm like, what am I going to do? My parents take off to Washington, D.C. for a party. and I'm like, I'm joining the military. And I drove just like that.

Just like that. I drove down to the federal building, and it's kind of a funny story. I walk into the federal building, and they've got the hallway with the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, in the Marine Corps. And as I'm going down the hallway, all these branches are the Army guys like,

come on in, I'll show you a movie, and you should join the Army, and the Navy guy the same way. Come take a seat, Air Force. I get to the Marine Corridor door. and I'm looking in, nobody's coming. So I'm like, all right, I'll walk in. I walk in.

I see the dress blue poster. I see, you know, all the different recruiting posters and all the history. And I'm like, this is pretty cool, but nobody's talking to me. And this guy looks in me, he goes, come here. He brings me over, puts a VCR tape in, and he basically shows me what boot camp is going to be like

and what it's like to be a Marine. I watched that, and I sang up right there on the spot. Wow. Yeah. What year was this and how old are you? 1980, was it, 89. 1989, I walked right in, signed up. And I had to come back the next week and take the ASVAB.

So I had to sign up for that. But once that was done, that was it. And you went right to boot camp. No, they gave me a date. I want to say that was in November. I left January 28th to go to Paris Island, just like that. My parents came home. And I said, hey, I joined.

the Marine Corps. My mother was like, oh my God, you're going to go to war. My father's like, there's no wars going on right now. But it was the best move I ever made. Got me away from Springfield, got me away. I always wanted to, I was a short guy with a chip on a shoulder and the Marine Corps is where all those guys go. It gave you some structure. Absolutely. Yep. Your dad was probably happy to follow his footstep for a little bit. He was. He was absolutely. And he loved the Marine Corps. My father growing up. We're watching Sands of Iwo Gene. We'd watch dirty hairy movies or we'd watch Marine Corps movies. He always looked up to the Marine Corps, even though he was in the Army. But that's kind of what got me going in that direction. And you make it through boot camp,

everything goes according to plan. How were you like in good shape at this period of time? Did you have to lose weight? What did you have to do? I probably had to lose 10 pounds. I had to get running shape. So I was, I was an okay shape, but I had never really run before. So by the time I got the boot camp, I was at like maybe three miles. But they basically, they can mold guys that never ran before, ever exercised before. And you're going to be in great shape when you leave. Yeah. Just it helped me out a little bit with my wind, you know, going in like that. But, you know, boot camp stuff. Parasylum was extremely hard. How do you think your friends would have described you at this time period back then?

The ones that grew up with you, the ones that really knew you. I ended joky. I was always like the class clown. I don't think anyone thought I was going into the Marines. And that's kind of why I did it. They're like, Jeff would never go in the Marines. I go, yeah, I'm going down. I signed up for it. I'm going. I'm the same way. Like what someone says they don't think I'm going to do something I do the opposite. Oh, yeah. Plus it's the hardest branch of the military. So I'm like, I'm gone. And it was the best decision I ever made to get away and go in the Marine Corps.

Now, you ended up serving in a war, I think I was reading. You weren't expecting to do that, were you? No, no. How does that? What happens? After boot camp, you get to your unit. You do your training, then you get to your unit. And I want to say it was within a year, 1990, is when Saddam rolled into Kuwait, and we got a call that we might get called up to go. We might argue it may go over. And then about 30 days later, we got called up. And that was it.

They brought us to Camp Lejeune. They had a bunch of training to get ready. A lot of it around gas masks and, you know, the nerve agents and the stuff we would deal with. And on New Year's Eve, 91, and we landed in Saudi Reagan. Totally unexplicated. I never thought this would happen. But I was excited for it.

You know, you don't know what's going to happen because at that point they were like, we're going to get gassed. Saddam's got, you know, 300,000 Republican guards waiting for you. So we went over there, you know, really think we're going to mix it up with these guys. And did you?

Well, when we first got there, the air war had just, started. So we were back in this area called Manifa Bay, which was probably about 60 miles from the border. And we'd watch the planes go over every day, and we watched the smoke come back every afternoon. So they'd hit the place in the morning, and it would just roll back over us. And then they moved us up to the front, and that's where things started to get a little more interesting. My friend Joe and I were in a hole out in the desert that we had dug, and he had the NVGs like vision goggles.

And he's looking out one night, and he starts to see little explosions and lights. And he's like, Jeff, there's something going on in front of us out here. So I said, all right, let me take a look. I looked. I said, all right, I see it, but I don't know what it is. Could be our people. I run back, grab the gunny, and it turns out that 22 Iraqi tanks had rolled across the border and were headed right at us.

Oh, wow. Our company, who by mistake was in front of the forward artillery unit. So we were kind of in a spot we shouldn't be. And in comes these tanks. So they start handing out law rockets and AT-4s. But they're not going to do much with the tank. I mean, basically, you're standing up facing a tank taking a shot. We had no other support.

But within minutes, the A10 gunships came over, strafed them, destroyed, I want to say 14 to the 22, and those turned around and hightailed it out. Was that like your first exposure to a near violent scenario for you? It was. It actually got worse the next day. So after this happened, they told us they wanted us to come up to support. That's something that happened in front of us, and they wanted us to come up there and help. and it turned out that eight Marines were killed in their LAV, and they were actually killed by our own people. So these A-10s that were shooting at the tanks shot one of our own vehicles and that we had eight dead Marines.

Wow. So that was, I think, the first thing that really hit me over there. You know, for all the dead Iraqis you see in the burnt-out tanks, seeing guys that were probably my age, a little older, a little younger, were laying there and we had to do litter duty and load these guys on trucks and that was

pretty wild especially at my age that probably thinking that it could have been you were very well could have been you 19 years old and I'm looking at you know looking down like any of these guys could have been me you know and that was you know to this day that's one of those things that I look back on while we were over there was stuff that happened

over there but that was I think took a toll on me more than anything Did that change your perspective of the military and why you were there when you saw that? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, you can watch all the war movies you want. You can think you know it. But when you experience it firsthand, when the artillery's coming in, when you're being shelled, you know, when tanks are rolling towards you. And then when you end up seeing these bodies, it changes you forever.

It changes me. I think that's the first time that when I got home and started a few. a little different that the word PTSD started to become part of my vocabulary, because I knew something was different when I came home. How long after that did you get to come home when that first incident happened? We stayed over there another eight months. So the war itself was done probably about three weeks later. You got to remember, this thing only lasted maybe three days.

You had to build up the air war. And when we rolled over the berms and went in, you're talking three, four days. And it was just too much firepower, too much American firepower. And most of the Iraqis that were on the Kuwaiti border weren't Republican Guard soldiers. They were people that Saddam just sent out with guns. You're going out and you're defending our border. They weren't even soldiers. So they all gave up.

They were either dead or they gave up to us. And that we would take them to the rear, question them, search them, put them on trucks, and they'd go back to Saudi and eventually probably return to Iraq. Did you get to talk to your dad at all about what you had seen and the experience and kind of share that with him?

I did later on when I got home. I had a lot of pictures. We had a little disposable cameras so I was able to take a lot of pictures and I actually have a great picture on my phone of the LAV with a flag on it, which we took right after

the Marines were taken where they needed to go. So yeah, that was tough. still is. Did he help you at all work through it, you know, mentally? My father's a great guy, but he's a man, a few words. And I thought by bringing that up with him, it might, you know, make him nervy after what he had gone through. So I didn't really want to bring up much of what happened with me.

I just wanted to kind of keep it inside, deal with it on my own. And, you know, as I found out years later, that's not always the right thing to do, not talk to somebody about it. Absolutely. When you first had those initial thoughts of PTSD, did you go out and seek help at all? No. No, it took several years because, and we're going to get into this. But when I got on the police department, incidents started to happen. And what that does is it exacerbates the PTSD that I took from the military.

And it gets worse and worse and worse. And I didn't know a lot about PTSD then. I just started seeing changes in myself, the way I acted, kind of a quick fuse. So these little things started to creep up. And that's when you know something's off. Something's off. And I eventually ended up getting help and still I am to this day. That's good.

How long were you in the military for did you serve in general for? Eight years. Eight years. Yeah. So that one instance when you first started experiencing that thoughts of PTSD, you still went back and continued on. Yeah. Eventually I went into the reserves.

And that was for the last couple of years because it was just getting on to the police department. So it worked out perfect. They only'd go one week and every month to Plainville, Connecticut. And, you know, two weeks a year they'd send us somewhere. But that was it. I mean, it was pretty much done at that point. The last couple of years were easy. So how old would you have been like 26, 27 when you, oh, 22, 23? When you were totally done? No, I was totally done 26. 26. Yeah. What year do you join the police force? In 1993. And you're how old, 23? Yeah, 23 years old, yeah.

Why did you decide you wanted to join the police force? Because you could have probably just lived off of you the pension from the military at that point. Did you need the police force? Well, you don't get a full pension doing even eight years. You're not going to get anything, no. You serve the country for eight years and they don't, that's a little insane. A pension would have been 500 a month, if that, 400 a month. So there's no money coming to you if you don't serve 20 years or more.

You're not getting anything. Wow. But I took the police. test in 1990 right before I went to boot camp and I kind of forgot about it. Oh, so you took it before? Yeah, I took the fire and police test, but I had, you know, I forgot about it. I came home, once I came home from Desert Storm, I was working as a bouncer at a bar in Springfield, this bar called the Keg Room.

And I went home one day and my brother said, hey, you got a letter from the city of Springfield. So I opened it up and it said, we're looking for candidates to be police officers. You've passed the test. If you're interested, please come down to the police department and sign a sheet. So I go down and I tell him I want the job. He says, oh, yeah, you're number 65 on the list. We're only higher on 35. So I said, okay.

He says, if you were a veteran or a minority, you'd be all set. I said, I am a veteran. And he goes, you are? I said, yeah, he goes, drive to Boston tomorrow. get your name on the list and you're all set. So I had to drive all the way to Boston with my DD-214, put it on the counter, and the guy dropped it dropped me all the way to number six. All because you're a veteran.

Yep, yep. So there was three cadets ahead of me, two veterans, and then myself. Yeah, so I became number six and went right into the academy. Why Boston? That was just like the headquarters? Right. That's where the civil service headquarters is and everything to do with all the testing that takes place, all goes through Boston.

Now, did you join the police force just because you felt like you had some background with the military, or were you passionate about it? No, I wasn't passionate about it at all. I didn't want to be a cop. But I get that letter in the mail, and I'm thinking, okay. You connect the dots. $58,000 a year. This is back in the early 90s, $58,000 a year, another tenant overtime. I'm like, plus I get a gun and a badge.

I'm like, I'm in. That was it. I mean, it was just like me joining the military. I made the decision right then, okay, I can be a cop. You know, if this guy can be a cop and that guy, I can be a cop. What did your parents think about you joined the police force at that point? I don't know. I mean, my mother never reacted to it.

You know, I think my father would have rather I'd gone on the fire department. In retrospect, I wish I had gone on the fire department. But I think it was the right decision at the time. The academy was fairly easy. You had the military training. I had the military training. I was the president of my academy. You know, the training itself was by a couple of old, kind of old school cops who were great guys, but they were kind of burnt out.

So the training was super easy. The running we did was super easy. And I ended up graduating, it was about three and a half months later. I graduated from the police academy and then went right into my shift. How hard is the training for to become a police officer? because something I see on social media is they like you know how the city announces when someone gets sworn in right there's some very overweight officers out of shape that are getting through the academy and we had a NYPD officer on the show and he was like that's like one of the most disturbing things having an overweight officer like make it through so is it is it was not rigorous back then is it not rigorous no there was a there was a guy that we knew that I mean he was he's like this and we They'd hang your pants. When you got fitted for your pants, they'd hang them in the roll call room.

We used to say you could put a phone book in his back pocket because his pants were so big. This guy couldn't run 10 feet without passing out. And he's, I believe, still on the job. How? I have no idea. These are the people that are protected. I know. It's awful.

Wow. And they're good guys. Don't get me wrong. No, great, great. I'm not fat shaming them. Some of them are actually really good cops. Yeah. But there's really no, it should be a height, weight requirement.

Some people are able to kind of slide through the system if you know people. I think it's one thing to go in, fit, and then become maybe as you get older in your career, that's different. That happens. It's aging, you know? Exactly. But to go in, not at your prime, I don't know. It's definitely strange to see.

Our academy, I'm looking back on our academy because I would have retired two days ago, would have been my full retirement. I look back on my academy. We were a pretty good shape, the guys. A lot of ex-military, you know, a lot of kids that I went to high school. But they were, you know, normal height, weight, skinny guys, but no really big dudes. And everybody made it through. I think we only lost two people.

And it wasn't for physical stuff. It was for mental stuff. They kind of broke down in the academy and they just left on their own. Did you see a lot of veterans joining the force at that time period? Yeah. there was quite a quite a bit of them. I want to say in my class, we had about eight veterans that were in there. A couple guys that went to Desert Storm, not with me, but they were there when I was there.

Some guys that already served in the Army and the Navy. They didn't go overseas like I did, but they were still veterans. And we had a much easier time in the academy because we already knew the paramilitary, you know, how the military works. Now the police department is paramilitary, the uniforms, the shining of the boo. the running, I think it was a lot easier for us. Some of the civilians are like, what? I got to fire a gun. They never fired a gun.

Yeah. And now they're giving them, you know, they've got to go to shooting range and fire. They're nervous. What was harder? Boot camp or police training? Oh, my God. Parasilin is, yeah, it's the toughest training they're doing in the military for a boot camp. Yeah.

It's Parasilin. And then the Coast Guard actually has the second toughest training regimen. Could you have stayed on in the military longer than they? years if you wanted to. Oh, yeah. I look back now and say I do you wish that you did. Yeah, I don't think I'd ended up where I did if I'd stayed in the military. Where do you think you would have been? Like, do you ever think about the what-ifs, like where you would be in the military if you stayed? Yeah, I mean, I probably would have been gunny sergeant or over. I'd probably have been living, you know, on a base or near a base now. I would have gone to Afghanistan and Iraq after that if I had

stayed in. But yeah, I mean, you know, I don't live with regret. I made the choice at the time. I was kind of, I wanted to, at that point, I was just stepping into the police stuff. So I had to, I had to let the military go. It was either that or the, and I made my choice. I said, all right, I'm going to be a cop. So you become a cop. What's day one like on the job? All right. Day one, I'm working the four to 12 shift. Okay. So half the class goes four to 12, half the class goes midnight to eight, which is kind of where we all end up, the dog watch. And I get in the car with this guy, CJ was a really good guy, and he just tells me, keep your fucking hands off the radio, don't touch it, keep your mouth shut.

All the shit you learn in Academy, bullshit. None of it matters when you're out here. I'm like, okay, I'll keep my mind. Later in the night, he let me use the radio. Actually, he was a great guy, but we end up taking some regular calls that night. to make my first arrest, it's a warrant arrest. So there's really no creative writing. It's, you know, I arrested so-and-so.

This is his address. This is the warrant number. But that was my first arrest, so it was exciting, even though it was for a warrant. The guy didn't fight. It was kind of easy. But, you know, as time went on, you know, you start to see crazier stuff,

crazier things start to happen. You're seeing the worst in people. So kind of, that's when things kind of stepped up a little bit. Did you set, like, morals for yourself as an officer? in those early days of what kind of cop you wanted to be? And maybe you saw other cops and say, I never want to be like that individual, too? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I wanted to be the cop that would give people breaks when they needed breaks to be given. I didn't want to be that guy who wrote everyone a ticket who locked up everybody for a dime bag of weed. I wanted to be somebody that I felt when I was around the public that, you know, they would trust me, get to know me. and respect me for doing stuff like that. There were some cops that I saw early on that I knew right away.

I don't want to be like him. I'm not saying they were brutal. It was just the personality. I don't want my personality to be like theirs. I want to be a different cop than they are. If we had one of the officers that you were in training camp with here right now, what would they say about you from that early time period? How would they describe you?

I think they described me as a go-getter. You know, like I told you, I was the president of my class. I got along with everybody in there for the most part. I didn't beef with anybody. You know, like I said, I think they trusted me when we're in the academy. And we built a bond in there. So I think they'd respond fairly well. I don't think anybody would be able to tell you what they,

what happened to me, you know, 18 years later. Yeah, no one could predict that. No one could predict it, right. What's the town like the city like? Is it crime heavy? is there violence? What's a, I know there's like a lot of mob activity,

but is it like violent mob activity? There's a lot of stuff goes on in Springfield. So we, back when I came in in in 93, the North End, which is your Hispanic area, was the Latin Kings and the Los Alitos. The Los Alicito,

they were out of Hartford also, the Los Alacelitos. The Winchester Square area was predominantly black gangs. That's where they all kind of hung out and did their stuff. But it was, it was very,

a lot of shit. shootings. Our murder rates always hovered around 20, 18, 20, 22. It's never really deviated, although this year we're heading for a much higher rate. How does that compare to some of these other big cities? Per capita, about eight years ago, Springfield was ranked the top 10 most violent city in the nation. Oh, wow. Yeah. And what about when you were serving as an officer? I don't know if we were there then. I just remember that article probably around the time I was leaving the department. But to me, there were sections of Springfield. You had to be very concerned when he got out of your car. And would you hear about stories of crazy things happening to officers

because of the violence? Oh, yeah. I mean, there were, you know, there's been plenty of cops shot at, plenty of cops stabbed. We've, we lost a few guys. There were two cops killed. Michael Borogard and, what is it, Michael Scavina. The two of them did a traffic stop in Mason Square, which is the Romilly, Hispanic area. And when they got out of the cruiser, one of them had a vest on, and one of them didn't. And there were two brothers in the car. And they started shooting. The one that wore the vest got shot in the head. And the one that didn't wear the vest, got shot in the face. And they both passed away right on the scene there. Wow. And what happens when there's a death in the police force? Like what are the other officers

doing, what are you guys doing to support, and how does the city react when something like that happens? They all come together. I mean, I've been to some police funerals that have been pretty emotional. You know, the bagpipes start playing. And March, you know, you start a march right out to the cemetery. It's emotional. That's when you see the thin blue line come together. I would say this. Anytime there's a funeral, cops really come together and support each other. It's, the community was great. So it's, yeah, it's a very tight-knit group of people getting together when something like that happens. And were you close with the officers on the force and in your department?

Like you personally, do you guys hang out? Do you see each other? Yeah, I mean, my partner, so you end up teamed up with two other guys. They have an A group, a B group, and a C group, and you rotate through the car. So you work with one of your partners for two nights and then the other one for two. and they work together for two. But I was very close to my partners. You know, plus once you start to go through things with them, you know, fights and

kind of stressful stuff that you form a bond. And I think that's what happened with us. You know, some of our partners, we formed a tight bond over that. And what kind of violence did you see directly happen to you during your career, maybe early on or in the middle of it? In 95, I end up getting paired up with this cop. and I had already heard some rumors about this guy that he had fired a gun at somebody in the woods,

said he saw a shiny object, and that he tried to clean his gun with aquavela to hide the fact that he shot it. That's the first story that I heard about him. And then the incident, I was involved with him, was we were driving down the street called Locust Street, and there's this red lion bar, very seedy place. And as we're driving up,

he tells me, grab this guy out on the sidewalk, quick. I want to talk to him. So I wave the guy down and he comes over to the car. While he's at the car, I ask him, hey, you got your ID on you, where you're from, what's your name? Next thing I know, bang, I get clipped in the face, sucker shots me. So I grab him and I'm holding him like this. I'm trying to choke him. I'm pulling him into the cruiser. I'm starting to hit him. He gets out, runs around the car, grabs him, starts to pull him off. I jump out. And as soon as I jump out, He wriggles himself loose from my partner, points a gun at my face,

fires three times, a little 38 caliber Rossi revolver. Boom, boom, boom. I mean, I didn't even have time to react. Three shots, and I didn't know if I was hit or not. I wasn't, but I didn't know. You just, the three shots go off, and I called for help on the radio shots fired, and you could, in Springfield's a bigger city,

you could hear the cruisers already. As soon as you hit that button, they're coming. I mean, you know, 20, 30 cruisers are coming with guys that are ready to help. The guy ended up blowing his own kneecap off on the ground. He kept firing the gun underneath him. And it was a great arrest.

I mean, this guy had heroin in one pocket, crack in the other. His windbreaker was filled with extra shells for his gun. He was wanted out of New Jersey. And then he shot himself on the ground. How does he miss you if he points a gun on your face? Were you ducking at all or were you, did you freeze? But it's just when I got out of the car.

So it was still kind of moving and he's like, boom, boom, boom. And I could hear it. I could just hear the cracks of the gun and I'm like, I think he missed. I think he missed me. And he did. And then it was we jumped on him, got on the ground and you heard another shot. And that's when I heard him scream. Did that trigger any PTSD at all in that moment?

It did after. It did have. Not at that moment. I mean, at that moment, my, you know, I was about as amped up as could be, so no, it didn't, it didn't bother me then. But later that night, when I got back to the station, I noticed something. And it sticks with me to this day because it wasn't just this incident. But no one asked me at the station how I was doing. Now, one person, you need to talk to somebody, how you're feeling.

Nobody said a word. I ran out to a pay phone at the time. They had the pay phone out front. And I called my wife and I said, I was just almost killed. She said, what happened? So I told her this story. She says, well, come home when you can. And I said, I think I better go out and grab a drink.

My father was still bartending at that bar downtown. I said, think I'm just going to go down and have one drink to kind of ease it and then I'll be home. But nobody ever asked me. And there's still to this day that they're still not where they need to be for cops with PTSD. They're just not there yet. Why do you think that is? I don't know. I don't know. I really don't. I mean, my read of it was always, if you're a cop,

you don't cry about it. This is our job. We don't want to hear that something upset you. You're supposed to have that tough guy mentality. Go have a drink, go home, forget about it. We'll see you next shift. Nobody ever really cared when you got involved in anything crazy. Every once in a while, somebody come up and your partner, hey, you're doing good, you're doing good. But I never saw anything from the administration where they came to you and said, hey, are you doing okay after that incident? Or you doing okay after this accident? Because it happened. A lot of stuff happens over the course of the career.

And, you know, the stress gets worse and worse and worse as you go on. And we don't really don't have an outlet for it. Did you harbor any resentment towards the force after that instance when you were thinking everything? Oh, yeah. It stayed in the back of my mind. And come to find out about a year later that the cop. Well, I'll tell you I ended up what happened. So after this incident, I get called down to the DA's office.

And he sits me down and he plays me yelling for help. And he says, you remember this night? I said, yeah, it was just a few weeks ago. It was awful. And he says, tell me what happened. So I told him the story I just told you. And he looks at me and he goes, I can't put you on the stand. And I said, did I do something wrong? He goes, no.

He goes, you read your partner's report that night. And I said, no. And he goes, read it. This cop was one of these cops that he wanted that hero complex. So he did creative writing. He wanted everything to be about him. So I'm the one who got shot at. He turns it into he's the one who got shot at, but the guy pointed the gun at me.

So they had to plea this guy down for this because he lied on the report. And the DA was smart enough to say, Jeff, I'm not going to put you on the stand a lie. So instead of getting 18, 20 years or more, he ended up serving 12, and then he was turned over to Jersey to serve his warrants down there. What happened to the cop? I'll get to that in a second because it's important, I tell you, after that incident, and I worked with another guy who was one of my favorite partners, this kid, Brendan. And he says, Jeff, you should have known this years ago. He said, I was out one night with this cop. and he said, we get in a stolen car chase.

We chased the car to a driveway in the Mason Square area. And he says, the guy gets out runs. Brock gets out to chase him. And he said, I go check out the stolen car quick. Make sure there's not a second person in it. And he says, they get out in the woods and Brendan here's two shots. Boom, boom. So this guy we're talking about comes out of the woods with the guy and he hands him to

Brendan and Brendan walks him back to the car. The guy looks right at Brendan. And he goes, listen. He goes, that car out there, it's stolen. And he says, in those two bags of weed I got in there, contractor bags with the stem sticking out the bag, goes, that's mine too. And he said, I got two warrants.

And he says, and that gun, that's mine too. And it's not registered to me. He basically fessed everything. And then he goes, he tackled me. He grabbed the gun out of my waistband. He fired it twice in the air out there. And now he's saying, I shot at him. and and Brendan said, I believe the guy.

I mean, he can't do anything about it because he wasn't there, but he knew that this kid was telling the truth. Yeah. Yeah? That's so crazy. But that's that hero mentality, just like I didn't get shot at. He got shot at. He did that his whole career of this guy. And he left because somebody put a picture of his face on a donkey and put it up all over the police department.

He sued the police department, walked away with, I think. I think three or four hundred thousand in his full pension. For that? For that. And that's a cop that never should have even gotten that to begin with. That's like a flaw in the system. Stress is killing me. And everyone in the department's have to get me.

And there's a picture of me as a jackass with my face on it. He sued, won, and retired and left. How did you feel about cops like that? Because I'm sure you encountered a lot in 16 years. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, those are the guys you don't want to be around. And we didn't have a ton of those guys.

Don't get me wrong. There's 500 guys in our job. There were probably maybe 10, 12 guys you didn't want to be around. You know, there were cops that were better than other cops, cops that were smart than other cops, more street savvy. But, you know, it was a good crew of guys. There were only a handful that you questioned where they're coming from. You know, whether it be racist, whether it be, you know, homophobic,

whether it be, you know, are they brutal? are they just going after people targeting people? There was a couple of those guys where you thought it could be true with these guys. Were you ever put in scenarios where you were with those guys serving behind them, with them, and your moral compass is at stake and you have to make a decision to have their back

or walk away from it in those? Yeah, there was one guy, and he was a nicest guy in the world. He was, I mean, he's just a great cop. But he had a drug problem. And we walked into an apartment in the north end of Springfield, and we found a large amount of drugs, and I watched him, throw the drugs out the window, and fall down into these bushes three stories below. Like, what did I just see?

And then he says, I'll be right back, and then he goes down, and I see him circle in front of the window and pick him up and put him in his pockets. And I'm like, did I just see that? He's a great guy. And, you know, the department during training, I always say, if you see a cop doing something bad, you report it. I suppose that's depending on what you do. I'm not a snitch.

I'm going to make sure that I'm taking care of it. This isn't going to jam me up at all. But there were no arrests. It was in a vacant apartment. All the kids, we ended up booted them out of the apartment, all these gang members. They had the stuff hidden behind an old radiator. So it's not coming back to anybody.

But you think any of these kids are going to say, yo, he took my drugs. They're not going to say it. They just left. They caught a break. But he took the stuff. And he lost his job years later. And again, he was a great cop.

He just had a problem with drugs. And it caught up with him on the job. And did you see a lot of that happen in those situations? Not a ton. You know, there were little things I saw here and there. A lot of it focused on more the use of force than it did drugs. So there were times I saw guys go overboard and do things. and the ones that would piss me off

for the guys that show up to your chase or your call where you chase somebody and they come flying while the guy's cuffed and they tag them. And then I'm looking at them like, hey, I got to bring this guy in. You just roll up and smack the guy in the face because you drove here at 80 miles an hour

and you're all pumped up. Then you hit my prisoner. Guys would do that. Why? What's a logic behind that for them? Is it an ego thing? A power trip? Ego, adrenaline, kind of a fuck you

to, you know, to the, bad guy like I had the drive here at 80 miles and I'm the one who caught him I'm the one who has to walk him on the camera in five minutes and you walk into the woods and you smack this guy as hard as as you can in the face drag him out rip his clothes now when I get in that's how he's going to look he's going to have a handmark on his face and uh you know he's my responsibility this guy that that that happened a lot and when that happens are you standing up for this uh prisoner or you saying hey don't do that like are you I would I wouldn't do it it right there. I'd grab the guy later in the garage and tell him, don't ever do that to my

prisoner again. If I got a right on this, if my ass is on the line, we're going to have to talk. But don't ever do that again. But it did. It happened once in a while. Now, if something was getting too far taken, carried away, would you have stopped it? Oh, sure. Absolutely. So you knew the difference between right and wrong. Absolutely. In that sense. As it turns out, I was involved in a lot of incidents, you know, later on in my career. But yes, I definitely would stop it if I saw it going too far. Now, throughout your career, like, if we were to look at your file, what's it like? Like, is there a...

Thick. It's thick. Thick. And when you say thick, what do you mean by that? My IIAU file is very thick. What's an I IU file? Internal investigations. So you were involved, roped in a lot of things?

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So in 1997, there was a house in this Mason Square area, the one that I told is kind of a hot spot. And we get a special, what's called a special attention. So one of the police commissioners lived on this street and said, hey, at the corner of Quincy and Orleans, his house, they're dealing crack all night. There's gang members out there, you've got to do something. So she goes to my captain, and she says, I want a special attention on this house. Who works the district car? Oh, it's Asher and his buddy Mickey. All right.

So we go up there, knock on the door. It wasn't a raid now, but eight of us went there, and some dope. lets us in. When we go in, we find a ton of fake drugs. They were cutting up soap, and they were selling soap as fake crack to all the white kids that come from the suburbs in Vermont. You know, these kids don't realize they're smoking soap until they get halfway up 91, right? Going back to Greenfield or whatever. So we go in, the tub is filled with feces and urine. The house stunk. You got the fake drugs. We're kicking people out. And I get a guy outside and I say, what's your name? He says, Roy Dancy.

I said, let me search it quick. Big knife on him. Take the knife off him, run them for warrants. Nothing comes back. I let him go. So that night I get him to the police department. I pull in my cruiser and this guy comes up to me. He goes, hey, Jeff, I used to work at the jail.

He says, what name did he give you last night? And I said, Roy Dancy. He goes, that's not Roy Dancy. That's Roy Parker. He says, let's go run him now. Five warrants. All types of crazy shit. So the next day, I get a rookie

female partner assigned me. But I'm going to get this guy now, right? And again, the police commissioner that's on this civilian review board asks me to go to this house. So we get there, and his wife and him were on the, Janet Dancy

and Roy Parker are sitting right on the front porch. And I said, hey, come here for a minute. I want to talk to you, Roy. She comes running down the sidewalk. Get the fuck out of here. You ain't talking to me. He ain't talking to Roy. And she takes a swing at my female partner.

So as soon as that happens, I reach around, grab her arm, click, click, cuffs, and I throw her right in the cruiser. And as soon as I do, I turn around, I see an arm, and I get slashed with a piece of metal with glass on it across my neck. Holy shit. Now there's blood everywhere, and I start having this mini war with this guy in the street. And he's a tough guy. He's been locked up 260 times. And that was before this. 260.

260 times. I almost brought his bop here today to roll it out on the floor. It would go past him all the way to the wall, all the way to the wall. So he cuts me. We get in his giant fight. We get down the street. I call for help. And the first cop gets there, pulls up.

He goes to grab him. He gets cut with the metal. Cuts his hands all the way, both of them, ripped them open. Another car pulls up. We finally get the guy down on the ground, and he still won't give us his hands. So I boot him right in his shoulder as hard as I could. As soon as I did that, the arm come up, cuffs go on. A lieutenant on scene grabs the medal to tag it.

And then I go to the ambulance. As I found out later on, he was HIV positive. It was actually full-blown AIDS at the time, and I had the blood all over me, so I was nervous over that. And about three days later, I found out that it was filmed by an amateur civilian with an... old camcorder, the ones with the VCR tapes in it. That beeps the red, yeah.

Exactly. And all as you could see was us over him. This is right after this battle with the guy, us over him. You see me do this. You see him roll and you see us pick them up. All of a sudden I get suspended for five days and the story hits the media. White cop kicks black suspect in head. I'm like, I didn't kick him in the head. I kicked him in the shoulder.

He cut my neck open. Like, I could have shot the guy. I didn't, but I could have. And it just turns into this media firestorm. The next thing I know, it's the news in L.A. All over the country, they're playing this clip, and they were comparing it to Rodney King. And I was getting calls from everyone.

I'm like, what am I going to do? I didn't do this. I mean, I did it. I kicked him. He cut my neck open. He had five warrants. He's a bad dude. Well, the news

Once the news gets your name They can write whatever they want So it was all premised around the fact that I was white He was black even though there was no racial component to this thing at all This is just a bad guy with a warrant who happens to be black and I happen to be a white cop This went on for almost a year Where I wasn't I was suspended without pay I almost lost my house

You know very well could have been divorced, although my wife stayed by my side through a lot of stuff. She wasn't, it was just the stress that it brought on the family. And this was before I had kids, so it was just the two of us. What year? What time frame? 1997. 1999.

1997. And you're not even 30 yet. Not even 30. So I'm seeing all the news coverage, and it got worse each week. They said that I was the judge, jury, an executioner. And I'm looking at my lawyer, like executioner. The guy got five stitches on his head. His shoulder's not even hurt from where I kicked him.

I said, I'm hurting more than he is on my neck. It didn't matter. The news just kept inflating it. They loved to do that. They love to take stuff like this and make it into something bigger than it was. In retrospect, that night ruined the rest of my career. Because they would use that against you later. Everything I did after that, every time my name came up, every time I arrested somebody that complained,

he was part of the Roy Parker thing. And they build this kind of, they build this personality like this guy's a brutal cop. Look at him. Look at him with the tattoos. You know, he looks like he's Aryan with his shaved head. He must be beating people. But here's what ended up happening. We get the court.

And during the hearing, he admits on the stand, Roy Parker, that he did not kick him in the head. After a year, he admits it because the nurse at the jail, at Ludlow Jail said, hey, when he came in, he said he got hit with a small billy stick in the head. And the cop kicked him in the shoulder, but it was a year before all that stuff came out. And at the bindover hearing, the judge during a break, or actually coming back from a break, had a TV brought in, put a VCR tape, and they had slowed the tape down, and they circled the metal weapon underneath. Because it was this thing about, did he still have the weapon on him?

When you kicked them, was it there? They circled it. And then within an hour, I walked out of there. with it all over. Did they charge you criminally or was just a civil suit? They would have if this went forward. He sued the department, but that happens all the time. We get sued all the time. How do you feel like this whole thing that the department maybe didn't even have your back at this point? Oh, they didn't. Let me tell you, it got worse. They made me go to sensitivity training, basically kind of admitting that there's some racial components with it. You need to

read this book about slavery and you need to read this other one about how to deal with people that are Vietnamese. I'm like, what am I doing here? I'm like, I was right. I did the right thing. But because the newspaper for so long destroyed my name, it was almost no coming back from this. And it took a little while to get back to work. I mean, I ended up back at work probably three months later. And it was hard. It was hard transitioning back to work. It made me think about everything I did the rest of my career. Did you ever find yourself taking that anger out on other arrests, like as time would go on because of the frustration with the department, cutting corners, anything, or were you just a straight and arrow up?

Listen, I made mistakes on that job. None of them are the stuff that have been in the newspaper. I've made some mistakes. I've yelled when I shouldn't have. I've probably gone too far a few times when I shouldn't have. Nothing criminal, nothing like that. But I made bad decisions, as all cops do. We all do.

We all look back and say, geez, that night I shouldn't have been that. I was too hard on this kid. But nothing that I went through was like that. These were all really bad guys that did not want to cooperate with the police, and I had to use force. And my name being attached to it made it even bigger than it was. So on the times that you, it was right that you had to use force, and you genuinely knew you had to,

but they were a different skin color. Were you hesitant at that point because of this past incident? It's always in the back of my mind. And they would still put me in areas where there were African Americans. There were Puerto Rican. And that's not what policing is about. I'm not out there to, I don't look at people. It had nothing to do with skin color.

This has to do with, hey, you give me a dispatch call to go here. I'm going to go there. Whoever I deal with who I deal with. If they've done something bad, they're going to go to jail. It doesn't matter. So if it was a white guy, you would have done the same thing. Would have done the same thing. Would have done the same thing.

How are your colleagues treating you when you came back after that leave? they were actually great. I got a lot of support from the street cops, a lot of supervisors stuck by me. Some of them kind of, you know, they put themselves on a line, a couple of these bosses by having my back because they knew it could mess with their career,

their promotions. But I got a lot of support because of that. Yeah. But my reputation in the city as a cop, my reputation at the courthouse as a cop, all went like this and I thought I could survive it. I said if I just go back and

you know just be myself and keep working, this law work out but it didn't happen that way. Do you wish you could if you could go back in time that you could leave after that incident? I would have resigned after that. My father in law and my parents both said you know maybe it's time to leave

go do something else, lateral transfer to the fire department, whatever but in the back of my mind I always thought I could survive that incident and it didn't happen. Actually, things got a lot worse. You know, something I've always been interested about is like when the city will publicize an individual for all the good they do. And then the second that something goes wrong, it's over and there's no coming back.

And I look at my situation with that because they used to write good articles about me. And then something happens that they don't even know the full story to. It's it. It's over. Yeah, you're done. That's like I strongly believe in like you're guilty. the second you're arrested. Oh, yeah.

There's no fair trial. There's nothing. None. And my chief at the time, early on in that incident where I had to kick the guy in the shoulder, she said after one week, this is my chief, I wouldn't want to see a dog get kicked like that. I'm looking like, she hasn't talked to me. She hasn't talked to anybody involved.

Now the chief's hanging me out to dry? As soon as she said that, then the general public says, oh, the chief thinks the dog shouldn't be kicked like that. He must be wrong. So I'm already screwed. Now, back then, it wasn't common for a woman to be a police chief, was it? No, she's the first in our city's history. Wow. And what was the relationship with the cops, male cops, and her being the chief? It was very good at first. I think a lot of these guys supported, including myself. There were a couple loose family connections. She knew my wife's aunt and Irish music. This is some, so I thought, oh, this is going to be great. You know, she's chief.

And not that I was going to get taken care of, but I'm like, it's a fresh start. We'll see what happens. And this happened within a year. And, you know, she stabbed me right in the back. Wow. No shame. You probably didn't look at her the same way again. Ever, ever.

She asked me to quit several times during that before my trial. Please quit for the department. And I just laugh at her across the desk. I'm like, you've got some nerve asking me to quit. I'm like, I didn't do anything wrong. You know I didn't do anything wrong. You went to the newspapers and said I did anything right at the beginning of this. You hung me out to dry.

It's for the best, Jeff. I'm so nervous about you. I care about you. I just got up in the chair. I'm like, I'm not listening to this nonsense. I'm not doing it. And she hated me all the way to she left. So you go back to the department.

You make it like another 10 years by this point, another decade you go through. Yeah. What happens that ends at all, that end your career with the Springfield Police Department? I would just say there's one incident that happens before the incident that ended. So car parked at a gas pump. What year is this? 1990, maybe. Probably in the early 2000s.

So pretty close to the first situation. Yeah, maybe about five years after that. So things have gone fairly well. I mean, you're always going to get complaints, but nothing that was high profile or anything like that. There's a car parked at a gas station. It's all fogged up. spend there an hour and a half. The gas pump is off the car and under the car

with a circle of gas under it. The clerk says, hey, this guy's been there two hours. I've been banging on the windows. I'm worried about this gas pump. Is this guy suicidal? Because the gas pumps out? You couldn't see because the fog in the tent, both. All you could see was kind of a shadow in the driver's seat.

And he was thrashing. Boom, boom. You saw the wheel on the car shaken. So we called for a boss. and at some point we make the determination, we got to take these windows out and find out what's going on in there. Is it a medical emergency use or whatever?

So we smash both windows out. One of the guys on weird opens up the passenger door. The guy's fighting with him. Now he's swinging. He pulls him out through the passenger door under the ground. This guy's a big dude.

We're rolling around with him. I'm mace him. We handcuff him, get him in the ambulance, and the guy calmed down almost instantaneously. He said, I'm a diabetic, and I pulled in here to grab some food. I didn't feel right, and I've been here for a while. So we're like, all right, I go, do you realize you just fought with us? No, I'm sorry, man.

When I have a seizure, I have no idea what's going on. And he had some injuries. He had glass stuck in his head from being brought out into the cement when he was fighting with us. No other significant injuries. This was it. I mean, besides having base in his eyes, that was it. We get to the hospital. The doctor confirms that he's a diabetic,

and he apologizes to us. And I said that a supervisor, should we lock him up? He fought with us. Shouldn't we cover ourselves? I get it. He's a diabetic, but no, no, he's good. We're going to let it go. Five days later, the nation of Islam in Springfield Mass wanted my head.

Because my name was on the report. Even though I only maced him, I never actually physically touched this guy. But all of a sudden it started. And there were newsletters and news articles saying that I was a member of the Blue Clucks clan, which is, you know, organization of racist cops. Yeah. Which is, you know, I'd never heard of that in my life. I have no clue what they're talking about.

But it was we beat him. We dragged him out the car window. He never came out the car window. He came out the door. But that was all inflated. Somebody that was in a window up top claims we stomped on his head for 10 minutes. This guy had no injuries to his head but a couple of kids. glass bunchers. But these are people that, you know, they're not friends, friends of the cops.

So they're going to, they're going to help. They probably went down there and looked for witnesses and got people to just say, the cops that's wrong. But that incident there was another big one. So now my name is rolling with the newspaper again. The cop from the Parker incident who still kept the guy in all these big incidents. Here he is again. And I got through that. The mayor at that time was another one who didn't support us, wanted immediate suspensions across the board, and it didn't happen this time. We actually went to a commission hearing

and were found to have done nothing wrong. It turns out this guy had a history of fighting with people at UMass as a student, fighting with paramedics during these diabetic seizures. He was a big-time steroid user and he couldn't control his rage and he would attack EMTs and cops all the time.

And he since died because of that. He overdosed and died. Wow. Yeah. The same with Roy Parker, the first guy. He died too. He's dead too. Oh, wow.

Yeah. It's crazy like all these incidents that happen among your journey, and there's a lot of opportunity for you to leave the department too. What do you think kept you to stay? Why do you want to stay? Was it back to like that early childhood thoughts of, you know, they're saying one thing and you're doing the opposite? it? Yeah, I mean, the department is trying to push me out, even though I hadn't done anything

wrong. I don't feel like I did anything wrong. I know the cops with me didn't feel like I did anything wrong, but, and I'm just like, I'm going to stand up to this. I didn't do anything wrong. I'm staying. It wasn't a good idea, probably, but I'm not going to let them be the reason that I leave being a cop. They don't have to support me, but here's two times in a row where I was found not to have done anything wrong. And now I'm back to work again. And you make it through another saga incident. And a third one happens, a third major one.

Yeah, that one was in 2000, what are we talking here? 2009 traffic stop. And it wasn't my traffic stop. So we went out on this gang patrol. There's two cops in one car and a boss and another cop. And we just drive around looking for stuff in the same neighborhood. They called us. They said, we need an assist with a car that's pulled over.

So we pull up, and the boss on scene, the lieutenant says, Jeff, can you talk to the driver, the female? We're going to get this guy out of the car. I go over to talk to him. She's very nervous. I said, you're doing all right? What's going on? I don't have a license.

She didn't even get, I think she got about five words in. I heard a fight going on. So now this guy's swinging at the lieutenant, swinging at the other cop, and he's running. So we'd catch up to him. back at our cruiser. And within a couple of minutes of fighting this guy in the car, he's a tough kid, and he's been in jail for a long time. He just got out.

He doesn't want to go back. During the fight, I hear my partner yell. He's got my gun, he's trying to pull the gun on my holster, smash him. So going through my mind, that gun comes out, we're dead. Or somebody's getting shot or somebody's getting injured. But, you know, there's a gun involved. So I immediately started hitting with my flash.

It's the quickest thing I could get to. I hit him probably six or seven times, and I miss him probably 11 times. And there's four cops at the scene? Four cops there, yeah. And you guys are at the hood of a car? Hood of a car. So he's prone over the car, but he's fighting and he's resisting. This isn't your simple.

He just won't give you the arm. He's actively fighting. So four cops couldn't restrain him, though, by that point? He was over the car, but he's kind of sliding back and forth. He's kicking at us. You have to get his arms. Is he a big guy? Yeah, he's a big dude.

He's a big dude. He's been around the block a few times. But you got to remember, this all happened within minutes. So it wasn't like we were fighting it for 15 minutes and we couldn't get control of him. It was three or four minutes. So I finally connect with him good right here. After the fact, he ended up with missing teeth and broken orbital bone. But we get him to the ground.

He's still fighting. So I hit him one more time in the back of his calf. As soon as I did that, the arms come out. We ended up getting a medical attention to hospital. We find drugs in his pocket. pocket. And of course, he tried to grab my partner's gun. So we charge him. And wouldn't you know, there was a woman there with a cell phone. And she videotaped it from quite a distance. But you could see the light was on on my flashlight. So you could see the flashlight going up and down.

So that got turned over. And then because of my name, this thing just blew up. Could you have tased him in that? Or was there not have been enough time? We didn't have tasers then. There was no tasers. No body cams? No body camps. So. Mace wouldn't have helped. He had a hoodie on. Did you consider going for your gun at all? Absolutely.

But you thought in that moment, let me grab them. I was in close quarters. Now in my mind, based on what my partner told me, you can use deadly force. He's grabbing his gun. If he's going to get his gun, I could be, I very well could have stepped back fired two shots into him. And that's it. I think that's interesting to listen to too, because there are scenarios that we know, even though yours didn't end up good either, there are scenarios where the officer goes straight to the gun. And there's all these incidents where they shoot someone,

an unarmed person. And you held that with restraint. Obviously, it wouldn't have been the right thing to do, but you went to the flashlight. I went right to the flashlight. It worked. We got him to the hospital, and then we found out about the video a couple of days later.

And then that changed my life once that happened. Did he need to be, looking back on it now, did he need to be hit all those times? Could it have been avoided? Could you have only hit him once? Did you even need to use the flashlight in that instance? I don't think I thought about it like that because the only time we gained control of him is where I hit him the last time. So I probably hit him in the shoulder, in the arm, still fighting.

And even the time that I hit him in the face, I wasn't aiming at his face. He had a hood up over his head. I'm just swinging over the top. But at some point, you just felt him go limber when I hit him. A lot of times I hit the cruiser. They actually brought the cruiser hood into the courtroom to show all the dents from the light that missed him. And he was unarmed?

He was unarmed. You thought he had the gun. I thought he had the gun of my partner or was grabbing the gun of my partner. But he himself was unarmed. Yeah. But, you know, he went to jail. The videotape came out. That implode your life.

That changed it. Do you get fired right away? What exactly? No. I went back to work. for about three weeks, and then a lot of stress from this incident. And plus everything that I've already been through in the past, I mean, I'm walking a fine line of PTSD stress. So I go out on stress.

And while I'm out, probably about a year and a half passes. I hear they are charging me with assault battery by means of a dangerous weapon, flashlight, assault battery, misdemeanor. And, you know, then I was headed for trial after that. How are you notified? Did they show up at your house or do they get because you're a fellow, are they arrest you? They raid your house? No, they never did that in my case.

They, the cops themselves came to my house, took my gun and my badge. And this is while you're on leave? Yeah. So you're on leave for a whole year and a half. Yeah. And this is a paid leave. Nope. Oh, you were unpaid for that time.

Yeah. It was able for the, actually for the first half over it, able to collect my vacation money. So I have a certain amount of vacations I can use. Once those vacations four or five weeks were used, I exhausted my funds. So who shows up at your house a day you got arrested and charged? A captain, actually two captains. And they're like, we need your badge and gun. And one of the captains, you know, I hadn't gotten along with it for a while. So I just walked up. I just fired the ID in the car. You know, I gave the gun to the other one and I just fired the badge And the car said, take him and get out of here.

And I just walked away. They didn't put you in cuffs or anything. Nothing. Not. Did they give you paperwork saying you're charged? Oh, yeah. Yep. Oh, so they didn't haul you to the courtroom or anything.

No, which was good. I mean, in retrospect, I didn't. Was that because you're a cop? Was that like special privileges? Probably. Wow. Probably. Because the average person would not, they would have been hauled to the cop.

They didn't even process me. There was no processing, nothing. It all led up to the trial. And then when the trial happened, you know, obviously there's a whole other story. Was there a plea deal at all offered to you? Like what are your thoughts? What are your feelings? Well, I should say this

before I get into the court stuff. I don't think I ever did anything wrong. To this day, I have no regrets. I learned there was a lot that I learned while I was in jail, a lot of experienced that in jail, which changed me. But I never thought I did anything wrong. So I was like, this is going to come out of trial.

Talk about this guy's history and grabbing the gun. It was all well documented. The video would say, did not veer that much from the report. It didn't. So I thought we're going to be fine. And nope. No.

So there was no plea deal? No plea deal. And I thought there would be because now they have a veteran court. So I was a veteran also. And I obviously have never been involved in anything. I'm a cop. No record, no anything. Are they going to come?

Nothing. What are your colleagues saying? I wouldn't have taken the deal though, to be honest with you? Because you felt that you were innocent? I'm not taking a deal. What are your colleagues saying to you? They feel terrible, but they're like, Jeff, you know, Mike wrote a good report. You guys are all set.

I mean, what are we worried about here? But I said, listen, man, I'm not worried about the report. My name. I mean, the public's probably smearing you as a- They know me. Fifteen years, they think I'm nuts. And this is, finally they think they're going to get their peace of me. This is just a buildup of the media frenzy.

The monster that the media created all these years, it's now going to catch up to me during this. Because once I get in the courtroom, do you think any of those jurors are not going to know who I am. Yeah. They all know. They knew the second I walked in there. How are you being labeled in the media after this last incident? Awful.

Awful. I mean, the stuff they wrote about me, I mean, I got death threats. Every day, you know, mail showing up at the house, I'll kill you and your family. Phone calls during the night. And then one day, I'm in the house with my wife and we get a phone call. And this is before the trial and all that. And a guy says, hey man, he says, I'm going to kill you and your fucking family. And I said, oh, real, telephone, tough guy.

What are you going to do? He says, I'm on your front lawn. I look out. There's a guy with a gun standing in my front lawn. So I grabbed my gun. This was before they took it from me, ran out, chased him down the street. My wife had called the East Long Middle Police Department, which is a small town I live in just outside of Springfield. And I chased the guy into the woods.

And he lost. He took off. So we weren't able to find a me and these slow metal cops. But the phone number that he called, they were able to trace it. And they came back to a burner phone in the Mason Square area, which is where this incident happened. They went to the door and everybody there. We don't know who called. You know, it was a burner phone.

There's no way you can trace it to who called. But that was a scary thing. How was your mental health? Were you contemplating suicide at all? I put on probably 100 pounds. There were many times I thought like that. I'm too much of a coward to do that anyways and you know what part of me

when things got bad I would go back to kind of that marine mentality which is don't do this to yourself you can get through this you can make it but that only helps so much I ballooned up to about 270 pounds I mean I was I was big

and I was depressed and I was on meds and you know I'm contemplating the worst coming out of this And it did. How much time were you facing going into trial? Did you know what, like, what would the worst case scenario could be if you were found guilty? Five to seven years, maybe.

I mean, it's a solid battery dangerous weapon. You know, nobody died. But, you know, I stuck by my story. But I ended up getting, after everything happened, two and a half, 18 months direct. Do you think you never would have been charged if you didn't have those two prior incidents in your file? I don't know that, but like I said, the media and my own department not sticking up for me are the two reasons that I ended up where I ended up.

And the sense of betrayal from my job was just awful. What was it like to be on like the other end of the spectrum? I'm sure as a cop you saw a lot of individuals go to court, maybe you had to testify at court, what was it like to be a defendant in a criminal court fighting for your life? embarrassed. I was embarrassed. Even though I know I didn't do anything wrong, I was still very embarrassed. It was very hard for me to comprehend how far I had fallen. Even though I didn't think I did anything wrong, I'm in court. People are behind me. I'm the one being charged. They know I was a police officer. And because of the way it was reported, everybody thought I was wrong anyways. Did you testify in your case? Do you think that hurt you? I don't think it hurt me. No, I think that the jury knew me very well before I ever stepped on that stand and my own department screwed me during that trial badly. How would you say they screwed you? There was a lieutenant on scene that I told you earlier. A lieutenant. He was the one who initially stopped the car. He's the one

who initially started a fight with this guy. And he wrote a report, still backing us up that he submitted to the police commissioner. Police commissioner made him rewrite the report four times until it got down to I didn't see anything. Even though on video, he's standing right there over my shoulder. Now, now, during court, I wanted him subpoenaed. He disappeared to Canada for an alleged hockey tournament. Never testified for me.

Real coward, this guy. I still see him once in a while. Coward. The same with the commissioner then. He's a coward too. How long was the trial? Trial was probably a week. Okay, it was a week long trial. It was about a week long trial. How long to take for them to reach a verdict? I think I had to go back maybe about four days.

It took them four days to reach a verdict. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, and then when they came back, there with my father-in-law and my wife and my father, and I took my watch off, and I gave it to my father. gave my car keys to my wife. And they're like, what are you doing?

You're probably just going to get probation. You know, you should be all right. We think everything's going to be good. I said, I got a bad feeling. This is before the verdict even came back. No, this was after that. So this was the sentencing portion. Okay.

So the verdict had already come back. Verdic came back guilty. Guilty. How do you feel when you got that guilty verdict read to you? Awful. Your heart like saying. Yeah. And I heard my, all the cops that were there to support me,

there must have been 50 of them in there. And I could just hear. the gasps. You know, I don't think they could believe it. And they knew what happened. They knew the commissioner threw me under the bus. They knew the lieutenant threw me under the bus. And they also knew the captain of the Detective Bureau

threw me under the bus early on. Not to veer off too much, but the woman who drove the car that night got arrested in East Long Meadow for shoplifting. So she talked to the East Long Middle Cop. She says, hey, you know, this guy asked her in Spinkfield's in trouble. Yeah, we know him.

They said, she said, I want to talk to the Springfield Police. So a couple cops go out there and she says, hey, I just want to let you know that before you guys walked up to the car that night, he was telling him he's going to run. If he's got a fight, he's gone. And she said, I'd love to testify for him if I could to get out of my charges. So they brought that back to this captain and the detective bureau right in the trash. Got rid of it? Yeah. That's how corrupt it is. And how did you find out all this information? One of my buddies was the sergeant that brought that information to the captain. There were other people in the DB that saw the report keep getting thrown out and rewritten by this lieutenant.

So I had friends that were still there, but they were actively trying to screw me. I mean, they were making it their life's mission to go after me. So, you know, there's a list of guys that really made my life. hell. I can't imagine, man. I mean, you served the country, you served the police force, and then just all of this. This is how it ends. Wow. And I was, you know, I have a good personality. I get along with everybody on the job. I had never done anything to any of these guys. It's easier for them at that point in our careers for them to cut me loose, watch me go to jail than to actually defend me. Because you know, cops nowadays, the job has changed to defund the police movement,

Black Lives Matter. Things have changed a lot. Cops now have cameras on their chest and they're not, they almost have to act like robots now because they're playing to either the camera here or the camera from the person. So you've got to make a decision, split second decision now knowing you're on film. But don't you think that holds the bad ones accountable? Because there are bad ones. Oh yeah. Yep, it'll do that. I mean, it's actually, I like the cameras on the cops because you're right. The bad ones are going to do bad stuff and get caught anyways. And the good ones, the video is going to help clear them from what they did.

But a video can be read so many different ways. Yeah. Being a Monday morning quarterback. They can cut it. Yeah. Yeah, you can look back on a video and play Monday morning quarterback. I've got three seconds to decide if this guy's got a gun and I'm hearing. gun. I'm not waiting five to seven seconds. I'm not waiting a minute to find out if I'm going to get

shot. He's getting hit. No, it's so tough, especially with social media. Like I hope one day there could be like a fair, you know, balance, you know, just a just balance. I mean, look what they do with the clips. I was watching the whole McConnell thing with him. Yeah, and freezing up. It's just all the clips of just him frozen there that probably got expanded a little bit and made to be, you know, everything. It's just, it's how it's portrayed. You always see that. You don't see the lead up or the after, you just see that one moment. Like every time Biden trips, they extend that out. I don't know.

It's just, it's crazy. And there's definitely like it's not like all cops aren't bad, but all cops aren't also good. And there's just like that fine line of and the gray area in it. I think that's what bothered me the most was I never, I was never a bad cop. But because of these incidents, the newspaper turned to me in to what they thought was a bad cop. Yeah. They created a monster for the people of Springfield. Actually, I mean, most of these were nationwide things, but Springfield, so everybody that saw me, everywhere I went was, hey, that's the cop.

That's the cop that beats everybody up. That's the cop that's in the Blue Clucks clan. I mean, that was the type of stuff that was out there. So I never had a chance by the time we got to that last incident to really have a fair trial to at that point between the newspaper and the betrayal from my bosses, I was cooked. sentencing day happens, you give your wife, your family, the watch, the cards, the keys, because you have a bad feeling, what happens? I thought in my mind, they're going to send me to jail, but I'm thinking six months a year. I didn't know, but I'm thinking, geez, I don't have a record.

None of that stuff, but no. You served in the military. I served in the military. And the judge said, I'm giving you two and a half years, 18 months direct, sending it to Franklin County corrections in northern mass. And that was it. And then the jail guards got up. And I was waiting for them to cuff me.

And they didn't. And the judge said, cuff him, please. And they looked there and said, no, these are guys I knew. Wow. They walked me to the elevator to go out. And they would not put the cuffs on. So you never got a handcuffed? I mean, I did downstairs.

Once I got in the prison there, I did. And I looked like Hannibal Lecter in the bed. So they shackled you? They shawed you. How did it feel like? shackled as a cop, like, for the first time. It was awful. I mean, I don't know how to describe it.

Are you thinking how, like, defendants feel now at this point? Like, does it make you think about the people that you arrested and how they felt? Like, it puts it into a perspective. How the mighty have fallen. And what about, did they strip search you for that first time? Yeah. How does that feel to go through that whole process? Embarrassing, humiliating.

my lawyer had come downstairs and you couldn't go with your tie you had to take your tie off hanging yourself, he took the tie and he gave me a $100 bill and you said when you get there I put this in your commissary so you can buy some stuff

he could give you cash? He gave me cash I put this crazy when he used the wild part I put the cash in my pocket and then when I got to jail they put it all in property so I got that $100 back when I left

so I wasn't able to get any commissary until it opened up for people to start putting it in. So that 100 was nice. I had that 100 right when I got out. Yeah, nice little something. Yeah. So you're a former cop that goes to a Massachusetts state prison, right? Yeah.

What's that like? County jail. County jail, yeah. How are you treated? Do you go in general pop? Do you go in the shoe and the hole? What happens? I was in a protective cell the first probably seven, eight days,

which they only bring you out for one hour. You take a shower in a little metal box You know they give you soap and something else There's toothpaste that's it But they kept me in it was a small It was a cell block and had two doors One for another prisoner who was there for a dangerousness hearing And then me it was 23 and one for a week

With minimal phone contact And of course all of a sudden thinking about it's my wife My son my daughter And it's It was terrible It was terrible You have to be going crazy too I remember the first time I'm putting a box like that.

You get like claustrophobic and you're losing all because you lose your freedom. Plus you're depressed. I was depressed. My PTSD was kicking in. You know, I didn't know what to do. But the guy next to me, you know, of course you're right next to each other. He had no one to talk to before I got there. So we started talking.

And I found out he said, I used to be a great candelpin bowler. And I was on this show in the 80s. I was kind of a championship candelpin bowler. And I said, you know, what are you here for? He says, I had drugs. And I said, and he said, domestic stuff. He said, they're keeping me for 90 days. I only got 11 days left.

So I said, best of luck when you get out. He goes, I'm on the straight and arrow now. I'm going to go to casino. I'm to go to Mohegan. I'm done, you know, I'm done using drugs. I got a letter from him when I finally got over to A-Pod and started getting into the serious guys. I got a letter.

And he said, I just want to let you know I'm doing great. I went to the casino, everything's fine. And then four days later, the sergeant come up to me and says hey remember the guy you were in with in the hole in the block i said yeah he said he OD yesterday oh wow he were in holyoke mass he had probably taking what he was used to take him when he first went in yeah and uh and he died and i still have that letter of my house yeah that guy pretty wild yeah i'm sure you see a lot of that in general like as a cop seeing uh defendants you know rego through the system and everything yeah yeah

now you're putting a general population how are the inmates treating you as a cop One of the first things the guard told me was don't let anyone step into your cell. Whatever you do, that's your space. Nobody else comes in. Day one, hour one, big black guy comes up to the door. Hey man, how you doing? Can I help you out? Do you need anything?

And all of a sudden there's one step, two step. No cells aren't big. And I knew what was coming. And because I looked behind him when I saw a guy kind of peeking in the door like this, and I'm like, I'm going to get jumped. So he came up, he's like, nice to meet you. As soon as he stuck his hand out, I swung as hard as I could. And I caught him right on the chin, and I leapt on him,

and I just started hitting as hard as I could. And within minutes, the COs were there. They broke it up. And that was it for that guy giving me problems. They left you in the unit after that. Yeah, yeah. Wow. So are the COs looking out after you because you're like a fellow officer?

Not really. Some of them were great. Don't get me wrong. There were some guys that, They knew my brother-in-law who's a chief probation officer in Massachusetts. They knew people I knew. They knew. They knew cops. They knew.

There were some very good guys. But there were some guys that, amen. They're telling inmates, he's a cop. They all knew. A lot of them knew, but they told everybody. How does an inmate view a cop in prison? Like a pedophile. Like a pet.

It's just as bad. Just above. No matter, regardless, whether you're a good cop or anything, you're labeled as a pedophile. You got to remember, these guys look at you like you're the cop that lack them up. Right? You are the cop that put all them guys, even though I'm not the cop that arrested this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy. You're a cop in jail. You locked me up. Your people, your tribe, you locked me up. So right away, man, everyone there hates you. Everyone there hate you. I couldn't avoid trouble. Anywhere I went in there, don't touch the remote. You can't go in that shower. You can't sit at that day. Which is exactly how sex offenders are treated in federal prison. I didn't really run into any cops because you don't really see too many in the federal system.

you see more in like the county and whatnot. And it wasn't just the black inmates. You know, because there was that whole connection with the race. With the race stuff. This guy with a swastick on his head, WP on his arm for white power. I sit at a table that was quiet to eat my first meal.

And he looks at me, says, man, you got to get the fuck off this table. And I just sat there on eight slow and I would just look at him every once in a while. I'd just eat. Fuck this guy. You're not going to scare me. You want a fight.

We'll fight. I don't mind fighting. I don't want to fight. but I'm not going to be punked while we're in here either. You may kick my ass, but, you know, I'll get my, I'll get my licks in, you know. So I sat there and did it, and it worked. He never said anything after. He said a couple times.

So you're a fighter in prison? I did a few times. I'm happy to say it was no more than three or four times. You were there to survive. A lot of verbal altercations. I certainly wasn't a tough guy. A lot of guys there are a lot tougher than me. But I spent my career fighting people.

So I know how to hang on. I know how to get through it if I have to. Do they give you a nickname at all? A smasher. Smasher. That was your name. Did you make friends at all in there? Like were guys nice to you?

Was there anyone nice to you? Well, after these altercations, word got back through my wife to the Hampton County Sheriff because I was his prisoner. Even though I was in another county, they put me up there to keep me away from the Springfield guys. Yeah. So once my sheriff, got news, he's like, what the hell's he doing

in General Pop and Pod A with pre-trial prisoners? Some of them have killed their wives and killed people. You got him in there with him? So they made a quick decision, hey, he's got to go to minimum security. I mean, there's still a lot of shitheads in minimum security, but that's where we're going to put you.

So they brought me over to minimum, and I would say it was a lot better. It's still jail. You still ain't going anywhere, but it was a little looser, a little bit looser than being in general. You were treated better. Yeah.

For the most part, by the inmates at least. That started off rough, too. The first day, because you give you a new color uniform now. So it was orange in a pod, but it's yellow minimum security. So this female guard calls me, and she says, here you go, three shirts, three pairs of pants. And I put those on the table right behind me. She gave me a couple other things. When I turned around, a shirt and a pair of pants were missing.

And this white guy, his name was Ron. I saw he sitting there smiling and he had the shit in front of him. So I said, oh boy, here we go. So about two hours later, and again, I did the complete opposite of what that guy did step in in in my cell. I found out where his cell was and I walked right in, grab my stuff and walked out. He goes, yo, what are you doing? I said, I'm taking my fucking shit back.

That's it. That's it. What's funny is I gained his respect because I ended up doing outside details with him, painting houses and stuff. He talked to me the rest of the time I was there. He was nuts. He was crazy. He was doing life in installments.

He'll do two years here, three years here, two years there. He probably, in the end, he probably does over 20 years. Wow. Just broken up in county time. Yeah. But he became friends with him. I mean, you know what I compare this to is I'll hear stories from some tough prisons about how like a sex offender or a choma would stand up for themselves and fight back

and no one fucks with them at that point. That's all it is. Yeah. You know, that's all it is. But at some point about, I want to say about six months in, I go into an AA. class because they had classes you could take to earn good time. So I go into an AA class and I said halfway through the AA classes. It's a, hey, excuse me from me and I said, I'm not an alcoholic. And I said, I feel bad. Listen to these guys tell their stories. But I don't think it's fair for me

to be here as somebody that's not an alcoholic listening to their stories. I shouldn't be here. She goes, well, you're going to stay. And I said, I'll stay. Nope. If these guys don't have a problem These other inmates are probably, I'll stay. But, you know, why should they tell their stories in front of somebody who doesn't have a problem? No. Drunken alcohol. She took offense to that. And I didn't know it at the time, this caseworker.

And about a week later, I'm in myself. It's a Sunday morning and visiting coming. And I was always important. It was visiting day. My wife was coming up with the kids. And all of a sudden, I know I get pushed up against the wall, cuffed, and thrown in the hole. I'm like, what did I do? Oh, you insulted a casework.

You yelled at a casework. I'm like, I didn't yell at a caseworker. I told him a story about the alcohol and anonymous. They bring me the hole, and I did about eight days in the hole, which was insane. Eight days, I don't care for the hole for three days. It sucks. Hey, I did three months, man. Yeah, it's off.

It's off. You know, the screaming and all night long, and there was a guy next to me, and for three straight days, almost, I mean, it must have been six, seven hours a day. he would just scream out, I got the moves like Jagger. I got the moves like Jagger. That song, that's all he would scream for hours and hours. I mean, I wanted to kill myself. I'm like, I was able to finally make a phone call and get a hold of my wife.

And she called the sheriffs at the time and said, they got them in the hall. Some caseworker, they told them what happened. And right before that happened, this kid came up to my cell and he says, hey, I'm part of the Sycamore Street Passy. and spread it like this. I said, you asshole, who gives a shit? He goes, when I get out of here, I'm going to fuck you up, I'm going to fuck your family up.

I'm like, all right, whatever. Next thing you know, a guard comes up and says, hey, I'm going to let you out with this guy. You're going to clean the cell block. So I looked at him, I go, as soon as you open that door, I'm going after him. And he's like, what? And I said, I'm going to fuck him up.

He just came over and threatened. He even made reference to a cop murder, this Kevin Ambrose was an awesome cop on her job that was killed in a line of duty. He said, I'm going to put one in your head, like Ambrose Scott and his head. So my PTSD, my stress, I mean, I was as red as you could get. If that cell door open, I was going to kill this guy.

I mean, really, you threaten my family, you bring up Kevin's name, it's on. And then the next thing I know, they lock him back in a cell, they come down, they cuff me up. They walked me out of the hole. I'm like, oh, man, I'm done. I've got to be going to the sheriff. They brought me to a closet, said change into that yellow alcohol. which is minimum security. Okay? Here's your bag.

Ramen noodles and all the other stuff. You know, all the stuff they walk me back to minimum. And I remember the guard saying to me while I'm walking up the steps, he goes, Jeff, he goes, I can't believe the two things I just saw this week. And I said what? He goes, number one, I've never seen anybody go from the hole back to minimum security. You're supposed to go back through the pods. Kind of earn your way back to minimum?

No. He goes, I've never seen that. He goes, number two, all 12 of the end. All 12 of the inmates that you were in that class with wrote statements supporting you and not the caseworker. And I'm like, are you kidding me? He goes, no, all of them. Latin kings, domestic abusers, you know, you name it, whatever they had been in there for. They all stuck up for me.

Yeah, inmates came together. Because I had built such a relationship with them while I was there with them, listened to them, talk to them, that they paid me back by doing that, which I thought was awesome. That's great. Yeah. How long do you end up doing? I was reading somewhere that you got out earlier than expected to. Yeah, yeah, about 10 months. So you did 10 months? Yeah. How hard was it to reintegrate back into society after that? Now late with this label on you, you're in the public eye, you're out of jail, which you never thought you would be in in your life. How is life? Well, when I came home, I was on parole and I was on the bracelet. So I had the bracelet on my ankle. And it was the winner, which was great because I could just wear my sweats and nobody saw the thing. Yeah, I wore my sweats and the long.

socks at the gym all the time. Yeah, right. So nobody saw it. I had to, I had to write a schedule. If I want to go to the movies, go to the grocery store, they had to know the times I was going. I didn't find it hard to get back in this stuff. I was, to me, the best reward I got was looking at these prisoners in a different way than I ever looked at him as a cop. They all had a story. There was a way that all these guys ended up where they ended up. And I had I appreciated listening to their stories. You know, you get the guys, the cops did it to me, and the cops framed me. But I got to know their individual stories, and I'd never talked to people like that firsthand.

And to me, I got a lot of satisfaction on when I left there, them hugging me, you know, them wanting to stay together and meet up with me in the future and talk and stuff like that. It was very rewarding. You see the totally different perspective than what you're used to. Like the opposite of what your whole life was, military police and military police and you. go and see that? The only normal guy I had was my next door neighbor, my cellmate next door. He robbed 25 million from his brother, 25 million. So I said, what are you doing in a county jail? 25 million. I mean, that's like, you ought to be federal lockup or state. He goes, he goes, I was a jail guard at Walpole in Massachusetts. And he said, because I was a jail guard

there, they can't put me in a state facility, so they tucked me in out here. So I'm like, who's your brother? He's like, Dane Cook. You know Dane Cook. Yeah. The actor and comedian. He's his brother Daryl. Didn't he steal from his own brother?

That's wild that you were with him. I was with him. He was a great guy. Wow, I was reading that whole article. This was a few years ago because he, and his brother didn't rat him out though, right? I think someone else. Yeah, well, the wife, too, the guy was with, his wife stole some of the money to opened up businesses in like a gunk with Maine selling C-Shout.

What a small world. But he ended up. in the next cell. He also wrote jokes for his brother. So I'd play basketball with him every night. And he had a great sense of humor. He graduated from Northeastern in Boston. He was a guy that I could talk to more than anybody because he was, I love talking to the other guys, but he was smart like me. He had college time. Well, and he had law enforcement background. He had law enforcement background of being a jail guard. That's good that you got to find someone to, like, have that comfort in.

I still talk to. Did you get to, you know, see any mental health treatment when you got out and really work on? Yeah. I mean, to this day, I still go to the VA. I'm 100% disabled to the VA. So I go there probably once a month, talk to somebody. But I've been doing a lot better. So you didn't end up going into work when you got out of prison?

No, because I'm 100% disabled vet at that point. You can't work. I can make a certain amount of years. So I do work for UPS every winter, which is great money in about a three-month span. And I'm working with a lot of other retired cops and troopers, Mass State troopers. They love doing that work. That's great. Yeah. So that's it. My wife works.

What do your kids think of this whole situation? Are they old enough to comprehend it? Oh, yeah. My son's 21. My daughter's 20. Do you have like a sit-down conversation with them, especially with like with tensions in America right now and the way things happen? Yeah. My son wanted, I was talking about becoming a cop. I'm like, nope, you're not doing it. No way. No way. It's not the same job as it was when we first came on. And it will never be again. I had a lot of fun my first couple of years, loved it no more. Yeah.

You know. Wow. And what do you say to the individuals that might put you in the same category as other officers that might have abused the badge or were put in the public eye? And you could very well be put into that category. Oh, yeah. What do you say to them? There's almost a lot of them you can't argue with because if they think you're wrong,

wrong. I could tell him all day long about the gun and the knife under this guy. It doesn't matter. They don't like, people don't like to see brute force. People don't like to see billy clubs. They don't see flashlights. Anything that involves brute force, they want nothing to do with it. I think it's easier if they see somebody shot once. You know, did the guy turn? Was it a legit reason to shoot? It's cut and dry. You know, the cop was wrong. The guy didn't have a gun. He's wrong. Or yes, he had a gun. The cop was right. When it comes to the guy. to hitting somebody. That's the stuff that people get nervous about.

They don't like to see that. So I don't care how anybody looks at me these days. I'm a happy guy. You know, I've moved on. I work for a nonprofit now for first responders that I get a lot of satisfaction out of. And I get to work with some of the cops they used to work with doing it.

And now what's your message? Like what do you want people to take away from your story? They listen, they hear this. What do you want those takeaways to be? What do you want someone to get inspired about hearing and listening to your story? Well, I mean, you can't let failure determine the rest of your life. You can't. Even though I don't think I did anything wrong, I still took a nosedive off the map because of the news and everything else.

I think that you just have to rise above, restart your life, you know, pick a plan and stick to it. Again, I'm a personable guy, so I can jump into anything easy. But, you know, don't give up. Don't let one moment in your life right or wrong define your future. Well said. Jeff, thanks for coming on the show today, man. Yeah, great conversation with you. Yeah, I think you're definitely one of the people that we have back for a part two one day just to hear like all the, you were on the force for, you know, 15, 16 years. You got stories for days, man. Hey, I'd love to.

Even you and Chicky sitting here going at each other, man. I got to call up Chicky. That would be awesome. That's right. But thank you, Jeff. I wish you the best man and everything. And, you know, keep hanging in there and keep doing you. Absolutely.

Thanks, see. I appreciate it.