This Security Guard Had To Kill On The Job

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“I worked armed security in a bad city, I was a mall cop.
A guy came running through the glass door high on angel dust. He grabbed some glass and started swinging it people. He struck a female shopper with it and gashed her face up. I unholstered my weapon. I remember firing my weapon, but not how many rounds or much thereafter. The guy made a death gurgle that I can still hear to this day. I don’t remember anything else. I yelled, ‘DROP IT DROP IT YOU’LL GET SHOT, I’LL SHOOT YOU DEAD, STOP!’ I did watch my bodycam after with the cops, I fired four rounds of .40 SW. One hit the torso, nothing.
Another shot. Nothing.
I fired a third round. He staggered, then regained his balance, until I fired one last one to the head.
He dropped, at first I was having a panic attack inside. I remember the cops (I knew them on a first name basis as I’ve needed their help numerous times).
I don’t remember this but, the first officer grabbed my weapon and told me to sit down. The lifeless corpse looked like a dead weight. The person was there, then he wasn’t, he disappeared, his life was gone.
I remember the smell of iron, blood, gunpowder, and metal. It all felt so surreal. I never thought something like that would happen. I was cleared of charges.
I have nightmares of dropping my weapon as he charged, wake up in a dead sweat. The sound of his death gurgle has never left me. I felt like my world was coming to an end. I felt so…dirty, so wrong, I JUST TOOK A PERSON’S LIFE, I KILLED somebody. I keep thinking, maybe I should have tasered him, should have done something different.
How do I cope? Meetings, talking it out, support structure.”
When Riots Broke Out In Their Country, They Had To Protect Their Family

“I assisted my father and brother in killing a man who tried to rob and burn down our house during the May 1998 Riots Of Indonesia. My family happens to be a minority that got targeted. During riots like that, it will be an everyone for himself kind of situation. No one can be called for help, the law in the country itself was temporarily paralyzed.
The situation was very chaotic. People were mostly afraid of fire that would spread because; in that kind of situation, no firefighters would come. The biggest part of the riot happened on the main street, not too far away from my house. Several rioters spread out and tried to rob houses. Some of them had bottles filled with kerosene to start fires.
My family and the owners of other houses fought back. We hacked away with farming equipment just blindly and then just dragged the body and left it at the end of the street. I saw it being collected by local law after the military was being deployed to control the situation.
How does it feel? It felt nice to survive. To be able to continue living.
How do we cope with it? By being alert and aware. Living in places where either there are so many different minorities we become the majority, or always having an escape route if the country shows signs of being unstable again.”
After Getting Shot At, He Had To React

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“I shot and killed a man who broke into my home and shot me with my own weapon.
I live on a ranch but it’s close enough to the outskirts of civilization that the worst part of it often wash up on my property. This was over 20 years ago. I was in my garage doing some cleaning and I heard the back door being kicked in. I had all the lights in the house off and the garage had no windows, so I assumed he/they didn’t know I was home.
The back door didn’t connect to my kitchen but it did connect to a room I used as an office. That room was connected to the garage I was in. I kept my weapons in that office. I’m not the brightest of individuals and I thought if I rushed now I could hold up whoever it was before he/she/they got to the weapons. Stupid mistake, in retrospect, because I usually kept a loaded weapon hanging from the wall just a few feet away from the broken door. I kicked the garage-office door open and lo and behold, a bearded crack-head, missing his front teeth, was standing there with the lights on, a giant grin on his face, my weapon pointed at me. I said to put ’em up and he did a rebel yell.
And then he shot me.
I felt the father of all body punches hit me and shove me back into a window, my legs gave and I went down like a tree, back and sideways into the glass and window frame, bouncing against on the window sill and falling on the floor. I’m not sure how fast it actually went, because as I hit the floor, I saw him lower the weapon – I think he believed he had killed me – I lined up my right arm and fired my weapon once, not aiming really, I saw the giant fireball out of my weapon and then him lift up somewhat from the ground.
I hit him center mass with a .357 magnum, and he never got up again.
He had shot me in the left groin/belly area with 12GA #4 buckshot, most of the shot missing, otherwise, I guess I’d have no hip left. Still, the shot nicked my femoral artery, and penetrated into my lower abdomen as well, later revealed to have hit my kidney and hip bones. Sat there for what seemed like an eternity (in reality, it had all taken place under 2-5 minutes) watching a pool of blood form under me and my skin turn white and for some reason hallucinating heavily, hearing voices and seeing faces and shapes wander in and out of the walls.
I felt really tired and the coldest I had ever been in my life, I felt the urge to get up, but my body wasn’t answering. I knew I was going into shock and soon I’d be dead (because police response time was over an hour here back then). Said my goodbyes in my head, decided life so far had been fun and worth living, then closed my eyes. Woke up nearly a month later in a hospital with the mother of all headaches and looking like Frankenstein’s monster on my left side from the waist down, stitched and stapled all over, skin turning shades of purple and green, giant surgical drain coming out of where part of my hip bone had been.
I learned later that my neighbor and his daughter showed up. He is a vet, got ice bags from my fridge and stuffed in around the wounds to slow blood flow, then stuffed rags into the wounds and fashioned a tourniquet around my leg. His daughter had an epi-pen case for her allergies, so he fetched it and shot it into me to prevent my heart from stopping.
As for what I felt: I’ll never forget that man and he’ll never leave me, regardless of the upturns my life took afterward. Many might consider me less manly for saying this, but the fear and paranoia of having this happen to you again never really leaves you, and I do feel it took something from me, not innocence, but some kind of naivety about life. For years, I couldn’t take corners or enter empty rooms in my own house without mentally preparing myself for a fight, there was a time I couldn’t get up from bed at night to get a glass of water without taking a loaded weapon with me, just in case. Every night when I lay on my left side, I’m reminded of him.
So, in a weird way, even though I don’t hate him, and even though I don’t want to remember, he is forever in my mind.”
He Had To Stop This Crime Somehow

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“He had dragged a young woman into a park in the early hours and tried to violate her a couple of times, but she had fought him off. I was walking home and by the time I had stumbled across them, he had tried to throw her off a bridge. She was desperately clinging to the side while hanging off the other side of the rail. At the time, I felt nothing because our altercation took mere seconds to surprise him, throw him over, and pull her up.
Over the next several months, coping with it was simply making sure she was okay and a being there if she needed someone to talk to. Long-term, my feelings have always been he made the decision to hurt someone on his own. He lost the basic courtesy and respect all people deserve and need to earn. It was not possible to rehabilitate him at that moment. I had more worries about the bugs I may have walked on while in the park. She was by far my main concern. We both lied a little when the cops turned up. I would do it again if needed, although maybe I would chat less to random strangers at the train station about silly things before walking home so that I would have arrived at the park earlier and maybe stopped the whole terrible ordeal happening to her in the first place.”
An Unexpected Attack

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“I live in a pretty safe area with little violent crime. It’s not uncommon to see women jogging down the road late at night unattended by the company of another person. You almost never see the police racing to the scene of a crime and no large news stories of violence ever come out about my town. It’s a safe area. That being said, I always have been and still am confident in walking around by myself late at night or going places on my own without giving it any second thought.
I was walking home from a convenience store near my house around 10 pm one night. It was a pleasant night out and I had been cooped up in the house all day, so I figured it would be nice to get some fresh air and exercise. I was nearing the exit of the shopping plaza when I heard a muffled crying coming from the shadows over by a dumpster. Remember, this is a normally very safe area of town so I had no reason to see this sound as suspicious. I walked over to the dumpster and poked my head around to see what was making the sound and when I looked around the corner, there was some dude squatting down while making the sound.
As soon as he saw me poke my head around, he lunged at me and tackled me to the ground. I managed to wrestle him off of me and yell, ‘What the heck dude!’ Before I could gather my bearings about what just happened, he lunged at me again and tackled me once more. I kicked him off me again but this time noticed he was holding something sharp in his hand. It didn’t look like a knife but more like a sharp piece of broken glass. I was sitting on the ground and leaned back with my hands supporting me when I felt stinging in my palms. He had apparently tried stabbing me and ended up slicing my palms with whatever it was he had in his hands. That’s when the adrenaline kicked in.
I don’t know if this guy was crazy or desperate or what, but he rushed towards me again and not having time to roll to the side or act quick enough to stand up, I shoved both of my feet forward as he was lunging towards me. I ended up kicking his hands in a way that pushed the sharp object into his lower stomach/upper groin area. He groaned in pain and stumbled back a bit so I used that opportunity to get up and bolt. I turned around and this crazy guy kept chasing me. Given how close I was to my house, I knew I couldn’t just lead him to where I lived since I could tell he wasn’t going to let up. I fumbled for my phone to call 911 but the blood on my palms made me drop my phone before I could.
I led him to the sidewalk that ran along the main road so that any cars in the area could see me and see what was going on. I ended up getting into a wrestling match with the guy on the side of the road while hoping a good Samaritan saw the scene and called the cops. I don’t know if anybody saw or not since I was caught up in the heat and adrenaline of the fight but I ended up getting into a position where I picked the guy up over my shoulders, stood up then dropped him on his head WWE style. All I heard was a loud crack and his body went limp. I collapsed exhausted and just sat there for a second trying to process what just happened while waiting for the adrenaline to wear off and my body to stop shaking.
A car did end up driving by about 2 minutes later and the lady in the car yelled from the driver seat if my friend and I were okay. I told her no and to call the cops. Cops showed up and I told them what happened. They got my statement and whatnot, examined my wounds, examined the other guy etc. It turns out he was a known violent homeless man in the area with severe mental problems. Apparently, he had a track record of attacking people with broken bottles and stealing their wallets. I kept reassuring them it was all in self-defense and the cops seemed to not even question my story. They did say, however, they would check the CCTV footage from the surrounding shops just in case and I told them to go right ahead. I went to the ER to get my hands sewn back up, taken to the police station for some questioning and was ultimately released a few hours later. There were a couple follow up interviews in the weeks following but that was it.
How did it feel at the moment? Survival. Nothing else. I was simply protecting myself and the shock and adrenaline combined made me feel nothing more than raw survival instinct. The initial shock after the adrenaline wore off was pretty heavy since I had a hard time wrapping my head around what I had just done but once I accepted the fact I had killed the guy, I moved on pretty quick. I don’t lose sleep over it. I never had nor have nightmares about it. I didn’t fall into a spiral of self-loathing or depression or substance abuse like a lot of other people when facing a situation like this. I consider myself extremely fortunate that I did not develop PTSD or anything of the likes.
I don’t want to come off as psychopathic but I really just didn’t care that I killed someone else. Not in the sense that I enjoyed it but in the sense that ending another person’s life just didn’t matter to me once it happened. It didn’t upset or disturb me in the slightest that I killed someone. Did I want to kill him? Of course not. I would have much rather not been in that situation at all or at least gotten him in a subdued position where the police could have just arrested him without me doing what I did. I consider it both a blessing and a curse that it doesn’t bother me. A blessing since I don’t need therapy or anything like that but a curse because it makes me question myself and how I perceive others to a degree.”
Even For A Cop, This Moment Was Terrifying

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“I’m a cop and I responded to an active shooter and I was shot in a shootout. He shot me with an AR-15 (our vests do not stop these rounds) and I shot and killed him with mine. I was shot in a very vital area and almost died.
As for killing him. I felt guilty for quite a while. I’ll explain…
As a cop, and a weapons enthusiast, I knew how bad my injuries were. I knew I was in serious trouble and my odds were not good. I was laid out on the ground in a massive amount of pain, so much pain I couldn’t speak. The whole situation was extremely chaotic and violent. It was absolutely terrifying, because I knew I was dying. When Rescue picked me up, my blood pressure was 60/30.
I felt guilty because I know the guy I shot went through the same terrifying experience. My friends watched him die and told me how it went down. I know I was 100% justified because he was about to kill innocent people, and he shot me, but I know what it is like to be laying on the ground dying from a bullet wound, and it’s horrifying.
I don’t feel guilty anymore, but I did for a little while after. It has been a long time since it has happened so I’m ok with everything. I made the correct and best decision that could have been made at the time and no innocent people were hurt. I don’t have full on PTSD, but I’m not the same as I was before. I also have chronic medical issues and have been in out of the hospital, even after returning to work.
As of now, I don’t feel anything when I think about having killed someone. I will probably have to do it again, and I won’t hesitate.”
He Acted In Self-Defense, But The Media Coverage Changed His Life

“A few years ago, I made a very large man angry. He responded by trying to break down my door. There was an altercation and it ended with all 350 pounds of the guy going through a balcony and down two stories onto his head. His wife pulled the plug on him a day later.
There was media coverage for a few weeks. It didn’t take long for somebody to post my address on the newspaper’s Facebook page and then I had people looking through my windows and coming by to see what all the fuss was about. It took about nine months for the DA to announce that there wouldn’t be charges (no media coverage on that, of course). I had a pretty tough time of it for a few months. The guy was my neighbor and I had just moved in a few weeks previous, so every time I came home, there was a group of randoms mean mugging me from the guy’s porch. I became agoraphobic for a few months, sure that every time I had to leave the house, I was going to come back to a looted disaster zone.
How did it feel? There was a second I can remember where he just wasn’t there anymore. When I looked down, there was blood pooling from his ear. I jumped down barefoot for some stupid reason to try and get him an airway but moving him at that point was a bad idea.
A lot of the problems I was having mirrored what it was like coming back from Iraq. Not being able to sit with my back to the door, having to be aware of exits in a room or windows on the buildings across the street, etc.
I rescued a pitbull who it turns out is absolutely incapable of defending himself even against the local cats but barks loudly and looks like a pitbull so my son slept better at night. I started going to the local veteran’s center and they set me up with a guy to help me fix my brain a little bit.
It felt horrible. I know I’m too strong to fight people when I get mad, even big guys like that. When I used to bounce, it was much easier for all parties to just catch the wasted haymaker and carry a guy out than to try and throw down in the middle of a bar. This happened right around the time that racist George Zimmerman decided to chase down and kill a man, and I was worried that law enforcement was going to turn me into some test for standing your ground.”
“I Just Got Really Lucky”

“A guy tried to mug me. He pulled me into an alley and kicked me to the ground. I landed on some piping and swung it blindly as hard as I could. The guy dropped to the ground and the right half of his face was caved in. I felt the side of his skull collapse and a massive sigh of relief. The police came and let me go. I guess the guy was a repeat offender because one of the officers recognized him, took my report and let me go home.
I don’t really talk about it unless it gets brought up. I’m not some big dude or anything, I’m like 5’6″ with a dad body. I just got really lucky.”
After A Medical Emergency, She Made A Hard Choice

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“My big sister had lupus. One day, she apparently had a massive heart attack in her living room. My brother-in-law called 911, did CPR and against all odds got her heart beating again. It was too late for her brain, though. She started spiking fevers in the ICU; the doctor said she reached 107 at one point. When your brain isn’t capable of thermoregulating your body anymore, you’re not in a good way. She had CT scans that confirmed the extent of the damage.
We were all gathered around her bed when the doc came in. After checking on her, he asked if we had any questions. I did: ‘If she wakes up, what are the odds that she, her personality, her intellect, will come back?’
He thought for a minute. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen. She was a surgical nurse, right? Then I’m sure she used to tell you that if she was going to be a vegetable, then to please pull the plug. I know she said that because everyone in medical says that to their families. Well, this is the exact scenario she was talking about.’
Yes. She had said that and I know she meant it. And that’s when we decided to let her go. She had already left us – we just hadn’t allowed the rest of her body catch up yet.
I am completely at ease with our decision. It was what she wanted, it was merciful, and it was right. I don’t feel guilty about it. And yet, I’m sobbing as I write this and I doubt I’ll ever really be over it.”
Risked Everything To Help A Stranger

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“I was walking in an alley when I saw a mugging. Male robber, female victim. It became an attempted assault. I froze. He saw me, stopped, strode towards me brandishing a knife, the girl ran. I had a deathwish and thought if this is how it ends, put up a fight at least. Thought saving someone’s life in exchange for mine was good enough of a final memory.
He attacked first. Bloody scuffle. Managed to stab his throat with his knife, but I got lacerations on my hands, forearms, and face. Adrenaline probably kept me alive until help came and rushed me and the mugger to the hospital. He died, I didn’t. I was messed up for months. Still alive. I’m now slightly cringey when I see blades.”
When A Guy On The Bus Gave Her Trouble, Her Friend Had To Defend Her

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“I was 18 and in my first year of college in Austin. The girl I was trying to date forgot her ID at the dorm so i offered to take the bus back home with her and play some Fuzion Frenzy. There was a guy tricked out on something a couple of seats behind us and as we were leaving, he grabbed her arm. I jumped on him and in a matter of seconds put my pocket knife in his throat. We didn’t get back to the dorm until the next day. I spent the night with the Austin PD and got probation for class A misdemeanor weapons charge.
She and I are still friends but we don’t talk about it ever and never tried to date. I still have dreams about all the blood and his voice but I try not to think about it too long.”