Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Come on a ride along with a Veteran Homicide Detective as the twists and turns of the job suddenly end his career and nearly his life; discover how something wonderful is born out of the Darkness. Embark on the journey from helping people on their worst days, to bringing life, excitement and smiles on their best days.
Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
From LAPD to Tragedy: Faith to Failures...The Truth No Parent Could Imagine
What if resilience could transform unimaginable grief into a powerful story of faith and purpose? This week, we sit down with Jon Beal, a decorated police veteran whose life journey has been shaped by both profound personal losses and extraordinary professional achievements. Raised in Southern California amidst the backdrop of the 1994 Northridge earthquake and a conservative Christian upbringing, John’s early dreams of becoming a musician unexpectedly pivoted towards a career in law enforcement, inspired by a friend's ambition. Jon's narrative highlights his transition from being a music producer to a respected officer, alongside his marriage and the pivotal life events that have redefined his path over the last decade.
Jon doesn't shy away from the heart-wrenching trials he has faced, including the tragic loss of two of his children to the rare genetic disorder LPIN1. He opens up about the emotional and spiritual challenges that come with such devastating grief, detailing how these experiences tested his faith and strained his relationships. Despite these hardships, Jon’s story is one of resilience, offering listeners invaluable insights into balancing the demands of a high-stress career with the responsibilities of being a father. His journey from the depths of despair to rediscovering peace and purpose is a powerful testament to the strength of the human spirit.
Moreover, Jon’s professional journey continues to inspire. His transition from the LAPD to the Gresham Police Department in Oregon, coupled with his passion for drone technology, showcases his innovative contributions to law enforcement. Jon explains how he spearheaded a drone program within his agency, illustrating the transformative power of technology in modern policing. Whether navigating career transitions or coping with familial tragedy, Jon’s experiences underscore the importance of faith, resilience, and continual self-improvement. Join us as we explore these profound lessons and celebrate a story of enduring strength and spiritual growth.
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And so the day before she literally says like I see Jesus' castle and it's like, oh, that's neat. And then the next day she's gone, you know, and so Welcome back to the Murders to Music podcast.
Speaker 2:My name is Aaron, I'm your host and you guys are in for an amazing week on the show. So this week I have a guest. His name is John Beale. John Beale is a highly decorated police veteran. He was Los Angeles Police Department. Then he came to work in Oregon. I had the pleasure of working alongside of him for many years.
Speaker 2:John is now out of law enforcement and has a great perspective on life that many of us don't have, can't understand, wouldn't want to understand and just is going to have a hard time wrapping our minds around. And at the very end of the show you're going to hear a twist in his story that I just learned during the recording of this episode that I absolutely can't believe. During the recording of this episode, that I absolutely can't believe. It takes a lot to shock my conscience, but to hear what he has to say towards the end of the episode about his family absolutely blew my mind. But I need to deal with an elephant in the room. When I recorded this episode with John, he's remote. He is in another part of the United States. The recording sounded amazing. Upon playback I found that there was an echo that had been added to his voice. For the life of me, I can't figure out why, and it wasn't there during the live recording of this. I've done everything I can to eliminate that echo.
Speaker 2:Bad audio is worse than bad video. I know it's annoying, but please stick with him. This episode is very touching and the fact that John would come up and be vulnerable, open up, about his family. You're going to hear about some terrible loss in his family and you're going to hear about how that challenges his relationships with people, with his family and with God. You're going to hear about PTSD and there's life lessons John is going to teach me at the end of this episode. That hits me right in the chest. So please stick around, forgive the little bit of audio and let's welcome John to the show. Hey John, how are you? Hello Aaron, how?
Speaker 1:are you?
Speaker 2:I'm good man, it's so good to have you. I'm just going to have a conversation with you, all right, my eyes are diverted. You can see me on cameras because I'm good man, it's so good to have you.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to have a conversation with you.
Speaker 2:all right, my eyes are diverted, you can see me on cameras, because I'm looking at you, not the camera.
Speaker 1:That's okay.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for coming on. Kind of like, we spoke about a little bit this morning and we really haven't worked through a ton of these details. What I'd love to do is just talk a little bit about kind of who you are. We'll go through your story and then we'll go through some of the big things that have happened in your life over the last 10 years or so and how that changed you, where you were, the kind of person you were, versus what you're doing now, and now you're outside of law enforcement, so maybe life outside of law enforcement Is that cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds great.
Speaker 2:Awesome. So tell me a little bit about you. Where were you born and raised? What was your family like? Start in the beginning for me.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, I was born and raised in Van Nuys, california, and I was raised in Granada Hills, like North North area. So if anybody's heard of the Northridge earthquake back in 1994, that was my hometown, I lived through that and that was interesting back in 1994.
Speaker 2:That was my hometown.
Speaker 1:I lived through that and that was interesting. But yeah, so, raised in Southern California, I spent all my time down there. I met my wife down there and we got married in 2008. Before that I was heavily involved in sports and athletics and baseball and music and uh and uh, when I met my wife, I was I was a musician, uh, working for a music library company and kind of producing and uh and like cutting up loops and stuff like that so that other people can use those, uh, those licensed music files for their music and film, tv and stuff and so that, uh, it was ironic just could love you to a complete career turn and I know it's kind of a quick kind of segue into the law enforcement side.
Speaker 1:But realistically I'm, you know, young, 24, 25 years old, um, just married. Probably. I think I was married like nine months and uh, in a gig with uh, uh, like a studio gig, and the guitarist in the gig was, you know, a longtime friend of mine. We did a lot of church gigs together and uh was just saying that he was thinking about joining the california highway patrol and it got me thinking like I was.
Speaker 1:You know, I don't ever really thought about going to law enforcement, but at the same time there was always an intrigue in that type of field, and so it just intrigued me and it made me think and I was like.
Speaker 1:You know what that sounds like something that could work for me too.
Speaker 1:And so I kind of started down the path of research very quickly into doing something like that and it brought me to applying to several police departments and like failing miserably on the first couple, not really realizing like how to interview and how to present yourself, and uh, I went in there, my first.
Speaker 1:I remember my first interview I think it was with burbank police, and I look like a total hippie, walking into this interview and just not knowing what to say and sitting down with them and they're asking me questions that I just have no idea how to answer and um, and then I realized it was a terrible failure and I learned from it and wound up taking a uh, a quick like seminar that lepd puts on uh for their prospects and their people who are looking at getting hired with the agency, on how to interview, and it was just like this whole thing went off and I'm like, oh, this is how you're supposed to interview, this is what you're supposed to say, this is how you're supposed to say it present yourself.
Speaker 1:And then I went in and nailed the interview with la and wound up getting with them pretty quick and uh, so yeah, I did a lot of years uh with them. Uh, four and a half years down there in Los Angeles working in the San Fernando Valley area, and I lateraled up to the Gresham Police Department. Before you go into, Gresham.
Speaker 2:Let's explore California a little bit.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's do it.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about John Beale as a five-year-old kid. What was your life like? What was your family like? Mom and dad? Are they divorced? Are they married Siblings? Walk me through those first 10-12 years of life.
Speaker 1:Sure so my parents are still together. They've been together for a long time. I don't have a relationship with them now. We're estranged. Lots of bad blood and history between us in the last probably 5-6 years, in the last probably five, six years. But growing up, yeah, we grew up in a really solid Christian home, conservative home, and I grew up going to church and playing league baseball. My dad was in the mortgage industry and so if anybody's ever been in the mortgage industry with their parents being either a broker or a real estate agent, they kind of understand the uncertainty of not knowing when you have a paycheck coming in or not. So it was difficult to kind of grow up in that kind of environment where you didn't exactly know if we have enough money to kind of cover funds or dinner or whatever it was, and of course Southern California is an expensive place to live. So we managed to make it work and I think that I was. I played a lot. I played a lot of sports growing up. When I was young it was mostly baseball.
Speaker 2:I did swimming.
Speaker 1:So it was baseball. I did swimming until I was about 12. And then I realized, um, that I didn't want anybody to see me, you know. So, um, I quit swimming and uh, uh, which was it was? It was kind of dumb, um, cause I was pretty decent at it and I should have stuck with it.
Speaker 1:But, um, my, I think I think, from what I remember, my cousins were coming to my next swim meet and I did not want them to see me in a speedo. So I was like I quit, I'm done, and that was it, and I just stuck to baseball. So, yeah, it was kind of an interesting way to kind of quit a sport. But you know, baseball was my thing. I was decent at it without working too hard at it, and I played all the way through Little League and like Pony and got recruited to play in travel High school, played all through high school, was a varsity pitcher, ace pitcher, and then got recruited to play at a city college in Pastina, and then, at a certain point, like right at that point in my life I had played so much of it and I felt like I missed out on so much of my life as a youth that I didn't want to do it anymore.
Speaker 1:So I got hurt and I said I'm done with this and kind of just went with a back injury. I got kind of a back injury, some soreness in my back. I was like I just don't want to do this anymore and I don't have a passion for it and I left baseball for a long time. How old it and I left baseball for a long time.
Speaker 2:How old were you when you quit 19? Okay, yep, yeah. So my first year in college gotcha and you also mentioned faith in there and music. Let's talk a little about your faith journey, like how did that start? What kind of church did you guys go to? Was it just you? The whole family? Walk me through that?
Speaker 1:yeah, so, my whole family grew up in a church like. We went to four square churches, you know Pentecostal Church. Since I can remember, all my friends went to these churches and their private schools the same private schools that I went to when I was in elementary school. Then my siblings I have an older sister and a younger brother also estranged, but they were not doing so well in school, so we wound up all pulling us out and we homeschooled for about years from my third grade year to my eighth grade year and still maintained friendships through church and through sports and basically I got into music right around that time.
Speaker 1:I was around eight, nine years old when my parents bought me my first electronic drum set, which was like a little four-pad drum kit that had little four pads, that kind of go across the front there and I came with a pair of drumsticks and it changed my life. This is probably like 95. And I really felt like after playing those electronic drums in my head, like some band was going to drive by my house and hear me playing on my electronic drum set and just recruit me to play with them and that was like my dream. You know I was like a nine-year-old kid so but I stuck.
Speaker 1:You know, ironically, I stuck with it. It and kind of played electronic drums just on that little drum pad, set for a while and then got into the actual drums for the first time when my church youth group was having a talent contest and I said, okay, well, I'll play the drums, I'll just play the drums for the talent contest. And so I'd never played an actual drum kit before, but I kind of envisioned what it would be like and I played it and I did really well and I was like, well, why don't you play drums for the church?
Speaker 1:And so I wound up playing drums for the youth group and wound up playing drums for the regular church over the course of the next year or so and it was an interesting transition from never playing on a drum kit before to kind of just really learning really quickly. But I think that's kind of the blood, my sons do the same thing now too.
Speaker 2:They're very quick learners.
Speaker 1:They just pick things up and are able to do it really quickly and learn on their own. That's kind of what I do with music. I do the same thing with bass, guitar and regular guitar. I pick those things up on my own as well. Drums Drums are great, I love drums, but I couldn't really write songs very well with that.
Speaker 1:So I wanted to play a musical instrument and I did play piano. I took some formal piano lessons when I was like eight or nine and so I kind of knew a little bit of the some of the music theory and everything with that, but translated that over to stringed instruments and started playing bass and guitar and then started trying to write music and everything like that. So I was probably 13 or 14 years old and then I was recording. I tried, you know I don't even remember what software programs we were using back in the day. You know this is, you know, mid to late 90s, and trying to record things on you know a home computer and then record like drum tracks underneath it to make it sound amazing and I think it was like the best song in the world. But I could only imagine going back and listening to stuff now. But I know now, I know what it would sound like now.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I spent a lot of time doing that, just fine tuning music and trying to learn. So I kind of had, you know, split attention. I had baseball that I was kind of played a lot. My parents basically told me that I had to kind of play a sport and I had to stick with it, and if it wasn't baseball, it was something else. I had to be something athletic. I was like I know baseball, I don't want to learn more sports, I'm just going to stick with that. At the same time, I had a real passion for music and trying to figure out how to carve that out in my life. I spent a lot of time working on honing those skills and trying to find a path for that. Once I actually got out of baseball when I was 19, it led me to divert to the music industry and go to music school and things like that. So I kind of carved that path out shortly after that.
Speaker 2:What music school did you go to, John? I guess I didn't know that about you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I went to Musicians Institute in Hollywood, california, and I studied music production and um, right about that time, um, they kind of instituted a class, uh like a course there for um, like kind of solo production artists who like who wanted to go out and kind of create their own album and do that stuff. So I studied for six months and I got a certificate. Uh, there's like like I think 15 or 20 students in my class to do formal training on music production, how to use recording software, how to mix, how to master and kind of create your own albums and do that. So that's how I recorded my first album that way as an actual school project, and I did that when I was 20. And then when I graduated the program they hired me back to be a teacher's assistant there. So I worked there for a while, kind of helping out with the program and and helping the studio work and getting some of the students through and trying to teach them and stuff like that after that. So that was a quick foray into doing that transition into working at Guitar Center Hollywood for a while. That's an interesting gig.
Speaker 1:If anybody who's listening to this show has ever worked at Guitar Center, you kind of know what it's like. It is cutthroat, I mean, it's straight commission, you know, and it's like what they call a draw versus commission. Basically, they give you minimum wage but you have to earn it back with the commissions that you make commission. Basically, they give you minimum wage but you have to earn it back, uh, with the commissions that you make and uh, and so it was really interesting. Where I was, I I made, I made enough money to work there and then very quickly, they promoted me to assistant manager within three or four months, and then I mean the turnover rate's so high there that they're looking for people to push, push up the chain and everything, and of course I you know, generally speaking, I'm a ladder climber.
Speaker 1:I like to get more responsibility and do more things, and so they offered me the job as assistant manager. I was like that's amazing, that's great, I'll do it. But it was still commission-based and so I'm trying to manage a department there. They put me over to the drone department so I'm trying to manage the drone department and the sales also sell my own. Eventually I just got burned out. I was like I can't make enough money doing this.
Speaker 1:I wound up going to work for a company that I had worked for some years back before I went to music school. I went to a music library company and worked there for a few more years. It was way more stable and got me on the right track. It was an interesting venture into the music industry doing that while also trying to kind of create my own music. But I was terrible at promoting myself. I hated doing it. I hated talking about my music. I hated talking about this gig. Come on, play. I could never do it. So obviously it was a miserable failure at being a solo musician because I just hated going out there and talking about myself. At the time. I would much rather just get a normal job, working from 9 to 5 and making money that I knew was going to come in, instead of trying to make my own.
Speaker 2:So how old were you when you got married? When did you meet your wife and when did you get married, and how does that fall into this timeline?
Speaker 1:So I met my wife when I was 21. I was a worship leader at the church that we were at. It's a large church in Southern California and so I was doing worship for the main church for a lot of years and she was working in the youth ministries as a mentor and I'd seen her a couple times and just kind of chickened out with not being able to kind of spy or anything. And the church every year puts on an event where they take their staff to Disneyland. So this is in December of gosh it was 2005, I think. So I wound up seeing her at Disneyland. I'm like this is it? This is a sign she's here, I'm here. I got to go up and say hi. I wound up introducing myself. I just kind of threw myself out there. We wound up hanging out the whole time with a group of friends and asked her to go to coffee with me. Very quickly after that we were dating.
Speaker 1:I dated for a couple years and wound up being engaged a few years later and and uh, yeah, we got married in 2008. Um and uh, yeah, so it was, uh, it was good. She's from southern california as well, kind of born and raised in the area we grew up around the same friends and same circles, just had never met. I knew a lot of the same people because she went to the school that a lot of my friends went to, but uh, it was, uh, it was just one of those kind of I felt it was kind of like a sign from the universe that I needed to introduce myself at Disneyland, and it actually worked out nicely.
Speaker 2:That's cool, and so she was around then when you started through the law enforcement interview process.
Speaker 1:She was yeah, were, you guys married at that time.
Speaker 1:We were and it was a change for her because generally speaking I would say she's relatively anti-authority.
Speaker 1:And so when I told her that I wanted to get into law enforcement she was just kind of like, okay, and she's a little bit more.
Speaker 1:She's kind of like that obviously over the last 16 years we've been married but at the same time it's also worked out pretty well. But at the time when I told her about my idea to do this, she was supportive, I think, apprehensive, but supportive Especially and she told me this recently too, because obviously she didn't go into detail at the time but LAPD puts on kind of like a family day where they do like a big dog and pony show and bring all the families into the prospect, all the recruits that are wanting to get into class, and they show the families what it's like being the spouse or the loved one of a law enforcement officer and what that's like and what to expect and kind of tear off the veil. And she was terrified at that point but she loved me and she was supportive of my desire to kind of look at this as a career and and also, you know, for me it was a good way for me to make a huge amount more money than I was making before.
Speaker 1:You know like you know there's a massive jump in pay between. At the time I was making000. I'd just gotten a raise I was going to make $40,000 a year when I jumped up to LAPD.
Speaker 1:I was going to start out at $58,000. I was like this is a lot more money than I can make. I can start out doing this and get training and get benefits and all these things that I get right away. I'm not going to say everybody has it like when you think about the idea that it is a calling, and a lot of us feel that draw as a calling to do that job and that almost like a duty, and so when I was feeling that at the time I was like man, this feels right.
Speaker 1:It feels like something I want to do, and there's honoring and there's dignity and there still is, absolutely, but at the time you feel this like major rush of this, this calling to do this thing and um, and so she was really supportive, uh and kind of helped me through it. I got through the academy, uh, and we had our daughter, like we got pregnant with a daughter like right towards the end of the academy and uh, so I was on the fto, uh on probation fto, taking uh fmla when we had our first, our first kid back in 2009 and uh, yeah, so it was kind of an interesting experience. Um, life happened to us pretty quick where we got married, I changed careers, we had children and it was all in a very short amount of time. There was a lot of adjustment going on to our new kind of life at that time.
Speaker 2:You mentioned earlier on that you had interviewed and failed miserably a couple of times. There's going to be somebody listening to this podcast that is starting out in their career. You're now a veteran law enforcement officer. Looking back on those early days you kind of mentioned it you did some self-improvement stuff. You went to the LAPD kind. Of course they offered. But what kind of advice would you give somebody starting out that hits a failure or, frankly, is 23 years into their career and hits a failure point? What are some lessons you've learned? Is 23 years into their career and hits a failure point.
Speaker 1:What are some lessons you've learned? Yeah, so the biggest thing that really hit me when I went to that seminar was just how little confidence I had going into my first interviews and what that really leads the interviewer to believe of that interviewee when they go in and there's a complete lack of confidence, and that was a big deal for me, kind of going in there sitting up straight, uh, looking at your interviewer in the eye, you know, making eye contact, having firm answers. The other biggest thing I thought for me was to predict the questions that were going to be asked, write out my answers and memorize those answers and go in there and do the best you can to formulate your answers based upon what you think they're going to ask. And obviously there's a deviation involved because they might ask something that's pretty close but not exactly the same. So you just kind of deviate based upon your formulated answer that you've come up with before and practiced. But you know, practicing is the biggest thing, to kind of overcoming those obstacles or those failures is what do I think that I'm going to be asked, how do I overcome that and what do I need to come up with when I go in there? So I know going in there, I'm confident that they're going to probably ask some similar questions of these. I'm ready for those things and have them kind of in the chamber ready to go and I'm just going to spit those out when I get there and I'm going to look at them often. When I do that Definitely also have some stories to tell that are relevant to the job.
Speaker 1:Looking back on it, I'm just remembering this now. I think they asked me some stories about have I ever been through incidents at the time that would kind of lead me to this job? I think I came up with some stupid answers that really were not anywhere close to what I should have brought up and that were leadership quality answers or things that they would want to hear talking about how I came through a difficult obstacle and overcame that obstacle and persevered through that. The biggest thing, I think, is just kind of making things relevant to the interviewer, making things relevant to the question. Those are the takeaways that I really brought away from those failures is to prepare myself more on the front end and front road that. So that way I go into it, being more confident and prepared.
Speaker 2:And you can't go anywhere in the United States if you're over the age of about five years old and you haven't heard of the LAPD, whether it's on TV, whether it's a SWAT show, whatever it may be. What was it like working for the LAPD? Both, what was it like on the day-to-day? But then what was it like on the pride ego side?
Speaker 1:Was there an ego trip that came with that, both in you and your immediate peers that you worked with? Yeah, I think there's a certain level of kind of I made it status. When you're on the job there and when you get past, even going to the academy, even going to the allocated academy, it's like. It's like man, I got here and I'm in this, I'm doing this Now. It was not easy. It's very paramotoristic. You get yelled at and smoked, a lot Like they're having you do push-ups all the time for somebody's stupid mistake. And I look back on it fondly, you know. I'm like, yeah, that's fun and that makes sense. Obviously their goal is to be down to the conclusion, back up into what they want you to be, and that makes sense for that. But once you get on the job, there is this air of a little bit of like yeah, I'm good at what I do.
Speaker 2:I'm kind of at the top of my game.
Speaker 1:I'm at the premier agency in the country. When you're on probation you're kind of like nothing. But once you get off probation, you know you become, you know, a police officer too what they call a P2 dog and you're going out there and you know, some of these call you a gunslinger. You get some of these guys would go out and get their drop swivel holsters and they would put that on their belt and now it kind of looks ridiculous and it's like why would you do that? But it was kind of like this rite of passage. You get up there and you're like you know what? I'm in probation, I'm going to get my swivel holster now. And so when they're running after these guys, the gun is like swinging all over the place and looks ridiculous. And some of these guys would go to their decocker school 45 and they wanted to get. You know, they wanted to shoot.
Speaker 1:You know you could shoot, shoot different, uh, sharpshooter medals or shoot different qualification courses so that you can wind up getting a um different kinds of guns that you know like elite status guns.
Speaker 1:These guys wanted to get, uh, these different kinds of 45s and it's like, okay, you know, it's the whole like elite status. Everything about it is kind of reaching the top of your game and I get it. You know, it's kind of law enforcement in general. Right, for the most part we go to, we go into the game and we want to be the best at what we can do and uh, so I think, yeah, I think you're right, I think there is an air of arrogance to it, but not in a, not in a terrible way, I think it's.
Speaker 1:I think it has to be there in a way in order to kind of like, um, keep the well, a is to kind of keep the idea that we are law enforcement officers, we are supposed to be, kind of this very kind of robotic type of thing.
Speaker 1:That's what it was. On patrol we had to kind of have that specific air of confidence and air of arrogance in a way, so we didn't kind of let go and lose our cool, lose ourself. We had to be confident in what we knew we could do. But at the end of the day I think I became super self-righteous. I remember when I got out of the academy my wife wasn't super, my wife was not always a fan of mine. When I would come out and she would want to do something and I was like, oh, we can't do that, I can't do that, I can't be caught up in that, I can't do this. And it wasn't even big of a deal, but I felt like I couldn't touch my toe in anything that would potentially sully my name or whatever it's like.
Speaker 1:I was being way too overly cautious and I got so tight and I think that I got so overly self-righteous about certain things that it almost and I would probably venture to say that I was probably self-righteous to begin with and this just exacerbated it, you know. And so, yeah, there's that element for sure of kind of dealing with that whole self-righteous pride aspect, and not only just on the streets, but with your home life and your marriage too.
Speaker 2:And I think that one of the things that I've mentioned on the show, but totally I think I didn't notice until I left law enforcement. And again, I think I was very good at what I did. I think I was good at solving murders and child abuse and interviews and have television shows about me and all that kind of stuff and child abuse and interviews and, you know, have television shows about me and all that kind of stuff. But, man, looking back, my pride was so big, you know, in that final moments and I'm going to do a show, an episode here, about the Dateline experience and having a Dateline about you and your case is pretty cool. But man, so ego driven and so much pride and I got caught up in that, you know, um, it's like I should have put it on my business card. That's kind of how I felt. But you're right, it's law enforcement in general. We're out there doing God's work, we are doing seeing the evil, we're saving each other's lives and, uh, it's just really easy to fall into that slippery slope, you know. And I don't think it's just isolated to law enforcement. I think that no matter what you do, if you're good at it be a car salesman you can walk around with that big ego and pride, and it's just something that the Bible warns us against, but oftentimes we don't.
Speaker 2:I mentioned on a show a couple weeks ago. It's a slow fade. You start off being one person and by the time you're done with your career, you're done with that incident, you've completely changed it into somebody else and you didn't even see the transformation until you look back. And that's what I think the transparency on the show and the vulnerability on this show. We're going to get some vulnerable stuff here in a second with you, but I think that's what makes it great. That's why that guy can reach out to me this week and be like dude, I'm struggling and here's where I'm at. I've never told anybody this before, which is kind of cool. Let's talk about the move to Oregon. Tell me about the move to Oregon. What started that? And that's where you and I first met, so we'll talk about that too.
Speaker 1:So tell of that, and that's where you and I first met, so we'll talk about that too. So tell me about it. Yeah, so you know I I have the impression that I'm kind of one of these people that likes to get my mind made up on something and finish that out. I like to start something and finish it. So when I started with the LAPD, I was like I'm gonna retire with the LAPD, this is it. Um, I love this job and and don't get me wrong like working in LA as a cop was awesome. On the streets out there working patrol and doing some specialized gigs and stuff. That was awesome. I wanted to work in a compliance unit. We basically tracked parolees and that was a lot of fun, but the command and the bureaucracy in it was really difficult to deal with on a regular basis.
Speaker 1:So it wasn't easy to navigate and micromanaged up to the hilt and it was just really difficult to almost have a personality there. So you know, and my wife had been wanting to move out of California for a while, and just kind of experience. She's a traveler, she likes to change things up, you know, not just our living situation where we live, but you know our house, and she likes to, you know, redecorate a room 18 times. You know those people that just like, okay, I'm good with this, I've lived with this for a month, let's change it. And so for her she's like I am ready to get out of California and I am much more hesitant to do those kinds of things. I'm really resistant to change in general. So it took her a while to convince me to do it.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day we were poor there and I was making a lot of money but I couldn't keep up my bills. We were in debt. I just couldn't figure out how to make ends meet. And so we looked at the possibility of moving and started kind of looking around. We looked at moving across the country, we looked at moving up north and my sister had moved up to Eugene, oregon, and was working up there for a while. So I kind of was able to go up there and visit it, visit Oregon, and Oregon's a beautiful state.
Speaker 1:And for those of you who haven't visited Oregon, you should just at least check it out, and there's a lot who haven't visited Oregon. You should just at least check it out. There's a lot of beautiful things in Oregon. So I visited up there, looked at potentially working in lateral, transferring up to the area. I looked at Vancouver, washington and tried to do that and I wound up interviewing with Vancouver um. I wound up interviewing with vancouver and there was there was like this this video test that they wound up giving you in vancouver to um to kind of test their laterals, and I didn't pass their their video test. And I'm always like dumbfounded because I'm like, okay, here I am working lapd, like you know, four, four years or whatever down here working as a cop, and I go up there and there's this video scenario test that I wound up failing and they told me well, you can't reapply for another six months.
Speaker 1:And I'm like this is crazy to me. And so they wound up basically saying, well, there's these other departments in the area, and one of them I mentioned was Greshresham, and I hadn't heard of Gresham before. So I looked it up and I was like, oh, that's interesting, it's next to Portland. Because my whole goal was to work for a smaller agency near a large city, because I didn't want to work for another large city agency. I wanted to work for a smaller agency, maybe a little bit more freedom, a little bit more ability to work and be a cop.
Speaker 1:And so I wanted to do some research, called the recruiting sergeant and talked to him for a little bit, and the way he framed it up it was like this is the place to be. If you want to be a cop, you come here and you get to crush crime. And I was like, well, that's what I want to do. So I wound up coming on a ride-along one night and it was funny because I came up and I'm still working with lep at the time, um, and I don't think we had moved up yet. But I flew out and did a ride along and, uh, I came out. It was a swing shift, and so the recruiting sergeant comes in. I will leave him nameless and uh, because he still works there.
Speaker 1:But uh, so I uh, he comes over and he kind of looks down at my badge. He's like bring your badge and your gun. I was like, yeah, and he goes all right, let me know if you need anything. All right, you know, go crush from crime. I was like I'm not a cop here, you know, I'm just riding along, and it was just kind of an infatuation.
Speaker 1:The way that place is yes and so it was kind of an interesting story on actual transfer to Gresham. They really did everything they could to bring me on. I did a ride-along that night. I think we had moved up. So here's the way I did this move and this is interesting. Some people will find this interesting A little bit of gaming the system. Okay, I went on FMLA because we just had our second child, our son, and so I went on FMLA. You can take a lot of time on FMLA. I wound up moving during that FMLA time and we moved up to Oregon. We rented a house up there and then I tried to space it out to the point where I would have a job and there wouldn't be any downtime by the time I left.
Speaker 1:LA and then got into the department. But time didn't really work out. I wound up having to commute for a week and so I went down there, worked my last week down there and then came back up and I was done. But while we had moved up, randomly ran into a Gresham guy at a restaurant and he and his wife were there, got to talking. Just a really sweet guy loved the dude and he said hey, I was. I was like hey, I really want to work for gresham, I'm coming over. And he goes you should, you want to ride along with me? So, uh, I want to go on a ride along with him. And uh, and then I wind up, uh, uh, meeting the chief comes out and says, hey, I heard there's an la guy here going on a ride along and I wanted to meet him. So he comes out, introduces himself and, uh, where? He's like where you on the process.
Speaker 1:I was like well, you guys aren't open for a lot of us right now. I tried. And he's like oh, I didn't know we were not open for laterals. And I was like, yeah, and he's like okay, well, uh, we'll, we'll be in touch. So the very next day I get a call, uh, from the recruiting sergeant who I talked to before. He says hey, we're open for laterals, now you should put your application in. And so I was like okay. And then they said also, could you come in for an interview at a certain time? Like give me a time and a date. I was like well, do you want me to put my application in?
Speaker 1:He's like well, yeah you should put your application in, but we also want you for an interview at this this time. So it's like setting two birds with one stone killing two birds with one stone. So I wind up taking the interview going to city hall. The chief meets me at city hall.
Speaker 2:He's like hey, I appreciate you coming in.
Speaker 1:I wanted to see if we can, you know, snag you up before anybody else does. We'll try to make this work.
Speaker 2:And they pushed the whole process through, I wound up getting hired in.
Speaker 1:I think six weeks, which is pretty fast, you know, for an agency to go from start to finish and get the background checks done and all that kind of stuff. And then I wind up coming to work and who is my first FTO on the job but Aaron Turnage? And so that is where you come into play.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I remember I met John. They told me I was going to have a recruit from LAPD and I'm like, great. I remember I met John. They told me I was going to have a recruit from LAPD and I'm like great, I go up and I ran. I was kind of a dick. Like in general as an FTO. It's kind of a dick. I was a micromanager. I induced stress in the car a lot of times and I've got some LAPD guy that's going to be in my car. I meet him and I remember meeting him in the upstairs hallway, outside the training sergeant's office, and there's this tall, you know slender, lapd guy. I'm like, all right, whatever. So then I learn a little bit about him and we start talking music and I'm like, oh, this guy's probably not so bad. So, uh, I'm a drummer, he's a drummer. I'm like, all right, this work. Then we get in the car together and, uh, from, I'm sure I was a dick, but it was more of a partner car.
Speaker 2:After the first, you can tell me about my dickiness here in a second. After the first, you know a little bit. It was really just like running a partner car. The one couple things I remember about John is our city is three different addressing systems and it's all. A couple of them are like a bowl of spaghetti noodles and you might have a northwest on one side of the street and a southeast on that same side of the street and it really takes a lot for people to figure out our city and our mapping. And John knew it by about night three, a call would come up and he would just start heading that direction. I'm like man, that's what I was going to quiz you on. I'm like ding you on at the end of the night, but you got this shit figured out. So, um, he would just go. And I remember, like this guy's brilliant, he knows the city like the back of his hand. He's been here in like a week. Um, it was really really cool to see that.
Speaker 2:And then we stopped a guy, this guy for DUI and I get him out, I give him field sobriety tests and he's okay, but I remember putting him in the back of the car. We were in the parking lot over there off 181 in Gleason or something, and put him in the back of the car and we're like well, do you have any medical conditions? Is there anything that would contribute to your poor driving? And he's like well, I just had a surgery. And he's like, you know, and that could be affecting me with all my eyes. And I'm like all right, well, we've got you stopped. We might as well figure out more about this. I'm like go ahead. You know what do you got going on and he was like well, he said I just got out of surgery. They put some drops in my eyes. He said, but I was born without eyelids, so they just reconstructed eyelids on me. He said and that could be, I'm not used to driving with eyelids and I'm like this guy's full of shit.
Speaker 2:So I look over at john and I'm like john, check him out, does he have like you know? I said but you got a scar or anything. He's like well, yeah, if you look really close. And I'm like john, check him for a scar. So John's like sure enough, aaron, he's got a scar. He said you can barely tell, he just looks a little bit cockeyed. And then there's the joke. So we did tell that story one night to a prisoner and it was a lot of fun. It's a great memory with John. So in your career with Gresham, give me like the high, just the high points of your career.
Speaker 1:And then I want to get on to your family stuff. Yeah, so very quickly. I mean I'm, as a police officer, like I was, not a guy that liked to work the road as much. I like to get off the road and do specialized details. So as quickly as I could, I did my patrol time and then tried to get off the road and do more investigative stuff.
Speaker 1:I was really intrigued by doing investigative work. I wanted to get into narcotics. So I did two years on patrol and then wound up making it onto the Special Enforcement Team as a detective, working narcotics and playing closed gigs. That was, I mean, outside of sergeing, the best gig in the department. It is just an awesome, awesome job. You get to do so much stuff and see so many things that you just don't get to see when you're in uniform. It was just a really neat learning experience and a bonding experience with the team. I did that for three and a half years. I wound up promoting out of that unit to Sargent and then, while I was kind of doing that, it was kind of towards the end of my narcotics days.
Speaker 1:We wound up buying a drone for just trying to figure out if we could use a drone for control buys, because there were some apartment building aggression that were all inward facing square, you know inward facing doors, and then you do a courtyard and you didn't want to send a human being into that structure when we were buying drugs. So we want to see if we can get a drone to do that instead. So we got this drone, spent a lot, of, a lot of drug money on it and I opened up this box and like from then on it was just like my brain exploded with the idea.
Speaker 1:And I hadn't even thought about this before. It was not even in my grid. And once I kind of opened that box and started looking at that possibility, it just kind of opened up a lot of doors for me in my mind. That's when I started kind of exploring that for my agency and so kind of worked on building the aggression program from 2016 on until we finally got a full-fledged approval from our chief to start our drone program in 2019, 2020 and then started training drone pilots and I just really took off from there to kind of where I'm at today and just, uh, you know, I, you I say that all the time I really thought I was going to be like a 30-year career cop, you know, doing this job.
Speaker 1:But then the whole drone game just opened my eyes and now it's kind of encapsulated what I do on a daily basis and kind of turned me into what I am today. I'll talk about that in a minute but it's just more like a complete diversion into the career path I chose in my life, and so sometimes you know, take this broad left turn and that's what you know.
Speaker 1:That that, that left turn kind of captured me and kind of moved me in a different direction. So I got fixated on the drone side of things and worked on that for the last you know five, six years of my career at Gresham.
Speaker 2:Beautiful and so in there you're living in the Portland Oregon area, gresham area, working for Gresham. You've went from patrol to detective On detective. You got some experience to work, some homicides and some major crimes. We got to work together there, then from there promoted to sergeant, then sergeant sampling the drones and then from drones you left law enforcement. When did you leave Gresham? What year?
Speaker 1:2021, December of 2021.
Speaker 2:Okay, during your time at Gresham you experienced some loss in your life. Can you walk me through that from kind of the beginning to the end?
Speaker 1:sure, so uh so like I said, I stated before, like we, my life took a like. Our life took a very quick turn when I got married, um, you know, nine months later, changing careers, we had our daughter isabella when um like right out of the academy, um, and then very quickly kind of had our kind of life set.
Speaker 2:We had a daughter.
Speaker 1:Three years later, we had our son, ethan, and then we were just we're having babies. You know, we're having babies and we wind up moving to Portland in 2013. So Isabella was four and Ethan was about five months. At the time, we were living in Oregon City, which is just south of Clackamas County, just south of Gresham. It's not a city. We had our first home up there. That's where we bought our first home, just very freshly in that neighborhood. We there, that's where we bought our first home and just very freshly in that neighborhood.
Speaker 1:We uh kind of getting our lives at that time and just kind of focusing on that. I was working um, I think I was just off probation aggression, so it was probably 14 months or so into it I was just over a year, um, yeah, just over a year.
Speaker 1:So, um, my daughter, she just wasn't feeling well and um for the last couple of days and it was just random, she. She wound up kind of going through just not um, just not being herself and then being fine. And then we're like, okay, everything's fine, and she's playing outside um one night and then being fine. And then we're like, okay, everything's fine, and she's flying outside one night, and then the next morning she's vomiting and just not feeling very good. And then she, well, I will take her to the hospital, and she's four and a half at this time and we're just going to take her to the hospital and get her checked out. Didn't think much more of it and right as I put her in her car seat to put her to take her to the hospital, her eyes roll back and she loses consciousness and so I pull her out of the car seat and I run her out to the porch on a flat surface and I start doing CPR and she's not responding to anything.
Speaker 1:My wife has run up the driveway's pregnant with our third, our second son.
Speaker 2:I told her to call 911.
Speaker 1:The ambulance arrives.
Speaker 2:She's still not responsive Still doing CPR.
Speaker 1:The ambulance gets there, take her to a hospital still doing CPR. She never comes out of it, never recovers, and we had no idea what happened. We were just completely, completely floored. I mean, lois, you can imagine just not having any answers and understanding what just happened and then realizing your daughter's gone and it was just a. I mean I couldn't really even tell you like.
Speaker 2:I was.
Speaker 1:It was surreal. We had the department came and showed up in force for us and we had folks basically on standby just sitting with us through it, but we were just non-functional for weeks, um, and so just kind of processing that, you know, my, my son, who at the time now was a year and a half, was calling for his sister, um, wanting like. He was like up in the morning. He called for his sister and wouldn't get a response, and you know how do you explain that to your son. Uh and uh, we just didn't know.
Speaker 1:And a few weeks later, uh, we got a report from the medical examiner with no information as well. They thought she had what's called her base strep in her bloodstream, but other than that there's nothing outstanding on why this would have happened, and so we thought that she just got sick or sepsis somehow, and so we were left to process that for a long time. And our you know, my wife was pregnant at the time. She also fell when she was running up the driveway during that time, so she had to get checked out of the hospital and all this stuff was going on.
Speaker 2:And while we were processing all this information, um, and I think she was five months six months pregnant at the time and so we're just kind of processing how all this is going to to go through and happen and what we're going to do about it.
Speaker 1:and you know you have no idea what to do and and thankfully you know gpd comes in and really takes the reins and helps out with dealing with a lot of the things that we just had no idea what to deal with, and so we had friends that were actually you know, posted put on special duty at our house for probably about three weeks and they were given actual time, you know, straight time, to work with us and help us out during that time.
Speaker 1:And so GPD really came to that for us and became a really close family for us when we needed it, because we had no idea what to do. I was separated from my family. My parents were down in LA. They wound up flying up and helping us out and staying, you know, nearby, but it was just a I don't know. I I can't really describe it other than just a miserable mess. Um, you know, so it was a lot of years no, sorry, was there some?
Speaker 2:did your daughter make some comments the day before night before, something like that yeah, yeah, and I appreciate your reminder of that. You never think about it until something like this happens.
Speaker 1:But she made a comment the day before. She looked up at the sky and she said I see Jesus' castle up there. I can see Jesus' castle and it's like, oh that's neat.
Speaker 1:That's an awesome observation you're making. She had a really close relationship with the Lord, you know, growing up, and loved Jesus and it was evident and sings songs about him all the time. And so the day before, she literally says, like I see Jesus' castle and it's like, oh, that's neat, no-transcript have of her the day before. So what happened next? So we spent um five years just in a a really difficult emotional place. Uh, it was about, yeah, five.
Speaker 1:We didn't really get out of our shell. We stayed hunkered down. We had a really close-knit neighborhood who really took care of us very well. We would get together with them on a regular basis. We would go have dinner at their house or sit on the deck and take care of our little ones. My son Saxon was born at that time, and then we would have our son Jasher shortly after that, in 2017, 2016, sorry, and so we just really went through a difficult time emotionally and spiritually, just trying to figure out what to do about our life, because when you lose your child, your life is ruined and you don't know how to overcome that and fix that. It's like there's no way to make it better, no way to actually come out of it and be like, okay, everything's fine now, or everything is as it was before. It's like your life is never the same and so you know, dealing with that kind of mentality, especially as kind of pseudo-young parents, you know I was 29.
Speaker 2:No, I was 30. I just turned 30.
Speaker 1:And so, 30 years old, you know, just dealing with these crazy, like, like life, traumatic happenings that you should, that no parents should ever deal with, I stayed off work for about five weeks and I felt like I needed something to kind of take me out of my funk, right back to work, um and uh, and that that was a bad choice. I shouldn't have done that so soon. Uh, and you know, especially talking with my wife, she just was not ready for me to go back, but I felt like I needed to do it and and then I also had some external pressures. I felt like, you know, I wanted to please the department because they were taking care of us and so I wanted to kind of get back to them too and I wanted to make them, you know, feel like I was going to be okay and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:But I wasn't ready to go back Because a lot of the things that I wound up dealing with on the road were just so traumatic coming back to work especially anything kid related, and I wound up having to deal with a lot of child abuse issues and this is a patrol cop, you know, going out there to these calls where these kids are, just you know, malnourished or not taken care of or neglected and it made me angry and upset.
Speaker 1:And I remember one specific incident where we went to a call and I'm going to call because DHS is calling us out there and they were working on getting rid of assistance. And for those of you who don't know what a rid of assistance is, it's basically like a warrant for the Department of Human Services to go and take custody of a child without the parent's consent, and so it gives them the authority to go into a structure and take the kid out.
Speaker 1:So they were working on this thing. They said, hey, we're going to come back with a SWAT team the next day, but we're going to do this warrant. We're going to do this warrant the next day, but we need to go and try to knock on this door and try to get this guy to turn over his kid, because he's being a dick, he's not giving him his kid and he's being abusive and all that stuff. So we go to knock on this guy's door and I know he was a turd and he had a long record, he actually had warrants at the time and so we knock on the door. I was like, if he comes out, I'm going to arrest him. And of course he doesn't come out, he just plays games with us and I was really upset. I feel like he's getting away with it, you know, and I didn't, you know like how could this guy get away with it and have his kid alive right now and my kid's not, you know?
Speaker 1:And so I knew we were going to come back and so at the time, like, and he had some surveillance cameras up on his door just to kind of keep an eye out, because obviously a lot of the crooks have their surveillance cameras up so they know when the cops are coming.
Speaker 1:And I tore one of the surveillance cameras down and so it became a deal, because he wound up calling to complain that I tore his surveillance camera down to sergeants and one of the sergeants at the time, who's now retired, wanted to burn me for it and charge me with criminal mischief and everything. And my justification was well, I knew that SWAT guys were coming back the next day. They were going to serve a warrant there, so I'm disposing of a camera that could potentially give away their position or cause them to have problems going there. And the other sergeant, who was kind of a newer sergeant at the time, wanda, being pretty lenient on me, just kind of writing me up for it and giving me a good talking to and basically saying hey, listen, I know what you're he's like.
Speaker 1:I can't understand what you're going through. I don't know what you're going through because I've never been through it myself, but I can understand that obviously you going through things like this is not helping you on the road, and so you might want to rethink, like how you're doing this or what you're doing out here, because it could get you into some trouble. And um, so it did. I had to kind of take a look, you know, take a step back and be like, okay, uh, I need to be better. You know, on the road, if I'm going to do this job, I can't let my emotions get the better of me, because then it's going to cost me my job and potentially cost me my livelihood, and I can't do that to my family, especially, you know, when we're going through this crap storm that we're dealing with at that time. So I just kind of bucked up and compartmentalized and just kept moving forward.
Speaker 2:Do you have any more children during this time? How many kids?
Speaker 1:do you have at this?
Speaker 1:point so we had Ethan, who is my oldest son, and then we had Saxon, who's my middle son, and then we had Jasher. So Saxon was born in 2014. Jasher was born in 2016. And then at this time, I had gotten into the special enforcement team, so I was working narcotics and so it was a little bit more laid back than normal patrol work. I had a take home car. You know we were on call all the time, but at the same time it wasn't like but the same like, you know, you know, chasing the radio all the time, never know what you're getting into, kind of stuff. It was for me it was like we're working investigations and I felt like it was a little bit more um, stable. So 2019, we had Sutton, who is our fourth boy. Yeah, we have a lot of boys.
Speaker 1:And at this time too as a couple, we're dealing with the fact that we've lost our daughter and there's this hole in our life that we're trying to fill and trying to have another girl, you know, and we keep having boys, you know, and so, um, we uh wind up having all these boys in the meantime who are all fantastic boys, but uh, we have uh Sutton in 2019 and then Wright after I promoted, I promoted in 2018 to sergeant and then was working just off probation in 2019 and working patrol.
Speaker 1:I think I was working nights at the time and wound up. You know, I think this is, yeah, I guess it was May or March of 2019. Jasher, who was three at the time, had a real weird episode where he just didn't feel very good. I took him to the doctor. He was lethargic, his urine was brown and he just didn't want to get up and it was really strange and we'd never seen anything like it before. He was complaining his legs were hurting. He didn't want to get up and it was really strange and we'd never seen anything like it before. He was complaining his legs were hurting. He didn't want to stand. So I took him to the doctor. The doctor kind of looked at him. She said like I don't really know what's going on. I said, hey, well, he went to the bathroom. The doctor's office, you know kind of coffee color she's like that's really weird.
Speaker 1:She wound up testing him she calls us later says hey, he's got these weird levels that are really high. We want you to take him in and have him looked at right now. So I wound up taking him to Randall Children's Hospital in Portland and he's getting there what they call his creatinine kinase levels. His CK levels were astronomical. The normal range is between 75 to 200 in a normal human. He was at 13,000 at the time so it was really really high and it was going up. So they were putting him on real high maintenance levels and trying to get his levels back down.
Speaker 1:We wound up being in the hospital for six days. He was in ICU for three of those days and then he went to the regular floor for another three until he could walk again. On day four or five is when he finally started walking again and his CK levels at the time went up to 460,000. It was the highest they'd ever seen there at the hospital. They'd never seen anything like it. They didn't know what it was and genetics didn't really understand it. They were like we don't really know what it is. We looked at getting genetic testing but our insurance wound up denying it. They said it wasn't medically necessary.
Speaker 2:Our geneticist thought it was a fluke and thought it wasn't going to happen again.
Speaker 1:So we're like, okay, well, all right. And then six months later in November, he winds up, kind of waking up early in the morning complaining of his legs hurting again. And we're like, all right, well, he has another episode, we're going to go back to the hospital and probably be up for a few days and deal with this again. And he goes to the hospital and they hook him up to a line and start giving him fluids, give him some Tylenol, and we were in the hospital for 45 minutes and he starts coding and at that point, like all of the trauma of watching my daughter do, the same thing is happening again in me right now, and on a spiritual level.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to attack this on a spiritual level because I felt like I failed the first time around and just trying to pray over him and trying to do all these things and try to see what's happening. And they wound up getting his heartbeat back a couple of times and I called my wife and said you need to come down here right now. And by the time she gets there, she winds up passing out and they put her on a bed in the hallway and they're still working on him for an hour plus. They're doing all the pulling out of the stops trying to get him back and going again, but they couldn't get his heartbeat back and he passed away in the hospital and it was just crushing at the time and couldn't imagine. You know this happened once before and now it happened again. And what's going on in our family?
Speaker 1:And having to make that phone call again like hey, I call you, know my lieutenant saying hey like josh died I'm not and he was dumbfounded and prayed for me on the phone and I was like I don't know what to do. He's like who do you need? And I started. I just said I need these people to get here now and I don't know what else to do, and so at that point, um, you know, like I you know whenever these? Things I say whenever, but unfortunately it's happened to us twice.
Speaker 1:You know like I can't get myself off the floor um to do these things, and you know you have these moments where like you, you can't function and you're, you're wailing, and that's what it was. As a parent, you lose your child, you're wailing, and that's what it was. And as a parent, you lose your child, you're wailing on the floor. There's nothing else that you can do in life, but just let everything out and I can't imagine, you know, being on staff or being the doctor and those scenes when you're dealing with that. But that's what it was for us.
Speaker 1:We were just flat out, just wailing on the floor, you know, wanting our son back and wanting a miracle to happen and praying for a miracle to happen. That wasn't happening and the geneticist came down and I'm still holding son, who's not alive anymore. We held him for a couple of hours after that, um, just holding him, you know, saying goodbye, and he said I don't know what's going on, but we're going to, I don't care what the insurance company says, we're going to genetically test you guys. And so we got genetically tested that day and came back with a very rare a week
Speaker 1:later, it took a week, but came back with a very rare genetic disorder called LPIN1.
Speaker 1:And it's basically what they call a homozygous double gene deletion of the LPIN1 gene, and basically meaning my wife and I are each carriers and we each contributed to Bella and Jasher.
Speaker 1:Obviously, we contributed the same thing to Bella because the symptoms were exactly the same for her, even though it was five years before, but the whole sequence of events was exactly the same, and so this genetic mutation that we've come to find out can't deal with viral loads first of all, and so when they get sick, they start going into what's called grab-down-my-lysis, meaning the protein in their muscles start breaking down and their muscles start becoming sore and they don't want to walk or stand.
Speaker 1:It's like what high-performance athletes go through when they work out really, really hard is they go through grab-down-my-lysis. But when you're a child, from the age of about two to six, your body can't handle that kind of muscle breakdown. To exacerbate the problem us not knowing that he had this issue and the doctors not knowing that they had this issue the doctors put him on the line with potassium, and the problem was his body was dumping potassium at the time on its own, so his body dumping potassium into its own bloodstream, the doctors introducing potassium into his bloodstream at the same time caused that heart attack.
Speaker 1:And that's what it's called hyperkalemia, and his body shuts down at that point and they can't get him back. So it was just a, you know, a catastrophe at that time. And you know we talked, you know the aviation side. We talked about the Swiss cheese theory. When all the holes in specific slices of Swiss cheese line up and it causes this problem to happen and occur. And that's what happened at that time. You know we had a denial for our ability to get genetic testing, which we couldn't find out, that he had the problem and even then it might have been difficult for us to find out, but we probably would have found out that he had that and it's probably possible we could have done some research to figure out. We shouldn't be given a potassium in the line. But now that we know, you know obviously that was what the problem was.
Speaker 2:And so we went through a whole long process.
Speaker 1:Obviously. You know, we were just coming out of our shop for about five years and then we lose joshua and then we're just at the bottom floor again, couldn't really function. I took, I think I took five months off of work at that point and, um, couldn't, I couldn't think about coming to work. Um, and uh, we had a new baby. You know, sutton was uh, he was eight months old at the time, and so we just had our hands full and didn't really know how to deal with all this stuff. And at the time I had a family drama that was going on too and I had to let go of my parents, brother and sister because a really, really difficult thing that happened between them reporting us to the state for potential child abuse at that point, and that was another thing. Over the loss of your kids, yeah, they thought we were basically neglecting our children. So it turned into a big deal, obviously.
Speaker 1:And I couldn't trust folks in my family because they had basically thought that we were not fit to be parents and I had to deal with DHS.
Speaker 1:on top of all that. I was living in Tigard at the time, which is near, it's kind of just south, of Portland. Tigard police was good to us. You know they took care of us too, and so you know I had a good relationship with them as well. So kind of understanding that this was just it was a quote, unquote, anonymous tip, but I was able to kind of do some research and figure out that it was somebody in my family that did it. It was just kind of a really difficult thing to deal with. As a son who has family who's going through this hurt and this hardship and trying to deal with, how do I deal with this kind of loss? But also how do I deal with the loss of support from your family who doesn't trust you with your own children anymore? You've lost support from your family.
Speaker 2:who doesn't trust you with your own children anymore. You would think that that is the time that your family should come around you and love you and hold you and figure things out together. It is absolutely amazing I didn't know this, obviously, until just now and I am absolutely floored, john, that your family turned on you like that. I honestly don't even know what to say. I don't know what to think. It's super frustrating. I was, yeah, it's super frustrating, buddy, and I'm very sorry you had to deal with that. You mentioned earlier about PTSD and you know seeing you didn't use those words. Those are my words, not yours, but you know going on these calls and seeing the kids that are still alive in these crappy environments in, you know wondering why your child is not there and theirs get to be, um, let's. First of all, can this happen to your remaining children, your surviving children? Is this still an issue that you guys face?
Speaker 1:yeah. So first of all, like we have, we went through a long process with some of the medical facilities in Oregon trying to figure out what this problem really was, because we, you know, we wound up pregnant again later on, and getting you know that child tested in utero through M, you know, and finding out that he also was gonna have like my one and so, at the time, the geneticist that we were dealing with, morgan, was like well, we just don't know enough about this and kind of advise me to terminate pregnancy.
Speaker 1:And that was really difficult for us to deal with because on one level you're like I really really strongly do not believe in abortion and terminating pregnancies because of my upbringing, my background and my faith in the Lord and even though we're still going through this pit of despair. So it's a whole other story talking about kind of you know the journey, spiritual journey, through this whole thing.
Speaker 1:But but at the same time we we also, just we didn't want to bring a child in with a death sentence either, because we didn't know enough about it either. So it's a really difficult decision to make, and so we we struggled with it for a while and wound up doing our own research, finding out that there was a doctor doctor in Paris who had done a study on kids with Lipin-1, had a small study group a focus group of, I think there were four or five kids in this and wound up using hydroxychloroquine as an anti-inflammatory, because Lipin-1 is an inflammatory disease, and wound up having success, getting these kids to an age where their body can handle the stress that life.
Speaker 1:One produces a body. So they survived the study. And so we talked to this doctor on the phone and it was like four o'clock in the morning because it's later in the day in Paris and so we're talking to her and she's like listen, you don't have to turn in your pregnancy, there is hope. And she's like, listen, you don't have to terminate your pregnancy, there is hope. And that was a huge game changer for us when we said, okay, well, thank God, because abortion was on the table now for us, we don't want to terminate this pregnancy. And so we said, okay, well, we're going to go through the pregnancy. And the organ doctors were like, okay, and the doctor in Paris said she's coming out with a study and the paperwork and the report on the study is soon. And so we were waiting for that report and her son was born at that time and waiting for this report to come out. And finally this report comes out and the doctor that we were dealing with we get on a call with her.
Speaker 2:And she says, okay, well, good news is the report's out.
Speaker 1:And we're like okay, great, and she's like. I got to be honest, I haven't read it. And we're like okay, and she's like, but from what I did read, a lot of it was over my head. And we're like we got to go, we got to get out of here, this team of doctors is not doing us any sort of justice or favors with our medical care for our children. So that's when we really started looking outside of Oregon for medical care and started studying on other hospitals that would be good and looked at.
Speaker 1:Houston for Texas Children's looked at Austin and we looked at Vanderbilt in Nashville, tennessee, and we landed on Nashville, came out and visited and obviously this is also during, like all the George Floyd riots, this is during the COVID shutdown and lockdowns and you know the craziness that was going on in Oregon, washington, california at the time. And so it was kind of a no brainer that we needed to escape the West coast and go somewhere where we felt a little bit more safe and because, outside of all of the trauma that we're going through with having this stuff, you know you're getting into fights with people over masking in stores. You know, in oregon people are confronting because you're not wearing your mask over your nose. And it was just ridiculous. At the time I was like, okay, we gotta go.
Speaker 1:So, settled on nashville, we traveled out to franklin, um and and just kind of took a trip to see what it would look like and it was like incredible, it was like pre-COVID Americana and we're like this is where we need to be at. And we made the move and just kind of left in faith that we're going to come out here and the team's going to be good at Vanderbilt because we can't visit the doctors. We have to visit the doctors in-state for them to actually see us. So we had to just make that move and and be in state for them to actually see us. So we had to just make that move and so we made the move and Vandy has been fantastic for us.
Speaker 1:The geneticist team that are here understand the actual disease because our actual primary genetic pediatric geneticist has worked under a doctor who works in DC who has six of those patients in her cohort.
Speaker 2:So she's actually treated patients with us and we've had great success.
Speaker 1:Even though we've had a lot of hospital visits since moving out here, we've had great success with mitigating this disaster for our son, and then we had our youngest, and so our second youngest is Highland he's three and a half now, and Marjan, my one-year-old, also has it. So we have two young boys now that we have to mitigate until they're about seven years old, and then, once they're about seven years old, their body can generally take that viral load and deal with it. On a, I guess on an easier level.
Speaker 1:They could still be hospitalized and still go through that, but it's not going to be as deadly. And that's what we're looking forward to is them getting through that window and so yeah so to answer your question, yes, we do have two boys that we have to mitigate, still with that Lycan1 disease. And you asked me another question. It was another secondary question and I don't remember what it was. It's okay, buddy, you covered it.
Speaker 2:You touched on something a second ago that I want to. You touched on something a second ago that I want to. I want to talk about it. It's going to be another show and I actually have a whole show for this and that's cops in Christianity, but in this case, um, how was your faith journey and how was it challenged as a result of what you've went through?
Speaker 1:I mean it's a mess, it's still, it's still a journey for me. It's something that I still struggle with on a regular basis because I still always ask those.
Speaker 2:why questions?
Speaker 1:And I don't want to feel like I'm a Job here because I get the worst things thrown at me, and in Job's case, his life was restored back to him A lot of fold, and mine wasn't necessarily like that. So you know, there's always these questions that happen where you want to know answers to your questions, and I think I've come to the realization that I don't really feel like the Lord answers why questions? But he answers like what questions, and so he's more like a doer. And so when you ask him, lord, what do you want me to do about this, and what do you want me to do about this and what do you want me to know about it, and then he answers questions like that. You know, and those are some of the epiphanies that I've had over the years, because we really went through the depth of like I mean we dug a hole like deeper than I could ever understand.
Speaker 1:At that time I wanted to drive my car to the river. Than I could ever understand. At that time, I wanted to drive my car to the river I every day. I would drive to work along one o'clock on this river. It's a beautiful drive, coming up from morgan city and almost every day on a regular basis. I just imagined myself just driving my car in the river and just like ending it and then being done.
Speaker 2:Um, because it just would have been easier, you know would have been easier, you know um, but, and then I could be with my kids.
Speaker 1:Um, but I, I just, you know, I have a very strong sense of duty, first of all, um, as a father and as a husband and um, and I knew that obviously that's not the right choice to do. And so you, you work from that saying, okay, I'm honestly not going to do that, I know better. Um, I wasn't, I didn't want my kids to deal with that either. But but at the same time, like it's still, you, just I, I would go out on calls and I wish that somebody would shoot me and I would die on duty. You know, those those kinds of things were like oh listen, if I could go out, I'll go out of blaze of glory and die a hero. Um, then everything will be taken care of and it won't be like me towering and committing suicide and those kinds of things like that. And you have those thoughts, you go through those things where you're, like man, I wish that it should be all taken care of for me and my life is unfortunately not that easy.
Speaker 1:I don't think any of ours really is. We can't, you know, we have to work through these obstacles and these issues.
Speaker 1:So I came to a place um and my wife really drove this, because my wife is much more spiritual than I am and, to her credit, she really pulls me into the spirit realm on a far more regular basis than I do, and I so appreciate that because, um, I need that in my life because I I'm practical and I'm so like just a doer and a fixer and all these things and I get tied up on projects and doing things, these things, that it really distracts me from sometimes just knowing the Lord, and so for a lot of years she just worked on me and she just you know she tried to draw me in and listen to me and spend some time with the lord and you know kind of figure this out, so we would just meditate and we
Speaker 1:would just sit there and, you know, just go in spirit, you know, you lay down, close your eyes and just kind of let your thoughts drift and um, and then just kind of see where you go and kind of, we would, you know, obviously we would always use jesus as our gate and just be like listen, like we want to want to understand you, want to know you, and so we would just kind of like envision ourselves taking jesus's hand right there and just kind of walking with him wherever he'd take us.
Speaker 1:You know, and you know there were times when we would see some really interesting things and there were other times where we're just kind of like us just trying to make something happen. It just felt like I don't know, and so we would walk. We walk through that whole process of just trying to understand what the Lord wanted us to do and we really felt like the Lord was promising us, like he was saying hey, like you know, your life is going to be restored in some way. You're going to have. You know, you are going to have a girl, and we had lots of dreams about that too. And you know, we have, we have five boys right now um, but uh, and so we're still.
Speaker 1:You know, a lot of years we've processed this, like why things work out the way we do, and, um, I think for us we, we it's just for we kind of realize we just want to understand the lord better in this relationship with him and just sit in it. You know, just kind of rest in him, and that's kind of been the hardest journey is because your mind races and you sit there trying to figure out all the problems and trying to wonder why and stuff, when he's just saying just come and wrestle with me, just sit with me, let's just, let's just just rest, let's not wear stuff, give it to me, I'll take care of it. And that's sometimes the hardest part, because you want to be in control, you don't want to let go of control and all that stuff. You want to fix things. I want to fix things.
Speaker 1:I'm a fixer. I could not fix my life, so I'm trying to figure out how to do that. I still struggle with this. I still struggle with it on a regular basis. It's not old for me by any means. One of the things that did help me, though, was just kind of allowing on my rides to and from work.
Speaker 1:I would just in my passenger seat. I would just invite Jesus to come sit with me, like Lord, my seat's open right here and I would just envision Him sitting with me and ask Him what do you want me to do that day? And sometimes I would be bawling on the way to work. I would drive to work and I'd be listening to worship music and I would just completely let it go. And I'd be listening to worship music and I would, you know, I just completely let it go and I'd be sitting there outside the PD like trying to pull myself together, knowing that I have to come into work and be a normal human being and not somebody who looks like a complete wreck coming to work. And so I'd take a few extra minutes and pull myself together.
Speaker 2:There were those drives where I feel like and that was healing.
Speaker 1:I feel like you know, I feel like he was healing in that way, but just drives where I feel like and that was healing, I feel like you know, I feel like he was healing in that way, but just kind of letting my, letting my giving my seat up and saying, hey, I want you to come sit with me as I drive to work and just kind of be with me. And that was a huge change, just kind of letting him into my life. There's a lot, of, a lot of us as cops we do so much compartmentalization right and we shut so many things out. I think he wants us to open up instead of shutting us out, and we do all the work of shutting Him out and create all those problems and shutting Him out. I think he just wants in, and so that was one of the bigger things that helped me kind of work through all these problems, just letting Him into them and just letting Him be a part of it.
Speaker 2:Did you ever find yourself being angry with God? Oh yeah, years, years of being angry with God.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, years, years of being angry at God, years of not wanting to do anything to do with Him, although I still felt like I had to do the right thing.
Speaker 2:You have this dichotomy of like.
Speaker 1:I am a good person. I generally make good choices. I'm not perfect. Obviously I'm angry at God. I don't want anything to do with Him right now. I don't. I'm angry at God. I don't want anything to do with him right now. I don't want to deal with him.
Speaker 2:But I also felt guilty and always needing to be doing the right thing and making the right choices, and doing all these things because it's the right thing to do, you know.
Speaker 1:And so there was this weird, like years of this, of dealing with that kind of difficulty, this of dealing with that kind of difficulty and like how do I, how do I not be angry at God, or how, how do I love God?
Speaker 2:You know, how do I understand?
Speaker 1:that God loves me.
Speaker 2:You know I do Um, so I feel like my mic sounds weird, Um, like I'm in another room. Does it sound okay on your?
Speaker 1:end.
Speaker 2:That sounds good, all right. So it's not comparison. It's not a comparison your story to my story, but something I've been struggling with over the past I don't know year is Christianity, you know, and it's really easy to blame other people and not to divert from you. But you've helped me in the last five minutes and I want to touch on it. It's easy to blame other people for where you are in your world and it's easy to shift the blame and maybe not look inwardly, you just look outwardly.
Speaker 2:And in the last five minutes you spoke about, you know, inviting Jesus into your passenger seat and finding time with God and walking with God. And I've been struggling a lot over the last year with my church and I'm angry with a few folks there. But I also know that is a part of PTSD and the healing process To pull away from faith and Christianity because you don't understand things. And just hearing you in the last five minutes has been super therapeutic for me, because our piles of shit are different and they smell differently, but they're just me, because our piles of shit are different and they smell differently, but they're just still same piles of shit. Um, and knowing that, having been alongside you for part of this journey and seeing you come out and still have your relationship with God. You've reinstored faith in me because I've been blaming others for so long about what I'm currently going through, and thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely it's just nice to self-reflect a little bit, and I don't know that anybody else my wife has been trying. I don't know that anybody else or another conversation would have got me to where I am mentally right now. So thank you, yeah, so one of the things that I mentioned is and we're going to wrap it up with this but one of the things that I mentioned is you know, I don't believe my pain is without purpose. I believe God has a purpose for me in my pain. Do you have any idea what that looks like in your world? Do you believe that your pain isn't without purpose? And if you do believe there's a purpose there, have you given any?
Speaker 1:thought to what that might be. To a certain extent, I agree.
Speaker 1:I think that the trauma that we've dealt with in our life has propelled us to a greater spiritual depth than we had anticipated, because I think that I really do believe that relationship with God sometimes is birthed out of trauma, and I think deeper relationship with Him is also born out of trauma as well, is also born out of trauma as well, and so a lot of the hurt and the pain that we've dealt with has opened us up spiritually to understand a lot more and to kind of mature a lot faster than we would have had we not gone through what we've been through. Not to say that like I mean I wish it didn't happen, I feel like I would still trade it. I would still trade it back because I want my kids back.
Speaker 1:But I do believe that having the pain and the trauma that we've dealt with, has propelled us to heights spiritually that we hadn't us to heights spiritually that we hadn't but we wouldn't have been able to reach on just a kind of a surface level and just kind of dealing with life at a surface level and not having that stuff. Even I know as cops we have a lot of trauma that we deal with on a regular basis, but when it happens close to home, when it happens to your family, when it happens to your kids, it's just a different level that kind of propels you to almost a a different desperation for that and because you need it. You can't, you can't continue to live without an understanding or, uh, some knowledge or some, uh, some deeper depth spiritually, because nothing else will suffice and nothing else will help. So yes, I do believe that there is a purpose to the pain. I do believe that out of that pain is born a deep spiritual maturity.
Speaker 1:And I'm not saying I'm like a sage, but I just feel things differently than I used to before all this stuff happened.
Speaker 1:And even after losing one, after losing a second, it just propels you and you feel things differently. And then, leaving law enforcement, you decompress and you wind up working through a lot of the trauma and emotions and stuff of your career and and still, and then you wind up feeling things differently Again. You know, you wind up kind of opening up to feeling new things and new thoughts and new emotions that you hadn't felt so long before. But you've been compartmentalizing things for so long and that's what's happened in the last two and a half, three years now, of being kind of outside the game is just kind of feeling, I guess, more freedom to feel spiritual, whereas when I was a cop, like you talked about Christianity and police work it's hard to describe it A lot of it's not there. I think there's a lot of duty and there's a lot of honor and they do honor that and there's, you know, verses that they, you know, they do tout and bless the peacekeepers, you know, and which is good. I think they should do that.
Speaker 1:it's important, um, I you know but there's, there is an element of being, you know, that warrior out there and having to kind of gird yourself up and protect yourself on a spiritual level. I remember after I felt like I saw things in the spiritual realm after losing my daughter, when I was caught, I would see things that I had been open to seeing before. Um, like in the physical, like you know, I got there and like I can see something different about this. Or I feel something different about this, um, but would have felt before. It opens up your mind and your heart to new ways of looking at a problem and solving things, almost spiritually sometimes, than it was before. I just wish that we could translate that into a language. I know there's a language for it, but I wish I was better at doing that.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, john, john, thank you so much for coming on tonight and, um, sharing your story with me and the guests and the followers and whoever else is listening to this. Uh, literally in the last 10 minutes you've changed a battle that I've been fighting for a year, so hopefully somebody else gets something out of this as well. Um, I really appreciate you sharing the intimate details of your life and your story and everything from where you were born to you know, current day stuff. It's really awesome. I'm going to do a Cops and Christianity episode with another one of our coworkers who you know is going to be a few weeks out before I can get some scheduling, but maybe I'll talk to you about that and I think it'd be good to maybe have a three-way conversation, because you said something a second ago.
Speaker 2:I mean, christianity is definitely in law enforcement, but it's really really tough when you see the worst every day, when things happen to you in your personal life and you're challenged in your beliefs, and then you go to a small group or a church, you know, and you try to explain or you try to share where you're at and they're like oh, please don't tell too many details because I don't want to be traumatized.
Speaker 2:You're like go screw yourself, you know, and then all of a sudden you can't relate to anybody in that group and you have to leave, and then it drives a wedge between you and faith and you start questioning God and where he's got you. And man, this is a whole nother conversation for another day, but I'll touch base with you and maybe we can have a three-way conversation there and just share kind of our views and our struggles. And you know that's one of the things that this gentleman spoke to me about this last week was, you know, christianity and law enforcement and how you handle that, and I think you've really been a great resource tonight and how you fell back on faith and Christianity through this and while it was a struggle, it also found kind of your peace and it was really cool. So thank you so much for sharing. Man, I love you so much and I just really appreciate you being here with me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thanks, it's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate you asking me to be here, yeah it's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 2:I appreciate you asking me to be here. Yeah, it's really cool. Well, thank you guys. So much for listening to another episode of the murderous music podcast. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it and, uh, we'll catch you on the next one.
