Whenever someone talks to a cop about their career, the same question always pops up. “How did you find yourself working in the business?” For some it’s a family affair, for others, it was a lifelong dream. Others fell into it by accident, or it was a case of few options. Often people speak of it being a “calling.” When did you hear “the call”? No doubt any conversation with a cop, new or old, usually heads in that direction. The call came a little differently for me.
Early Years
I grew up in a small town in Georgia, first living out in the sticks, later living in town. My dad was a farmer, and my mom was a stay-at-home mom until they separated and then later divorced. For most of my childhood when we weren’t in school we were running wild through woods and farmlands. If we were out of school, I was likely to be with my dad on the farm. At least some of us were with him. There were five of us. Three boys and two girls, we pretty much had to be divided to be conquered so our parents kept us split up in different directions.
It wasn’t a happy childhood for me even though it had its happy parts. My dad struggled with alcoholism, and possibly (I realized much later on) substance abuse of other kinds. My mom was overloaded trying to raise five wild kids who were all on the gifted side when it came to school and when it came to trouble.
My parents eventually divorced, and my mom went to work as a bookkeeper to keep ends met, our mouths fed, and five wild kids aged 6 to 18 clothed and out of jail. My dad’s alcoholism didn’t help. I think sometimes when he went AWOL and we didn’t see him for a while was probably him protecting us from his bad side. Other times the five of us caught hell. What passed for severe discipline then, would be clear-cut child abuse today.
High school, for me, was not much fun. I was the weird kid but luckily, I had some really good friends. Some of those were, and are, my best friends to this day. High school itself was a bunch of classes where I was bored out of my mind. And then there was band.
Band was where I fit in best even if I didn’t fit in much there either. I had friends in band and we had football games, trips, and good times. In my Band Directors, I found three of my first mentors, men whose advice and lessons I still repeat to others today. Band had just three rules.
- Be on time.
- Be where you are supposed to be.
- Be doing what you are supposed to be doing.
Band was great. High school was not and I was failing for the worst reason ever—I was completely bored out of my mind. Where most kids had to be forced into reading, I read everything I could put my hands on. During summers it was not rare for me to read between five and ten books a day. I had started with Louis L’Amour’s Westerns and wound-up reading everything I could get my hands on.
My mom, doing her best to herd five kids into anything in life other than prison or a grave, got with my teachers and again had me tested. The dreaded SAT. My score shocked a few teachers but validated others. I had the 4th highest score in the school that year, as a sophomore. The three who beat me were the valedictorian, the salutatorian, and my brother who was two years older, all seniors with two years of AP classes.
Mom and the teachers got together and lobbied the state for permission for me to get my GED. The next move was college, which I wasn’t ready for at all. I had the brains, but I didn’t have the discipline. I wound up working some small jobs and kind of just being lost.
Then one of my lifelong friends made a decision for himself that helped change my life. My buddy Chris became a firefighter. Except in my small town, we didn’t have a separate fire department and police department. Our cops were our firefighters.
Chris, having taken a job as a firefighter, became a cop and he fell hard for the profession. It got to the point where it was all he would talk about. I won’t lie, I was getting interested. I had never considered being a cop. I was invited to do a ride-along and it was possibly the best thing that ever happened to me.
I got hooked on ride-alongs, not just with Chris, but with Terry Ray at the Sheriff’s Office. The excitement I had found in the books I read as a kid came to life. I wound up in car chases, going to accident scenes, crime scenes, etc. I was doing a ride-along about three nights a week.
I decided I had to, so I put in applications everywhere and found myself in the academy with three days to go when the twin towers fell. I think that was the first time I felt “the calling”. I wanted so badly to go and do something, ANYTHING to help. I think we all did.
The Call
Fast forward a couple of years later and I was struggling with working as a cop in a small town. My family had high expectations and they wanted me to go to college and cure cancer or make a half billion dollars inventing something. It was clear they didn’t like my choice of profession.
That’s when Someone upstairs sent me a clear message. I was working as a cop patrolling my one square mile town and a wreck with injuries was dispatched. I was the first on the scene of the two-car accident which looked more like a car bombing than an accident. The leftovers of a high-speed two-car collision with most of both engine compartments gone—it was brutal. Parts and pieces of cars, fluids, and glass strewn across the roadway in such a disarray that I had no idea how the accident happened.
I heard screaming coming from the first car and I ran to the driver’s window. An older lady was inside and in obvious pain. She had broken arms and was stuck inside the car. I checked the back seat and I was thankful she was alone in the car. I told her help was on the way and ran to the second car which had me really worried. The first lady kept screaming, which honestly made me feel better because screaming meant she was breathing and everything I had seen at this wreck told me it wasn’t going to end well. The second car was quiet and I was worried
about the passengers.
At the second car, I found another lady in the driver’s seat, but she was unresponsive. Now, as a first responder, I had seen different levels of “unresponsive.” People who just don’t answer when you say something to them (non-responsive), people who are knocked out (unconscious),
and then there are those people whose bodies don’t respond to pain stimuli. She hit the non-responsive right away and appeared to be unconscious to me.
Her head started to tilt, so I got in the back seat of her car and held her neck to prevent further spinal injuries. I started talking to her and telling her I was with her, and she wasn’t alone. I told her we had help on the way and with my hands tied up holding her neck, I pinned my radio mic between my cheek and my shoulder to activate my mic to radio I really needed some help and for them to be careful, we were still in the roadway.
No doubt about it I was scared. But I knew my job was to sit with her, hold her neck, and calmly tell her it was going to be ok, even if I didn’t think it was going to be ok. I was pretty sure I was lying to a woman who was going to die, and I was dreading telling her family. I wanted to
make sure I could tell her family she didn’t die alone, and it was peaceful.
The world was moving in slow motion and while the screams of pain hurt me to hear, I was thankful the woman in the other car was in enough pain to keep yelling which let me know she was alive. I was sure I was doing the wrong thing, but I didn’t know what else to do.
I kept telling her it was going to be ok until after maybe five real minutes, or 50 “oh shit” minutes, EMS and fire arrived. An EMT checked her while I held her neck. The EMT checked and she was unresponsive to a sternum rub, and to an eyelid tap. Both of which put her in the “this is BAD” unresponsive category. I was relieved from holding her spine by another EMT and I got out of the car. Both women were transported to the hospital and I was left standing there in the road which was shut down by my firefighters.
I quickly had gone from being needed to do everything and not knowing what else to do, to doing nothing. I stood off to the side a little shell-shocked until the Chief of Police, my boss, told me to get off my ass and work my wreck. A rookie cop working a wreck like that was unheard of in our area. Serious wrecks were always turned over to the State Patrol to work. I, having all that nervous energy left, immediately jumped on it. I think I spent about eight hours working on the wreck and writing the report. In the end, I was proud that I could figure out and prove who was at fault and what happened.
31 days later to the day, I was just coming on duty when a local resident told me that the second victim, the one whose neck I held, was out of the ICU and in a normal room. I had learned through the grapevine they had both survived, the lady who I had to leave screaming had lost a leg and an arm.
I mustered up the courage and called the hospital and asked for her room. I was redirected immediately, and a soft voice answered the phone. I told her who I was looking for and she replied “ That’s me.” Everything I had practiced saying, all the excuses I had about “calling for
the report” when I was really just calling to find out how she was, went out the window. I simply said “Ma’am you don’t know me…. “ And she cut me off.
She said “I recognized your voice the second I heard it. You were the young man in the back seat of my car after my accident. I didn’t think you were real, I thought you were an angel sent by God to take care of me, and I still do.” By that time I was reduced to trying not to let her
know I was crying.
We had a good long talk. She was calm, I was a bit “emotional.” I thanked her and wished her well.
When it comes to feeling “the Call,” I don’t know that there was ever just one time I felt it. I think I’ve felt it every time I went to a 911 call where I was trying to help someone, I’ve felt it. When that wreck happened, I was struggling internally a bit with the question “What should I be doing with my life?” After the phone call, I haven’t had a doubt that this was what I was supposed to be doing and I’ve rarely questioned if this is where I was supposed to be doing it. I just have to make sure I show up on time.
