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Broken Yet Chosen: Divine Timing, The Sphere, Sitka Alaska and Realigning Our Country · Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)

• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Murders to Music podcast.
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: My name is Aaron, I'm your host and thank you guys so much for coming back for another week.
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: So a couple things I want to throw out there real quick.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: If you guys hear some background noise, it's because I'm not in my normal recording studio tonight.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: I'm actually in Sitka, alaska, and I'm in a house thing with lots of other guys and some ladies and I'm on a fishing trip and I'll talk about all that here in a second.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: But if you hear some background noise, my apologies, go with me, but hopefully this still sounds good and it's not too distracting.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: So I want to talk about a couple of things tonight.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: I want to recap me and where I am and kind of my journey over the last few weeks, because I think that well one I think that some people care, um, and that sounds a little conceited, I know, but really there's a lot of conversation that happens in this podcast that is centered around my journey or my experiences or the things that I've learned through my experiences or through trauma or tragedy or love or loss, and that's why people keep coming back.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: So I just want to share one of those moments.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Right, I think it's so easy to get caught up into the minutia of the negative and really when it's positive we forget to sing its praises.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: So I want to talk a little bit about that tonight.
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: I want to talk about some of the things that has been put in front of me and in my life over the last few weeks and over the next month or so that I think are really going to help me kind of grow in this, going to help the podcast, going to help just the overall message.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: But before we get to that, I want to talk about something that happened today and I just want to hit it straight and head on.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Okay, I don't care if you are left, if you are right or if you are center.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: Politically it doesn't matter, and I try not to talk about politics on this show.
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: You know, I think anybody listening can probably guess which side of the line that I am on if you've listened for more than one minute or two episodes.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: But it doesn't matter.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: I have friends on both sides of this line.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: I have love and respect for both sides and I don't think everything on one side is right and everything on the other side is wrong.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: I think there needs to be a happy medium right, a happy middle ground.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: If we could just find somebody to run this country that would make good common sense decisions based on the totality of the circumstances, that is what we would thrive.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: You don't have to be Republican or liberal or independent or down the middle or whatever.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: We just need to find somebody that can run the country with good common sense decisions.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: And I think that over the last 15 years there's been swings on both sides of that fence.
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: Whether you are left, there has been swings far left.
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: Whether you're right, there has been swings far right.
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: And I get it and I understand that Love to everybody.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Right, we're all born in the image of Christ and it is what it is.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Our political views, everything.
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: The pendulum always kind of swings back out.
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: The fact the city of Portland right now, in the majority, is asking for more police presence and take the streets back and to write the wrongs or the errors of their ways, that speaks volumes for me.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: It tells me that pendulum is starting to swing Now.
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: Portland in itself, in my opinion, is a shit show and it has a long ways to go.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: There's been a lot of devastation and death to that city.
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: That is going to take more than a couple of weeks of reform in order to right it, but as long as we're going in that right direction, then I think that is positive.
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: And I can say this because Portland, gresham that was the city, the metropolitan city that I worked in as a police officer.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: So I've seen the change from the early 2010s through current time.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Right In 2010, portland was a city that was fun to go to.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: The nightlife was hustling and bustling and it was alive, and at nighttime and midnight, one o'clock in the morning on the weekends, there was people partying in the streets and having a good time and the music was playing.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: It was an entertainment district.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: It was fun.
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Now the city has burned in place and is dilapidated and overrun with all the stuff that doesn't make city a great place to live, or Portland a great place to live.
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Now I know somebody's going to argue with me and say you know what, aaron?
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: It says Portland is the sixth quickest growing city in the nation.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: I get it.
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: I get it Again good common sense decisions is what we're looking for here, so go drive the streets.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: It.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: I get it Again good common sense decisions is what we're looking for here.
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: So go, drive the streets, look at the homeless encampments, look at the devastation in the city and tell me if that's really somewhere that you want to go Now.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: You can always put a cherry on top.
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: You can always dress it up with a pretty picture.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: Right, you can always make statistics say anything you want.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: You could make a quick promo video for the city of Portland and make it look like the best place on this side of heaven.
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: But reality is something different.
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: Anyway, I digress.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: So the reason that I brought up left right center was because what happened today to Charlie Kirk is absolutely unacceptable.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: And I don't care where you are in that political spectrum and I don't care where you are in that political spectrum.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: First of all, let's talk about the man himself.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: He is an unapologetic Christian who confesses his faith in Christ and debates.
• 5:58
  Speaker 1: It is simply a debate.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: If you come to him wearing a cat collar and tell him that you're a cat, he's going to say no, you're not a cat, you're a human.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: You can pee and poop in the litter box if you want, but it doesn't make you a cat.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: The transgender folks you can want to be and identify as a.
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: If you're born with male genitalia.
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: You can identify and want to be a woman, all you want and identify as that.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: At the end of the day, in my opinion, you were born a boy, a man, a male, and that is what the genitalia shows.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: You can identify as anything.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: I can identify as an ape, like at the zoo.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: I could go and identify as an ape at the zoo.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: It doesn't make me an ape.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: And these are the things that Charlie Kirk would talk about and he would speak about, and he was an advocate for youth in our nation.
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: He was an advocate for just good common sense decisions again.
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: And what happened to him today?
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: At a public meeting, televised with cameras rolling, a cowardly assassin sat on a rooftop 200 yards away and took his life and the disturbing images that were captured on that video of the arterial bleed from his neck.
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: And you literally watch him die on television.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: And if you haven't seen this, literally watch him die on television.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: And if you haven't seen this, I suggest you don't go look for it.
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: It is disturbing, having me being somebody who had death as my business that is what I did Having seen people be shot in the neck, having worked the crime scenes and the murders and witnessed people getting shot.
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: I can tell you that that is all too real and it is a haunting, scarring image that you don't necessarily want in your life.
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: A few months back, a man went into the Portland airport and committed suicide by cutting his own throat.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: That also was captured on video and also plastered around on the interwebs Also something you don't want to go and search out and seek and find.
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: There shouldn't be, and I realized today that it was being captured in the moment for the debate.
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: But the fact that it was then taken and aired out on the air and I get it you media people out there, they're gonna crucify me, go ahead doesn't really matter to me.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: The fact that we would take that moment, the last moments of that person's life, and air this on television, social media Spread this five second video clip where I, not having having been there, could go online right now and find the video clip of five seconds where he gets shot in the neck and you see him arterial bleed.
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: That, in my opinion, is also unacceptable.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: Nobody needs to witness that, his kids don't need to witness that, his wife doesn't need to witness that and it definitely doesn't need to be memorialized as entertainment value.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: It's disgusting.
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: And this coward and I don't know if they found him or her or not, but where are we at as a nation where it is okay and acceptable At least we think it's acceptable because we don't like someone's voice, we don't like their debate, we don't like them challenging our thought process that we can assassinate them from a rooftop.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: If you remember, somebody tried to do this to Donald Trump during his campaign, right, and it was only by the grace of God, in a one millionth of a second, that Donald Trump's head didn't explode on national television.
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: It's only by the grace of God that this sniper shot which I presume was a headshot, but caught him in the neck that his head didn't disintegrate on national television.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Both of these assassination attempts are because they don't like the message that is being portrayed.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: This is unacceptable, left, right or center, and we should not stand for this as a nation.
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: Stand for this as a nation.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: I don't know where to go with the conversation.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: Other than this is absolutely unacceptable.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: People, we need to right our country.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: We need to right our wrongs.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: We need to right our faith, our Christianity.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: We need to right the things that this country was built upon.
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: The things that this country was built upon, and this is not it.
• 11:11
  Speaker 1: This is not where democracy is supposed to be, and my prayers go out to his family, to his wife, to his kids, to his community.
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: You know the fact that his wife today shared this morning Psalms 46.1, and it says God is our refuge and strength and a very present help in trouble.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: The fact that she would turn to those Bible verses, or to a Bible verse, in her time of tragedy speaks volumes for the foundation that man laid within the four walls of his home as his spiritual leader.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Amen to him, my condolences to his wife and family and, frankly, my condolences to our country.
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: We need to do better.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: We should be ashamed as to where we are right now.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: In other news, moving on from that, as you guys know, I have been doing some therapy over the past month or so that has really focused around slowing down relationships, building relationships and turning from a hummingbird into a hawk, soaring into things at 30,000 feet versus bouncing all around like a hummingbird, and at the end of the day, this is a marathon and not a sprint, right, but for far too long I looked at this as a sprint, so this therapy sessions organically turned into this relationship building, hawk, hummingbird things as we went through these conversations that I had with her because of different things that had come up in my life and questions she was asking and that type of stuff.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: So over the last month there's been this organic direction towards healing and slowing down and finding a better pace and a healthier pace of life.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: But then I look at what I'm doing, starting last month, this whole month and then even some in October and November, and this is what it is.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: So there's been a ton of travel that I'm involved in right now and I'm going to go through some of these.
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: So two weeks ago I was in Seward, alaska, on a fishing trip for work with some customers.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: This trip was planned four months ago and it came to fruition the same month that she and I start talking about slowing down, building relationships and finding a better pace of life and seizing those opportunities and moments when God puts them in front of me.
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: Then I come home and I'm home for a couple of days and I go to Las Vegas.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Las Vegas is a work trip and I'm going to talk about Las Vegas here in a second because I want to talk about something that happened while I was there.
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: But Las Vegas was a work trip.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: There was 14 of us that went.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: We went and saw the Eagles concert.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: It was time to relax, time to rest, time to connect, time to build relationships.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: This trip was planned six months ago months ago Yet the execution of the trip organically came up during my month of talk and conversation about resting and healing.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Currently I'm in Sitkalaska.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: Sitkalaska is a beautiful place.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: This is where I had my police academy.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: It was hell then.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: I had no fond memories of it during that time.
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: But now I'm here and I'm on a fishing trip and I'm on a fishing trip that I put together about three, four months ago.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: On this trip, there's five of us and we are spending five days at an all-inclusive lodge resort in Sitka, alaska.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: We're fishing three days.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: We're getting food, we're getting pampered, we're getting hot tubbed.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: We're getting everything.
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: It's just an amazing time.
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: But again, it's an opportunity for me to slow down, slow my pace, relax and find those relationships and dig deeper than surface level.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: This was planned, again three months ago, yet it organically executed Maybe that's a bad word to use today.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: Organically came to fruition during the month that I was talking about rest and relaxation with my therapist when I get home from this trip.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: I get home on Friday my wife is picking me up at the airport.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: We have to go home because I'm dropping off the fish.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: Then I'm taking her away for three days for her birthday and I'm not going to tell her where because she's going to listen to this and she doesn't know.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: But, uh, they planned that about three, four months ago.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that came to fruition during the time that my therapist and I are talking about rest, relaxation and finding a slower pace of life.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: Then I get home from that and in a week I take eight people to Chicago.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: We're going to Chicago to go to a factory and then we're going to go to a Wrigley Field Cubs baseball game.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: That is another opportunity for rest and relaxation.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: This was planned six months ago, yet organically come into fruition and being executed during the month that my therapist and I happen to be talking about rest, relaxation and finding healing.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: I have got an entire month of relationships and opportunities put in front of me and I think the timing is divine.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: The timing is exactly where I need it to be.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: It's right, it's now, it's in the present, and I know that you guys aren't all going to have these opportunities.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: I never had these opportunities before.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: These are just opportunities that have come to fruition with me because of the job that I'm in and because of just where God has placed me in my life right now.
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: But I was never there.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: When I was a cop, right, and I knew nothing other than being a cop, that's all I could do.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: I didn't know anything else other than how to arrest people, how to write reports, how to solve murders and child abuse.
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: Somebody saw something in me that showed those skills as being relatable into the real world Anybody being stuck in your position or finding yourself stuck in your position or in life or a relationship or whatever it may be.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: Because I've been there too and I am there to some extent, I'm kind of stuck in my negative thoughts.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: Sometimes we have to look at it from a different perspective, lens or filter, and when it comes to our profession and our career, I had no idea how much I did every day that was relatable into the real world, so I was never really stuck.
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: It's just the lie that I told myself for a long, long time.
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: And now, between the new job that I have I've had it for about three years.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: The opportunities I have to build relationships, the people surrounding me that are hawks and not hummingbirds, my partner I work with every single day, who takes things at a very nice pace and is very successful, and who I emulate to be like these are all great things and places for me to be right now, you know, and I started doing a Bible study, and I'm not going to go deep into the Bible study, but I will tell you this.
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: I went to chat GBT and I said, look, I need a Bible study about slowing down, resting, building relationships.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: I want it to have a passage of scripture, I want it to have two, three, four questions that are thought provoking and I want this to be a seven day plan.
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: So it spits out exactly what I asked it to do.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: And it gave me all the scriptures and I've been studying that and it's really awesome how, in that Bible study, that rest is and healing, but rest specifically is biblical.
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: It gives us an opportunity to restore ourselves and to slow down and to take on his yoke at his pace, not our pace, and I just think that I'm really, really blessed to be where I am right now and I think it was divine that my month of relationship building comes when we organically launch into this therapy session and it gives me an opportunity to put my words into practice.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: Right, and I'm not perfect.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: I'm not even good at this yet I'm not.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: I think you know, realistically, I'm still a hummingbird.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: I was frustrated getting on the plane coming here because the people in the TSA line in front of me were idiots and couldn't get their stuff on the conveyor belts, like they'd never been there before and you know these people travel.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: But you got to take the stuff out of your pockets before you go through, put it into a cup, put it on the conveyor belt and just push it, push it right through.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: But they weren't and it was frustrating me and I posted something about this on social media, kind of funny little tongue in cheek thing.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: I thought it was funny, but I think I'm funny all the time.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: So, uh, I posted it and one of my old coworkers, who is an amazing man, uh guy retired with 30 something years in law enforcement, and that guy is a hawk.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: In fact his last name is Big Eagle, so he kind of is a hawk-ish, right, anyway.
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: So he posted a response that just says be a hawk because I was so spun up over that moment, right.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: Anyway, I just think it's awesome.
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: I want to highlight the positive that comes.
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: It's from murders to music, it's from darkness to light, and this is an opportunity of light that I'm working through.
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: I'm getting better and I'm getting encouragement from you guys.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: I'm getting emails and text messages from you guys and it's super, super encouraging.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: So, thank you guys, so much for that.
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: I want to go back to Las Vegas.
• 21:16
  Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about this and then we're going to wrap up the show.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: When I was in Las Vegas for this last trip, so here's what we had going on One of our factories is, um, uh, a plumbing manufacturer and I was out doing some training with them.
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: Oh, back in April or something like that.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: Uh, january, february, march, april, and I was talking about the Eagles concert that I went March April.
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: And I was talking about the Eagles concert that I went to in Vegas and I was talking with some of the upper management and I'm like this concert was so good.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: So, as things do, they progressed and before dinner was over, we were planning a trip to go to Las Vegas, to the Sphere to see the Eagles, to the sphere to see the eagles.
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: So this trip comes to fruition and we get the tickets.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: And last week is when we all headed out to Vegas and we met in Vegas and we had a great dinner.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: But getting to the dinner is what I want to talk about.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: So we're staying at the MGM Grand.
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: So in my mind, we're going to get on the tram at the MGM Grand and we were going to ride it to the Sphere.
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: In the meantime I had to find somewhere to eat dinner.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: So I call a restaurant and they say we're right behind the Sphere, it's right there and you're close.
• 22:30
  Speaker 1: So myself, stacy, my partner and his wife, we're all going to ride it.
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: We jump on this tram.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: When we get on the tram, there's three trams in Vegas.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: Two of them are free and one of them you have to pay for.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: I thought we were on a free tram but we weren't, so I paid for everybody.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: So here we are Now we pay to get on this tram.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: When we get off the tram and we check our little map to the restaurant, it says we are 1.2 miles away.
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: So we're like, hmm, that seems crazy.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: So it doesn't actually drop you off right at the sphere, it actually drops you off about one mile away.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: So we're going to take a shortcut through this casino.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: So we go into the Venetian and we go in there and if you've ever been in, you step in.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: You've got to go up or down.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: There's a staircase there that goes down and the security guy says yep, go down the stairs, cut through here, hang to the right, hang to the left, follow the signs and he's going to take you there.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: Cool, so we do that.
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: Well, we pop back out of the Venetian onto some sidewalk and when we do, it now says we have 1.8 miles to go.
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: So I don't know how we took a shortcut but added on 0.6 miles, but we did.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: So we start walking and it's about 4.30, five o'clock in the evening, it is 90 degrees outside.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: I've decided I'm going to wear two layers of shirts and I'm going to wear black jeans and cowboy boots and we're walking and we're walking and we're following Sahara Boulevard I believe it was and we're walking and we're walking and we're walking and it's hot and we're dripping with sweat and I'm like dear God, if I find a taxi cab or an Uber, I'm flagging them down and the four of us and the whole time.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: I'm looking at my phone and I'm feeling self-conscious because I'm like man.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: I told them we were going to be right there.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: Nobody planned on walking for two miles.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: I told them we were going to be right there, nobody planned on walking for two miles.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: But here we are walking for two miles in the heat.
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: We're on side roads, so it's not like we can catch a bus or something and we're walking along.
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: And then, as we're walking, we're approaching an intersection where the main road that we're alongside of is intersecting with a driveway for the sphere.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: And as we're walking, I'm watching the traffic and there's traffic that's going eastbound beside me and I see this motorcycle going eastbound at about 55 miles an hour is what I did for the visual estimation of speed and as it enters this intersection I see a car turning in front of it and I say crash, crash, crash, crash to the people with me.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: And sure enough, this motorcycle T-bones the passenger side of this car and the driver wearing all black and a white helmet.
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: He gets launched.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: This guy's 200 pounds and he was getting thrown through the air like a rag doll up and over the hood of the car, did a complete somersault in the air landed flat on his back in the middle of the roadway.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: I'm about 150 feet from this, 200 feet from this, when it happens, and there's a lot of people standing around, there's those people out there in the green vest with the waggy, wavy wands telling people to go this direction and that direction, and I don't think about it.
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: I just run up to the guy on the ground.
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: He's trying to take his helmet off.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: So I put my hand on his chest and I said look.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: I said, sir, what's your name?
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: He's like my name is Abel.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: I said Abel, my name is Aaron.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: I said I'm a police officer.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: I just need you to relax, okay?
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: I said you're trying to take your helmet off.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: Please stop.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: I don't know if you have neck injuries or not.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: He's like okay.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: So he stops and I pull his glasses out of his helmet and I said Abel, here's the deal.
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: I said we're going to get some help for you.
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Okay, I said, but I need to know where you hurt.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: So I start doing an assessment on him and I realize that I'm incredibly calm while I'm doing this and I said okay, abel, you know where do you hurt.
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: He's like he's there.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: My, my hips really hurt bad in my legs.
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: I said, okay, and he had his legs bent.
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: I said, well, don't straighten your legs out, cause we don't have got broken bones.
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: I said if you got a broken bone in the femur I don't want you questions about.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: You know what day is today, about what time is it?
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: Where are you at?
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: What's your name?
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: What's your birthday?
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: Who's president?
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: And he started laughing.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: I said, look, dude, I don't care if you like him or not.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: Who's president?
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: And he said he gave the right answer.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: So I go through this whole thing and in the meantime, in the back of my head I'm in the back of my head I'm thinking, okay, we've got a blocked intersection here.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: It is a narrow roadway.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: We're bringing emergency vehicles in.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: I'd already told somebody to call 911.
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: So now I got to start clearing this roadway.
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: So I look up and my wife is there and I'm like Stacy, I need this lane cleared for incoming emergency vehicles.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: Take those two cars, move them, get them parked over here on a side street.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: Take that cone, block that roadway for me, the roadway for me, the roadway behind me.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: We need to clear this car through.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: And then, sir civilian, take this cone, go to the end of this off-ramp here, put a cone up and keep this lane open.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: Emergency vehicles are responding in from this direction.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: So I'm going through this, I'm processing the scene.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: I even tell Abel at one moment.
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: Abel, give me just one second.
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: I just want to make sure we're good.
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: I stand up, I take a 360, look in, I make sure that everybody is fine.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: I get people back off the sidewalk.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: There are some pedestrians who are out there trying to linger with me.
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: I'm like guys, get off the sidewalk, get out of the roadway, so you're not another victim Went back to Abel by that time.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: The police got there.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: I got up, identified myself to the police officer.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: I told him that I was retired law enforcement.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: I didn't feel like going through all the details with Abel.
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: He didn't give two craps about if I was retired or not, but I told the cop.
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: I said look, here's who I am.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: This is what happened.
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: You got, you know, a 38 year old male, um, he was involved in this crash.
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: He's 55 miles an hour, T-bone into the side over the top.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: I give him the whole breakdown right and then cop takes over.
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: Medics get there.
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: I point out some injuries that I've noticed on him and I get up and leave and we walk away.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: And as we're walking away, I'm hot and sweaty at this point but I'm incredibly calm and I walk away and I go to dinner, and I sit dinner and I eat dinner and then we go to the Eagles concert.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: And the Eagles concert was amazing.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: Why am I telling you all this?
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: I'm telling you all this to tell you this it was the first time in three years that I felt at home in a situation.
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: In a work situation.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: I immediately felt at home in that crisis emergency.
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: I felt like I was the expert, versus every day when I'm at work, I feel like I'm the new guy that's constantly trying to learn something, that doesn't know his way around and can barely navigate through the hallways.
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: I have not felt like an expert in something in a long, long time.
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: Honestly, it felt good to be good at something and that something was not only assessing the patient but doing it very calm.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: I got strangers to help me to follow my directions and clear roadways for me.
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: I got Stacy to move vehicles, contact people, get them to move their cars and blocking roadways which created the paths for the emergency vehicles to get there.
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: I had command presence.
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: Everybody in that intersection knew that I was in charge and this just came natural.
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: This isn't something I had to think about, it's just something that happened.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: It was a response to my training in my prior life.
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: I was fast to think I didn't have to question my reality like I do every single day when I'm at work.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: Done, I just had that situation.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: Well, aaron, why is that a problem?
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: It's a problem for this reason Because in that time there was a ton of confusion in my head.
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: As I sat through dinner and sat through the Eagles concert and laid in bed that night.
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: I had a roller coaster of emotions.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: And it's not because of witnessing the crash.
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: It's because, in a moment, I was right back, where I feel like I'm at home and I belong.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: I was in that emergency, that crisis.
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: I knew what to do, I got it done.
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: I executed well.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: I didn't have to question my reality, question every decision, question whether I was doing something right.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: I felt like the expert.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: Question every decision, question whether I was doing something right.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: I felt like the expert.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: On the contrary, in my new role and in my new life, I don't get to feel that very often I feel like I'm questioning, I don't quite know.
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: I'm unsure there's uncertainty, insecurities that I was having in my current day, my current day to day, but in that moment, without thinking, I was centered, focused, got it done.
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: You know, my partner that I spoke about, he got to witness this whole thing and I don't know he's never mentioned it to me and I don't know if he noticed anything or not but, um, it's the first time that I felt confident in a long, long time, and that was really confusing and hard for me.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: It hit me really, really hard.
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: That night, however, I talked this over with my wife.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: I talked through it with her that night, as we're laying in bed, before we go to sleep, and it's Vegas, what happened in Vegas stays in Vegas.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: Guys, I'm not telling you all the details, but before we went to bed that night, I told her about this and I said um, you know, and then the next morning I woke up and I felt there was no really emotional attachment to it.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: Um, you know, the night before I was very emotional with it.
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: By the next morning, it was a set of circumstances that occurred and I didn't really have that emotional attachment.
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: I wasn't sad, I wasn't feeling, you know, like man, I was the expert.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: I'm not now.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: There was.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: No, you know, woe is me, nothing like that.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: It's like, okay, this happened.
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: I was there, god gave me the gifts and the talents and to, you know, execute this and and uh, I'm using that word a lot today for some reason to make this happen and get it done.
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: And I was where I needed to be at the right time, which is maybe why we had to walk that two miles for the exact moment, who knows, this guy was injured, really, really bad, and had I not been there and he ripped his helmet off, he could have severed his neck and killed himself, I don't know.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: So you know, I was where I needed to be at the right moment and God gave me those skill sets and those talents and command presence and emergency scene management, all that kind of stuff, and maybe one day I'll get to use that stuff again, but right now I am exactly where he wants me to be and the healing has occurred because I no longer have that emotional attachment.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: Had this call happened to me a year ago, I would be wrapped around the axle over it, questioning my reality for a long, long time.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: And I'm not questioning my reality.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: My reality is God has me exactly where he needs me in this moment, right now, for my family, for my friends, for my company, for my coworkers, for the relationships that I'm building over this next month and that will continue with me.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: The relationship is not whether you're going to buy my plumbing product or not.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: That's not the relationship that is going to happen.
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: The relationship is the human touch, the human aspect that I have an opportunity right now to reach out and grab, like I used to do as a cop.
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: What made me effective as a police officer was being able to talk to people and communicate with them on a deeper level, and I think right now I'm having that same opportunity, and it's so nice.
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: While I don't get to use my emergency management skills, I get to use my people skills right now, and I am exactly where I need to be.
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: I am blessed right now.
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: And five years ago I would have told you you'd be crazy if you were to tell me that I'd be in five years, be selling commercial plumbing stuff and on some fishing trip in Sitka, alaska, for a week.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: I would have told you were crazy.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: I would have told you you were crazy.
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: I would have told you I'm going to be a cop for the next 30 years.
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: I'm going to die in this cubicle because that's what I had planned on doing.
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: I wasn't as stuck as I thought I was.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: I do have skills.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: I have a reason to be confident in my day to day because, no matter where I go, god is with me and he's got me and he is there.
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: If I wasn't supposed to be where I am, I wouldn't be here today.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, I am blessed.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: Blessed to have an amazing family, blessed to have an amazing podcast where all you guys listen.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: I am blessed to have a job.
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: I am blessed to be in Sitka, seward, chicago, vegas, somewhere I'm not telling you Stacey.
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: I'm blessed to be in all those places and I love you guys so much.
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to me.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: I just really wanted to highlight where I'm at, what's going on and kind of my mental stuff.
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, you guys are amazing, whether you're left, right or center.
• 36:42
  Speaker 1: Please, with sovereignty, come alongside me and say we are not in the right place in our nation.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: We need something to change.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: We need a come to Jesus moment.
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: We need an aligning of the pendulum.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: What happened today is unacceptable.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: My condolences to that man's family, for his wife, for his kids.
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, that is a Murder Street Music podcast.