by Aaron Davis
Personally, I think that is a recipe for disaster. When someone takes that approach and then experiences something painful that contradicts what they have been taught (which may or may not be true or accurate), they often become bitter and throw in the towel without ever really having known why they believed what they believed in the first place. They don’t seek to find out if what they were taught was correct or sound teaching. Instead, they become bitter. Often, they turn away from their faith completely. Events like these become dramatic crash-and-burn moments in a person’s life and are often the reason that many who were raised to believe in God have a change of perspective, and for those who really didn’t have a faith in God to justify why they do not.
THE EVIL THAT MEN DO
I’ve seen a lot in my lifetime. The evil that men do has directly touched me in ways that most will never have to experience. More times than I could even recall I’ve seen with my own eyes the cause and effect of the wages of sin.
I’ve comforted the orphan in the moment he is told that his parents have died.
I’ve combed the hair and prepared the body of the infant who died from SIDS at the babysitter’s house so the parents whose world was rocked beyond imagination would have one less thing to do when they arrived at the ER.
I’ve confronted the child molester with the digital proof of his personal exploitation of children through the trafficking of child pornography.
I’ve pulled the murder victim from his rural hiding place in the pouring rain.
I’ve comforted the family grieved beyond explanation who walked in moments after their father put a shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
I’ve tracked a man up and down hills and through the dense woods of Tennessee, wearing seventy pounds of SWAT gear for days in 100-degree heat. He killed his entire family before I had the opportunity to stick an MP5 machine gun in his face and politely inform him that if he moved I would pull the trigger and see an end to this entire scenario.
Injustice, murder, rape, suicide, victimized women and children, traumatized, even . . . I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. I pray you never have to.
Romans 8:28 (KJ21)
And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.
You see, although I have been in pastoral ministry for the majority of my life now, I’ve also been a law enforcement officer. I served as a School Resource Officer, DARE Officer, and am medically retired as a Detective Sergeant and SWAT team member.
I started out in law enforcement as an additional way to work with young people and make some extra money when youth ministry just wasn’t enough to pay the bills. Within two years, I was named Officer of the Year and promoted to the SWAT team and Criminal Investigations Division as a Detective.
I enjoyed the job. My personality was a perfect match for police work. Even my childhood best friend commented, when hearing I had been voted onto the SWAT team, “Aaron, I could not think of a job that you are more suited for.”
I probably loved it too much. Okay, definitely too much! Unhealthy pride set in somewhere along the course of my tenure, and my world came crashing down one day when a couple of young men I had arrested conspired to kill me and set out to do it.
THE CALL THAT CHANGED MY LIFE
On December 14, 2006, I was sitting in my office when a phone call came in to my secretary. I overheard her talking to the pastor of a local church who also ran a drug rehab center for teens and young men. I asked her to transfer the call to me so I could handle the case.
When I picked up the phone, the pastor explained to me that two young men had sneaked out of the rehab program the evening before and stolen several hundred dollars worth of tools and digital equipment from garages and cars in the neighborhood adjacent to their rehab house. He informed me that they were caught red-handed sneaking back in, and that I simply needed to come and pick them up along with the stolen property.
When I arrived at the rehab house, the two young men, ages seventeen and eighteen, were in tears, asking me if they were going to jail. Now while I looked tough—standing over six feet tall, covered in tattoos, and with a shaved head—in my hometown and department, I was known as the cop who always looked for an opportunity to help troubled young men. When one was killed in a shootout, I went to the funeral. When I pulled into the neighborhood and the kids on the corner would scatter like cockroaches, all I had to do was step out of my patrol car and whistle. When they saw it was me, they would come back to talk with me. They knew I cared and I didn’t look at my job as a way to bully them or bust their chops, as may have been their experience with other officers.
I started out in ministry working with their demographic. At fourteen years old, when my friends were going to camp and on summer vacations, I was going door-to-door raising money for outreach programs in the heart of Detroit, when Detroit was the murder capital of the world. Although I didn’t come from the streets, there was a connection with these kids and they acknowledged that I understood.
Surprisingly, I didn’t know these two guys sitting before me that day. One was a seventeen-year-old white kid who stood about 6’2” and weighed 200 pounds, and the other was an eighteen-year-old Asian kid, about 5’7” and 135 pounds soaking wet.
I felt compassion for them and told them that if they took a ride with me back to the neighborhood they had just stolen from and helped me make a list of everything that they took and where they had taken it from, then I would help them out and go to bat for them with the judge by asking for leniency. It was pretty cut-and-dried from my perspective. Remorseful kids meet compassionate cop with a “save them all” complex . . . What could go wrong?
I cleared everything out of my unmarked car (with no transport cage) and put it in the trunk and cuffed the crying teens’ hands in front of their stomachs (against protocol, which stated to cuff them behind their backs). I didn’t want to have to stop every fifteen minutes because their wrists were hurting from sitting on the handcuffs. We went for an hour-and-a-half ride, documenting each car and garage they had stolen from. I placed the larger threat (the seventeen-year-old) in the front seat next to me (also against protocol) so that I could keep an eye on him more closely.
At the final victim’s residence, I got out of the car and knocked on the door to speak with the homeowner who was yet unaware that anything had been taken from him, and then returned to the car.
Unbeknownst to me, just before we went to this final house, a several-pound trailer hitch I kept under my seat and out of my view slid out on to the floor in the rear of the car and the eighteen-year-old Asian kid sitting behind me picked it up and sat on it. When I stepped out of the car to speak with the victim, the two young men conspired to take me to another house on a back road and kill me. The plan was that the young man in the front seat (whom I placed there against protocol) would point to a house and say, “We did that one as well,” and while I was distracted and looking away, the other one would hit me in the temple with the trailer hitch from the backseat. Then they would dump my body on one of the back roads and steal my car so they could escape.
It almost worked.
When I got back in the car, they “remembered” that there was one more house they had stolen from over the hill that they had “forgotten” to tell me about. As we crested the top of the hill, the seventeen-year-old white kid pointed to a house to my left and said, “We did that one too.” As I looked to my left, I quickly looked back to my right in mid-sentence, asking, “That one?” and I was hit squarely in the face with the trailer hitch by the Asian kid who swung it with both hands from the backseat.
It sounded like a gunshot went off in my head. I had no visual indication that it was coming, no benefit of adrenaline kicking in before the pain. It caught me completely off guard, and it hurt! Bad! I blacked out for a moment but never lost consciousness. Within seconds, I regained my vision and confusedly looked down at my shirt, which was covered in blo
od. I spit my teeth out and then saw the trailer hitch sitting on the floor in the front seat, where apparently the guy had hit me so hard with it that he lost his grip and dropped it.
When the eighteen-year-old realized I was not unconscious, he jumped over the front seat, climbed on top of me, and began to strangle me—all while still handcuffed. I struggled for a moment, his eyes inches from my own. Then I saw his gaze shift to my gun, and he reached for it. When he released my throat, I grabbed his face with my hand and bench-pressed him into the windshield and pinned him there while grabbing my weapon with the other hand. I pointed the gun in his face and informed him that if he moved, I was going to create another orifice in his face, accompanied by a severe case of lead poisoning.
He got the picture and slowly, with his hands up, crawled back into the backseat. The seventeen-year-old sat frozen during all of this, still buckled into the passenger front seat.
I was in a precarious position. I was bleeding profusely; I was still in the same seat with the same young men who had just conspired to kill me; and I was way out in the country and fifteen minutes from backup arriving. Furthermore, I knew that because I was so far out into the country, I wouldn’t be able to step out of the car and call for backup on the handheld radio, and I didn’t want to get hit again sitting in the car. I had one option: to step out of my car and leave my keys in the ignition while stretching the cord out the door and calling for back up on the patrol car’s radio.
If the event had ended here, I would probably still be in law enforcement today. But it didn’t.
After calling for backup, I looked into the window on the driver’s door and saw my own reflection in the glass. I was a mess—covered in blood, nose shattered, lip split nearly all the way through from the tip of my lip all the way to my nose, and teeth were missing. I realized then that I needed to get these guys out of the car and to where I could keep a bead on them until backup arrived.
They were both seated on the passenger side of the car so I walked around the back of the car to get them out from the passenger side. When I got to the trunk, the eighteen-year-old jumped from the backseat into the driver’s seat. In a moment, one thousand thoughts entered into my mind, not the least of which was that all of my SWAT gear and machine gun were in the trunk.
I ran around to the front of the car with my pistol in my hand, jumped on the hood of the car, and pointed my .45 Caliber Glock through the windshield at the young man who had just tried to kill me. I screamed out, “Don’t do it!” and intended to shoot him if he put the car in drive. What I didn’t know is that by the time I got on the hood, he had already placed the car in drive. He slammed on the accelerator, and I flew onto the windshield as the car took off with me on the hood. I grabbed on to the edge of the hood right in front of the windshield wipers with my left hand and pointed my gun at him with my right as he swerved from one side of the street to the other, trying to shake me off the hood of the car. In that moment, I had an internal conversation with myself: Shoot him or jump! Shoot him or jump! The car was increasing in speed, and I’d already ridden a few hundred yards on the hood. In that moment, I opted to jump.
I rolled to the passenger side of the hood and pushed off as hard as I could to try to jump far enough to land in the ditch, but I didn’t make it. I landed on the asphalt, hit my head on the road, and sustained the injury that ended my career when I busted both of my inner ears from the impact.
According to the doctors, the instant swelling managed to delay the symptoms of severe vertigo that would hit me abruptly about a week later. I was able to quickly stand up, turn around, and watch these two young men drive off with my patrol vehicle.
Immediately, a man pulled up in his vehicle, asked me if I was a cop, told me he had witnessed everything, and invited me to jump in.
We drove up the street together after my car. Miraculously, I was able to not only remember the phone number to dispatch, but dial it on my cell phone (which is not typical when the sympathetic nervous system is active and you are experiencing fight or flight, and you lose your fine motor skills and cognitive processing). I informed the dispatcher of my situation and location while we continued to follow the fleeing fugitives at a distance.
Within a few minutes, it became obvious that they were not familiar with the area when they paused for an extensive amount of time at a four-way intersection, likely trying to determine which way to go. I told the man driving to slowly pull up next to the driver’s side of the car and that when I had shot, I was going to take down the driver.
He did as I said, and when I was nearly in position, the driver saw me in the side mirror and bolted straight ahead up the hill on what now had turned into a country dirt road. As he got to the top of the hill, the man driving me said, “He’s going too fast. He’ll never make the turn at the top of the hill” (which blindly cut about 90 degrees just after the crest).
He was right.
Moments later, I saw a huge plume of smoke as the eighteen-year-old lost control of the vehicle and I watched my patrol car roll five or six times down the side of the hill.
The trunk burst open as the vehicle rolled, spewing the contents into the air and all over the hill. On the last roll, the eighteen-year-old driver was ejected through the windshield and pinned from the waist down under the hood of the car that was now resting upside down in the field at the bottom of the hill. The seventeen-year-old passenger was still belted into his seat, hanging upside down in the car.
In an ironic twist, I went from being nearly killed moments before, then postured to take a man’s life, to now being the first responder in an accident I assumed would likely end in at least one fatality.
I handed my phone to the man who was driving me and asked him to relay to the dispatcher everything I told him. I said we were going to need three ambulances (one for each of us) and maybe one LifeFlight helicopter to airlift the pinned driver. I tended to both of the young men’s injuries until other first responders arrived, at which time I was carted off to the hospital myself. During that time, we had little conversation. As I approached the pinned driver, I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was afraid of what I may do to him, but I simply kicked into autopilot and did as I was trained as a first responder—I tended to their injuries. The only words I said to him were, “You’ve really screwed up.”
The eighteen-year-old driver was airlifted to Vanderbilt Medical Hospital. The seventeen-year-old passenger had minor injuries, and both men lived.
About a week later, my world spun out of control as severe vertigo set in, resulting in several months of vestibular and physical rehabilitation, multiple sessions on a psychiatrists’ couch, and about a year of prescription drugs to help me process all the events.
Ultimately, a year after the attack, I was given a medical retirement from my doctors who would not allow me to go back into law enforcement because of the injuries to my inner ear and the possible repercussions associated with the injury.
The doctors told me that I could work in any other field, but they would not release me to go back into law enforcement because of the nature of the job. If I were ever presented with a personal lawsuit, any good lawyer would bring up my injuries (even after being healed) to try to discredit my competence. That would set me and the doctors up for a civil lawsuit as well for releasing me to go back into that field of work. Even with my pressing them, they wouldn’t release me and I had to retire.
As for the kids who tried to kill me, at the hearing, the judge gave me the choice to try the juvenile as an adult, and I opted against it. He got a year in juvenile detention. The eighteen-year-old was charged with attempted first-degree murder, pled out to attempted second-degree murder, and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison. He was released from jail in just over three years.
WHAT NOW?
I’m not angry today. I decided early on that I was going to forgive, but I’d be lying to say I’ve not had many, many opportunities since then when I had to decide again to forgiv
e when anger would try to get the best of me.
Getting back to work was my motivation for all of the previous years’ recovery process. The three to four hours a day of physical rehabilitation, the sleepless nights, and having to see a shrink—I did all of it so I could go back to doing what I loved. I’d found a significant amount of personal identity in law enforcement. I didn’t know who I was without it.
When I found out I’d never be a cop again, the doctor left the room and I sat there by myself and wept. Everything I had worked so hard for was gone! I had been recruited by the State to work for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI). I had been recruited to work for Tennessee Highway Patrol as an instructor of instructors for their DARE program while I was still in DARE School myself. I was awarded Officer of the Year three years into my career. I spent countless hours in training to better myself both mentally and physically. If I had taken those same efforts over the same period, I could have graduated from medical school as a doctor. And here I was, sitting alone in a doctor’s office, realizing it was all gone.
And not only was the career gone, but Tennessee is a right-to-work state. I had no pension and didn’t qualify for disability because I could still work (just not in law enforcement). So, I literally lost my income, I lost my insurance, and I lost the ability to qualify for insurance because of preexisting conditions. I lost my ability to do the job I loved and worked so hard to advance in with nothing to show for it. No retirement, no pension. I had to walk away with a paycheck that amounted to about four months’ pay from workers’ compensation for the injury to my inner ears and was basically told, “Have a nice life.”