265: What if a routine pickup led to a crushing blow?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. There's screaming and commotion, just pandemonium. But what I have is just black. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

Episode 265. What if a routine pickup led to a crushing blow?

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. National average 12-month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and I ended up growing up in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside of D.C. I got a brother that's six years younger than me. We grew up pretty normal. I was the troubled kid.

When I was six, my father was the maintenance man of our apartment complex and had fallen from a third-story balcony to the ground concrete and shattered his legs and hips and had all these surgeries and stuff. So I guess a year or so after that, he had gone and gotten a pizza. And I was carrying the pizza in the house. Six-year-old kid tripped, dropped the pizza. I'm shoveling the pizza back into the pizza box, trying to salvage it. And he came in and started beating me about my back with a walking cane.

My mother assaulted him, had me grab my brother, who was an infant, maybe six months old, and rush out of the house into the vehicle, and we fled and didn't see my father ever again. I remember getting beat with the cane, but do I remember getting beat with the cane, or do I remember the story of me getting beat with the cane? I don't know if that actually happened, or if that was a fabricated story that I've been told so many times and retold myself that I just believed that's what happened, but

I don't know. I know that I didn't see my real father after that. At a young age, you just don't know how to process that. Dad's here. Dad's gone. Mom says he's a bad guy. I don't know. I'm a kid. Even that young, you question, like, did I drive this person away? Did I do something to make them not want to be around me? And then that kind of snowballs right into, well, if I was a good kid and they left anyway, then what's the point of being a good kid?

By the time I was 12, I was constantly in trouble fighting and just being a jerk. I was very angry. I felt like I didn't belong where I was. It's really a struggle to go through traumatic event that's so negative and still want to be a peaceful, happy, easygoing person.

That was the ultimate question. Like, why am I so angry? Why do I not have a problem punching this tree and breaking my own hand? Why do I not have a problem smashing bottles in the middle of the street or knocking down somebody's shed? Or why am I so angry? I don't know. And then not knowing there's no outlet for that. There's no answer. Seeking ye shall find. But there's a lot more seeking than there is finding.

So, it was just a never-ending question and the answer was always, "He's dead. He overdosed. Don't worry about it." It definitely had a pretty brutal effect on me. I just felt like I didn't have any answers and the person that should be giving me the answers wasn't. So, I basically retaliated against my mom for that for a long time. We would steal my mom's car. We would push it out of the driveway, pop it in neutral, and then drive around all night drinking and partying and acting stupid.

We had this metal shed when I was probably 10 or 11, and for whatever reason, I decided it'd be a good idea to throw a baseball at it, repeatedly cave the entire side of it in, and then run and throw my whole body into it until the whole thing collapsed. My stepdad had come in from work. He bought that shed with his own money. Schmuck kid's stepson just completely destroyed it for what? Something that had nothing to do with him.

Anything would set me off as a kid. You could say something stray and I'd be on top of you, punching you in the face. It was always a very negative display of anger. My mom would respond to my anger and outbursts, sometimes with kind words, but more often than not, she'd be angry. She's yelling and screaming. She's punishing me. She's smacking me. She's hitting me with something. I always loved my mother very much. I've always been very protected of her. I felt like she had gone to the ends of the earth for me, but she had her own demons and

So I think I was about 14. My mom wanted to go to the store and my grandmother's car was blocking her car in the driveway. So she asked me to move my grandmother's car out of the driveway to the street. And instead of doing that, I definitely drove around the neighborhood and picked up a couple of girls and joyrided for a while.

We lived in a corner house. I turned the corner. I'm going to show off. I'm going to drive right past my own house with my grandmother's car. And my mom is literally standing in the driveway with her arms folded. So I decided otherwise, pulled up to the curb nice and slow, put the car in park. I told the girls, you guys might want to just head on out now. I walked casually up to my mother in the driveway. And this is a Saturday before Mother's Day.

Beautiful day out, bright blue skies. My mother begins to scream and cuss me and closed fist punch the crap out of me.

I was taught always to never put my hands on a woman, so I basically covered my face and my balls and let my mom wail on me in the driveway, in front of the two girls, in front of the neighbors, in front of God, in front of everyone, while she screamed and berated at me and asked me if I wanted to continue to be a stupid schmuck for the rest of my life or if I wanted to finally be a good person. So after this driveway assault, she went in the house and slammed the door, and I walked around back and sat down on my basketball court

She had always told me my entire life, I'm going to give you whatever you ask for. And I guess I had been screaming for that. So mama handled that. And I cried for a while. That emotion transformed into, I can't believe I'm making my grown ass mother beat my ass in the driveway. What is wrong with me? Why? Why is this necessary? It was an epiphany moment. And I pretty much decided right then and there I was done. I was done being an asswipe.

I could see how it had affected her, and I just didn't want that result for either one of us anymore. And that was definitely a turning point. It's a conundrum, so you can take it whichever way you like. It was definitely abuse. It was definitely uncalled for. This time of day, she would have gone to jail. But it was also the specifically exact thing that I needed to stop acting like an asshole.

That was a pivotal moment for me and her. And like I said, the emotion involved me to, how can I do this to my own mother? Why am I hurting her this way? And I'm the one getting assaulted. But she was doing what she thought was right in her own mind, and it worked. It wasn't right, but it worked.

I just wanted to be more helpful towards her, make sure my room was cleaned up. If there was a mess or something that I saw, I just went ahead and handled that and picked it up. If there was a quick meal I could make for my brothers and myself before she got home from work, I would go ahead and do that. At that point, I started becoming mechanically inclined and wanting to work on cars. I would have her buy the oil and filter for her car instead of taking it to Jiffy Lube or whatever and change the oil for her. It made me want to be a more caring person.

And I felt like that would make me feel better about me. I essentially looked for other things to find pride in. And that evolved into a love affair with cars. It was a very positive outlet. It was something I could learn on. It was a puzzle, essentially, that I was given, put together, and I could learn how to take off certain pieces of the puzzle and put them back on. And when you go to the car dealer and he says, it's $1,800 to fix this. I'm going to fix it for $75.

That's what I like. We go to the drag strip and drag race. We beat the crap out of our cars. We make a whole bunch of noise and everybody drives home and goes to sleep. Nice outlet, something loud, something annoying, something fun that you weren't going to get in trouble for doing. Going and watching drag racing, drag racing my own cars, drag racing my buddy's cars. That ended up being a phenomenal outlet. I am not

artistic per se, but I can envision the way I want my car to be, look, sound, feel, stance, the entire thing in my mind. And then I can make that exact product happen. Starting with my first car was a Volkswagen Bug that I bought literally out of a pasture and it had been sitting for years and years and years. It was a big process to get that up and running. But when I did this sense of accomplishment and then it being an inanimate object that

Most likely, genuinely will never let me down. I moved out of my mom's house on my 17th birthday. I was already working a full-time job and fixing cars on the side and buying and selling cars on the side. So I was called into the counselor's office. I was 17 and this is early, early spring.

The counselor says, I have to finish this year. I have two more full years and then a year of half days to finish high school. I said, no, I live on my own. I am an emancipated adult. I'm out. You guys have a nice day. You can't just up and leave. No, I'm going to do that. So that kind of propelled me on my own and put me right into adulthood at not even 17 and a half. I like that. I like being on my own. I liked paying my own bills, earning my own money, being responsible for myself, having to answer for only me.

At 21, I got married and had my first child. We were young. Everything was great for a year and a half, two years. And then she and I ended up parting ways and I ended up with full custody of my son.

At that point, I was trying to evolve into a different person. I wanted to be there, be a good father, be around and aware and present in my kids' lives. I didn't have that as a child, so being able to do that and wanting, having to do that was very necessary to me. Ended up moving on to somebody else. Had a daughter with her, and she left with the daughter.

I ended up marrying my second wife. I had two kids with her. She ended up being a raging alcoholic. So I got custody of my two middle kids. And then I met my current wife. And she and I have a six-year-old together. Been married almost eight years now. So I have six kids total.

I was doing mechanic work for a long time coming up through my early 20s and I liked it, but doing it for a living wasn't that much fun to me. The guy I was working for, his business partner came and asked me if I wanted to drive a tow truck. So I tried that for a little while and really liked it. I was pretty much my own boss. I was out on the road all day. I could go where I wanted, when I wanted. And then that progressed in my late 20s. I got into private property impounding.

With that impounding job came a little bit of opportunities here and there to repossess, mostly in Washington, D.C., which a lot of people were afraid to go and do, but I wasn't. I had done a few of those, and I liked that. And this opportunity that I'm at currently to repossess full-time came about in summer of 2014. So typically, you have a monthly installment contract on your vehicle. So built into that contract is a default contract.

Basically, when you go 90 days delinquent, on the 91st day is when typically most banks will issue an order to repossess. And what that means is the bank wants their property back being that vehicle. In the state I live in, once an order to repossess has been issued, you are committing felony bank fraud.

Some states, if you have this piece of paper that says order to repossess, that gives me the dually assigned agent permission to touch that bank's property, I'm going to go wherever that property is. If it's in your mother's backyard, that's where I'm going to go. When you're doing repos, you ride around with a laptop open in your face. All your orders are on the screen. You show up with a recovery vehicle as a licensed recovery agent and you reclaim that property. I pick up the bank's property. I transport it to my lot.

I do a very high volume. I'm close to 1,000 units repossessed per year. A unit is considered a car, truck, minivan, motorhome, motorcycle, ATV, lawn equipment. So I stay busy. It's very fun to me. I like the challenge of it. I took an approach doing repossessions where I try to be kind to people. I try to handle it with kit gloves, but I also have a backup of smart-ass responses. I call them the pause button.

People come out so angry and I just want them to stop. Old school guys, customer would come out screaming and yelling and making threats. They immediately want to become verbally combative with the customer. I go completely the other way. I say the most off the wall thing just to make them stop. People will be screaming in my face and I'll ask them if they have any mirrors in their house. They'll say, what? Mirrors? Yeah, I got mirrors in my house. Okay. You want to go yell at that? Because that's what you should be yelling at. Not me.

I just want to change course. You know, their mindset is focused on one thing. I'm the big bad wolf and now I'm here. And I try very hard to alter that track that they're on. Like a lady come flying out her door one night and she's screaming at me, what are you doing? Do you know how to throw dollies? She says, what?

Do you know how to throw dollies? Jesus. What? Are you from Hyundai? Yes, ma'am. You've missed a series of payments. I'm here to reclaim the collateral. Would you like to gain personal property out of this vehicle before I leave with it? Well, they didn't send me any notice. Yeah, but you know you've missed a few payments, right? Well, yeah. Well, yeah. Okay, so you want to take your items out of the vehicle and call them in the morning?

Well, I just, I didn't know. And I just, I want that pause. You know what I mean? I want that person to stop and think for a second. It's not necessary. We're both adults here. We know what's going on. Let's just deal with this as adults. Usually, usually, once I'm able to get that person calmed down, most people are very, very nice about this.

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There's been a couple times where people have driven off my lift. Like I've had the car up in the air and they've definitely slammed it in reverse and come off the lift. But they usually end up tearing up their own stuff. I had a guy in a Camaro one time hit reverse and just bake his concrete driveway with his back tires. His truck stuck on the back of my truck. I'm not scared to do what I do. I definitely have a, I call it my repo sense. I definitely have a tingling sense of what I'm doing.

And there's cars that I've rolled up on from time to time that I just get a very bad vibe. And I won't bother them until they're in a better position, like at an open area like a Walmart or a shopping center or a CVS or something like that.

But there was an incident where I had a vehicle hooked and an older gentleman came and opened the door to my truck and pulled me out of the truck. And then he and I got to scrapping in his ditch in the front yard. He's laid down in the puddle. So he's in this cold water up to his neck. And I'm literally punching the guy in the face because he has the key to my truck. So that one wasn't fun. I get threatened a lot. Now with that kind of stuff, I'm going to laugh at it.

But if I get somewhere where I feel uncomfortable, I definitely take pause and try to reevaluate the situation. I'm not going to have my life removed for doing this type of job. I had an incident a few years ago in King George County, which is part of my regular territory. I'm on a farm and the guy shoots at me five times. The sheriff's office shows up and the deputy went to high school with the guy.

So, the state trooper says that's five counts of reckless discharge of a firearm. The local deputy says, well, you're creeping around his property in the middle of the night, man. Uh, sir, it was 9.30 p.m. He was watching Shark Week on Discovery Channel in his living room. The vehicle I was there to recover was his roommate's. The keys were in the vehicle. I went directly to the vehicle, and as I was leaving, he decided to shoot at me five times.

Yeah, so we're not going to pick up the charges on this one. You can go to the magistrate and pick up the charges yourself. You're not going to prosecute it. Why would I possibly do that? Yeah, but you're free to do that if you want. So even though the state police says this is five felonies, we're not going to charge this guy. Good old boys network.

I'm a natural empath, so it's definitely some heartbreaking times doing this type of work where, you know, I've always been of the impression that it was probably rent or the car payment. So I'm cognizant of that. This is like the worst moment. It's always the worst moment to have your car repossessed. It's never a good time. It's never a good scenario to have your car repossessed. That's your means to work. That's your means to the grocery store. That's your means to the daycare. I am totally, completely aware of that.

Some of these people's stories are just heartbreaking and it makes me sad. I go above and beyond to try to make people at least feel decent. Do you need anything out of the car? Is your kid's medicine in there? Do you have money? Take whatever you need from the vehicle. Please, here's my business card. This is exactly where it's going to be.

And then me personally, I go back to the bank and I state that the customer was extremely nice. The customer needs the vehicle back right away. I put those things directly to the bank as the agent on scene in the field with these people because I do feel bad for them. The flip side of that empathy coin is if it's not me, it's going to be somebody else coming here to do this job. At the end of the day, the bank doesn't care about you. They don't care about me. They care about that green. That's it.

So, April 26, 2016, my mother had a brain aneurysm. Basically, sometime early in the morning, she had gotten up from bed to use the bathroom. She used the bathroom, laid back down in the bed, and it was lights out. She was gone before she knew what happened. I was in charge of notifying my mother's sister that my mom had passed away. And in that conversation, we got on the subject of my real father.

My mom is dead maybe 10 minutes, and my aunt relays to me that, no, my father is in fact not dead. He is alive, and he lives in Florida. She told me his name, and with his name and what I do for a living, I am paid to find people.

Within 10 minutes, I had an entire 10-page email report on my real father to include his current address, current phone number, current car registration, entire criminal financial background, every address he had ever gotten mail at. I had it all in my hands. So that day, I called him and his wife answered the phone and she did put me on the phone with my real father.

He says, hello. I say, hey, long time no talk. And he says, who's this? I said, your son, Brian. How you been? Been like three decades. You're not dead. No, no. Who told you I was dead? Oh, everyone. Everybody told me you were dead.

I don't remember anything specific that was said at that conversation. Just that the shock in both of our voices that I had actually found this cat after all this time and all these lies. I had found this cat and he was on the phone with me and it was my dad. It was a mix of emotions. I literally just lost my mom.

Somebody I'd always really looked up to, loved and respected. I quickly realized she just lied. Like she just lied, lied, lied, lied, lied, lied about everything, man, like everything. And now I'm stuck with the conundrum of do I really hate my mom or do I just love my mom and love her with the flaws and understand that she lied? And when somebody says, hey, your mom, blah, blah, blah, I can say, eh, maybe, maybe not.

It's a tough blow, but at that point, I wanted to move forward. I'm alive. He's alive. I want to get to know who this dude is. I want to do it on my terms. I want it to be my way. I laid down two ground rules. I told him, do not ever speak an ill word about my mother. I don't know what happened. I don't care what happened. You do not have the right to ever say a straight word about my mother. And the second rule is, don't explain the past to me, man. The ship has sailed. I'll never really know the truth. I don't want to hear any more versions of it.

I found out tidbits like they had met in the National Enquirer. My mom had put an ad in the Women Seeking Men, the National Enquirer. And that's how that's how they met. So, you know, that was like a cool snippet. I met specifically. I didn't want to know his version of what happened between them, why they split up. I didn't want any excuses. I don't want any reasoning. I didn't want any more lies about the situation. I wanted to be in the here and in the now, knowing you, learning you and who you are today.

He agreed to that, and we developed a phone relationship. And then the following April, we drove to Florida, my wife and I, to meet him in person. It was very emotional the way down. We rented a car. You know, you play all these scenarios out in your mind of what he's going to look like and how he's going to sound and is he going to want to hug me and how tall is he? Like, I don't remember any of this stuff from when I was six years old. When we got down there, we did a drive-by of the house. My wife's driving. I'm smoking this big, fat blunt.

This dude's sitting on his front porch looking down the street for us. I went down the street probably four blocks from the house and just sat at this little parking lot. And I cried for a minute. And I think the emotion, I didn't want it to overwhelm me, but I wanted to feel the emotion of I finally have laid eyes on this cat after 30 some years. He's a person. I could see him.

Went back to the house and met him. Met him in person. And we hung out for a couple hours with him that night. The next day, we went over there in the morning and just hung out, just talking to him, getting to know where he's been and what he's been doing for the last 30 years. He basically disabled and hadn't been doing much of anything, but watching the world go by.

My father's hard of hearing. He only has one leg. He's had 500 surgeries for everything under the sun. Found out about cousins that I had never met or heard of. Found out that I had an older half-sister. I was very happy that he was at least seemed to be a decent person.

I was happy. I felt like I at least was holding a puzzle piece, not necessarily that it fit into my life now, but I had it in my hand. I completed the mission to find my dad. I wanted to find out what happened, and that was done. It was a long drive back from central Florida back to Virginia.

So we got back home four or five in the evening. It was a Sunday. And my wife, she begged me. She said, don't go to work. You're tired. You've been driving. Just tell them you can't do it tonight. It's one night. It's no big deal. And me, I provide for my family. I miss five days of work. I don't get paid for being off. It's a commission job. I got to go make some money back.

This night, we had gotten home around 4 or 5, hung out with the kids for a bit, played with the dogs. At probably 7, I told her I was going to go ahead and try to pick up 4 or 5 repos and come back home and get in bed. So I went to my very first address.

I come down the street and I can clearly see the red Mercedes is present in the given address's driveway. This particular Mercedes is rear-wheel drive and the rear is facing the street, so I know all I got to do is ass-grab it and go. So I lower the boom as I'm backing in the driveway and back underneath the rear end of the Mercedes and pick it up off the ground. And immediately the customer came flying out of the house with a younger male.

She immediately begins to scream at me that I am trespassing, which I advised her that I am not, in fact, trespassing. I'm allowed to be wherever that wanted vehicle is. At that point, she turned to the young man that was outside in the driveway with her, I later found to be her younger son. She says to him, go get the gun, go get the gun.

It's frowned upon to carry a weapon doing this type of work, but I had a gun in the truck behind my seat, but did not have it on my body as I felt it was a tool only to be used in case of emergencies. But her screaming, go get the gun, go get the gun, was enough to make my hair stand up on the back of my neck, and my next immediate thought was, I'm going to call 911.

And so I did. I called 911. And then I informed the gentleman, if he had gone in that house and come back out on the porch, I would shoot him dead. And he said, are you threatening me? And I said, no, your mother just said, go get the gun. If you go in the house and come back out with a cup of water, I'm going to shoot you dead on the porch. He had some choice names for me, but did not go in the house. The woman then picked up a cell phone.

and started to act like she was cleaning her personal items out of the car while screaming and berating me at the same time. I found out later that at that moment, she was calling her husband, George Rainey, to the scene, which was their home. Within five minutes, George Rainey pulled up, blocked my vehicle in the driveway,

took a cane. I'm saying cane, but what this was was a very hard branch of a tree that someone had carved and shellacked multiple, multiple times to make it a walking stick.

He went over and retrieved the walking stick from a Cadillac that was next to the Mercedes, came all the way around to the far side of my truck where I was strapping the rear tire of the Mercedes to my repo truck, drew back that cane over his right shoulder, and struck me in my left temple as hard as he possibly could, shattering that stick.

There was people in the front yard. I have the man that has now smashed my face. I have the woman that is common law wife. I have her son, but I'm still holding my phone to my head with 911 recording. When he struck me, you clearly hear a quack. I went to one knee and then there's a blank spot. There's screaming and commotion, just pandemonium.

But what I have is just black. Nothing. No sound, no movement, nothing. I don't know what happened other than what was recorded. It's dead silence, and then you hear the woman, his common-law wife, scream as loud as possible like kids touching a hot stove. George! I'm not sure how long I was black. Maybe 20, 30, 40 seconds? Yeah.

As I regain my vision, I watch him run into his front door and up the stairs of his house. My initial motion was to touch my left temple with my hand. I realize that there was an immense amount of blood flowing

As I'm regaining my wits, I hear the 911 dispatcher screaming at me, Brian, are you with us? And I calmly and very softly say, I'm bleeding from my head. Can you please hurry up? I got guys coming to you. There was maybe 12 deputies on scene. Four of them went into the house as the rest of them were outside gaining control of the complete chaos.

They get me in an ambulance. My truck is still idling in the driveway. They called the owner of the agency that I work for. And the ambulance driver says, you have to go to the hospital. And I said, no, I'll be fine. I'm going to superglue it. And they say, oh, no, you're not going to superglue that, sir. You are going to the hospital. I've never been afraid to die. I've never been scared of death. I've never been afraid of death coming upon me.

At that physical moment, what I was afraid of was failing my wife and kids. They're telling me my face is busted open. How am I going to work? Like, how am I going to continue to do this? How am I going to pay for a surgery? We didn't have health insurance. I made too much to get any kind of break on the health insurance, but I don't make enough to actually afford health insurance. So how am I going to pay for a hole in my temple? I didn't want to fail them. I didn't want to let them down.

They took me to the local hospital. A $10,000 ambulance ride to go four miles. I'm in the wrong business. I get to the hospital. The ER doc comes in, puts on his rubber gloves, and then proceeds to stick his finger in the hole in my left temple up past his second knuckle. And then the doctor removes his finger from my skull hole and says, I can't help you. I got to send you to a different hospital.

So they loaded me in another ambulance and sent me 62 miles south to the city of Richmond. That was another $10,000 ambulance ride to go there. This happened on April 2nd. And early in the morning on April 3rd, the doctors at VCU had determined that they were going to do reconstructive skull surgery on me. But they had to wait for the swelling to go down. The swelling was extremely severe.

On April 11th, my youngest child turned one. He recognized my voice, but did not recognize my face. I went back to VCU on the 13th of April. We got there at like six in the morning. They told my wife it would be a six to eight hour surgery.

I guess about 3 or 4 in the afternoon, they came to my wife in the waiting room and they told her that they had to put me back under and that she needed to go ahead and go home because it was going to be a while before I was cohesive. I woke up at 3 a.m. in a recovery room and no one is around me.

So I hit the call button for the nurse. The nurse came in and I said, where's my stuff? Where's my wife? We sent her home hours ago. Why would you do that? When we brought you out of anesthesia, you trashed the operating room. At that point, I got extremely upset and the nurse is trying to calm me down, stating that it's no big deal. It happens all the time. Some people react badly to anesthesia and they are prone to violent outbursts.

I totally understand that. My issue is I have no recollection whatsoever of trashing an operating room. I don't recall this, and that's an issue to me. So they determined after my surgery that 23% of my skull bone is no longer in my body. The doctor that performed the surgery on me is a micro-skull surgeon. The doctor rebuilt my face with titanium plates and titanium screening as best he could.

It was about an eight-week healing process, recovery. My face was infected six different times just because of where the wound is. It's right off to the outside of my left eye. Listening to the 911 tape, just that pause, and then later that night, reflecting back, lights were out. It was black. I was gone. No noise, no sound, no motion, no color, no light, no nothing.

And then it was like a snapback when the dispatcher's screaming my name. So it was probably a good 15 minutes or so before I really started to process what had actually just happened. I asked specifically, like, what is this pause? Of course, I had a severe concussion. I have brain damage.

What I'm told by the micro skull doctor is that the fact that there's nothing whatsoever, nothing from me, there's no breathing, there's no, it's just gone. Once I had put all that together and started asking those questions, it was almost like, yeah, but you didn't stay dead. Oh no, totally get that part. But can we talk about this?

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It was an emotional struggle. And the morning we got home from the first hospital, I started a journal. It was me literally just writing down exactly what I was feeling.

And I only did it for maybe 21 days. When you read it, it's just so ugly and so nasty and so negative. But that's exactly what I was feeling at the time. And it's just like, they deserve retribution. I should go take care of this. I'll go over there and murder his entire family. Like, fuck that guy. But I didn't want to live or harp on the negative, the anger.

I wanted to let that go, but at that moment, my face is so swollen, my one-year-old kid doesn't even recognize me, and this dude's walking out the street like a free man, like, ain't nothing happened, bro. You shouldn't have been on my property. So getting to the point where I could not feel angry and want to go over there and wait for the guy to come outside and just beat the brakes off of him with my bare hands on his own porch, I knew that wasn't the answer.

They wanted me to go see all these therapists and wanted to prescribe me antidepressants. And I'm diagnosed, of course, with severe PTSD from this incident. I know in my state that if you're on antidepressants, you can't carry a weapon. And I won't leave my house without a weapon. So that's not an option for me. What I ended up doing was getting into a psychedelic trip.

With the sole express purpose of healing from this. The trip I took was really a journey and the whole destination of the journey was to release this. Anger, negativity, why me? Why did I deserve that? I've always been a good person. My entire goal of taking that journey was to park all of that baggage away from me.

I had dabbled with psychedelics as a teen and into my early 20s. Didn't have any interest as I became a father and started being an adult. But upon this, it made me do some more research. So then I decided that I wanted to go hardcore. I wanted to find some double dots, which that's a paper tab of acid that's been dipped twice. So it's twice as potent. Prior to my journey, I psyched myself up.

We're going to have a great time. These are the things I want to think about. This is what I want to let go. This is a negative thought. That's got to go. This is a positive thought. This can stay. This is an evolving emotion. This can stay. This is a revolving emotion. This can go. I had this roadmap in my mind and ended up taking four hits, which was really eight.

During the actual journey, there was nothing out of place. There was nothing out of realm. I just kept focusing on and saying that I want peace and calm. I want peace and calm. I want to nothing these people. I didn't try to drive where I wanted to go. I let the journey take me where I needed to be. I've always been a firm believer no matter where you are, what you're doing, you're always going to be where you're supposed to be doing what you're supposed to be doing.

Coming out the other side of it 12 hours later, I had come to the conclusion that I wish these people everything they deserve. Good, bad, or indifferent, I wish them every single solitary thing they deserve to have happen to them. I don't like them. I don't hate them. I don't love them. I don't despise them. I nothing them. This was an act that they had completed against me, and that's what I was going to allow it to be.

When it was over, I like to cut the grass after that. So I go out and fire the mower up and I'm doing my thing with the grass. And I just have this profound washing calmness over my entire body. And I knew right then and there, like, that's the spot. Everything I wanted to accomplish with that is there. I really felt at peace with me after coming to that realization. I felt at peace with myself.

The whole thing is so profound. So going back to my father being out of my life all those years, I was told that he beat me with a cane on my back when I was six years old. So then of all the things this guy could have possibly grabbed and smashed my face with, he grabs a cane. Everything in this entire universe is interconnected. Some way, somehow, something, we're all connected. I came to be at peace with this is what it's supposed to be.

When we finally got to circuit court trial, it was January 2020. There was a giant projector screen to the right of the defendant's table and projected on that screen. They had a picture of my temple that was taken at the first hospital right after the incident. It was pretty disgusting. And just below that was a picture of her walking stick that was identical to his walking

When the jury was handed the case, they came back about 20 minutes later and they had a question for me. And the question was, did he say anything at all to you? The answer to that was no. He struck me, saw me stand up and ran in his house. So the jury proceeded to give him 10 years in prison. They expressly said, had he said anything at all to me, they would have stuck him with the 25 years.

The symptoms of PTSD are still with me. After this incident, going back to doing the same thing for work, being a repossession agent, I definitely do things a lot differently. I'm now hyper aware. I never want anyone behind my back at all for any reason whatsoever.

I have learned through time and different situations how to recognize and then try to curtail. Like I've never had like a panic attack, but I can feel where my blood pressure will start to raise and the hair on the back of my neck goes up and I'll get a little warmer than I was. So at that point, I know I need to change things right now. So I'm very much hyper aware now and wanting to understand what my mind is going through.

I do have some brain damage where I don't have great memory anymore. You know, something stupid. My wife will say, hey, can you pick up some cream on your way home this morning? Sure. I'll completely, like, she never even said it. That definitely bothers me. I feel like that's disappointing.

But it's, even now, there's times where it's rare, but I'll pull up to a repo and just looking at the house, looking at the layout, I'm like, nah, I'm not going to do this. And I'll carry on myself. I will never again not listen to my sense on this.

At 39, having my face reconstructed, and now I'm 45, and I still, I don't look in the mirror. When I go to shave, I'm looking at my beard. I'm looking at my face. And it's because I saw myself the same way for almost four decades, and he took that from me. So now what I have left is not me, but it is me.

At first, after the surgery and recovery, I started to grow my hair out long so I could cover my face with it. I didn't want to see it. Now I've come to the point after a couple of years where I shave my head. I don't try to cover it up anymore. It is what it is. My wife says it's not noticeable, but I still have that self-consciousness when I see people and they really notice it and they don't want to ask. So they just jerk their head back like, oh my God.

Most people just assume car accident. They don't assume, no, some grown man stood there and pulverized your skull with a cane. But it definitely created another obstacle that I didn't need or want.

I don't like what I see. I didn't make it that way. If I had gotten into a car wreck, maybe I would feel differently. But that face that I knew for 40 years was taken from me. So in addition to all this other stuff, I have to mourn that loss too. My face will never be ever what it was. But I came to the resolve that I just need to make peace with this. It's always going to be this.

So after the husband was convicted and given 10 years, no time served, the wife was willing to take a plea deal. And what she pled to was aggravated malicious wounding. They gave her seven years, time suspended. They gave her a class four felon status, which means if she gets a speeding ticket, automatic felony. The wife is on indefinite supervised probation until such time that my restitution is paid in full.

$105,000 plus interest. She sends me $50 a month to keep the probation officer off her ass. $50 a month, $600 a year. I wouldn't say I felt closure after the sentencing and trial, but I felt a little bit of retribution. Finally, finally, this dude had to answer for what he did

He had several charges that we found from back in the 80s and 90s of violent acts against people, but he was never convicted of it. So we weren't allowed to bring it up even. He hit some guy in the face with a metal toolbox in 1995. So finally, finally, after 75 years, he was 72 when he smashed my face. He was 75 when they convicted him. This dude finally had to answer for that.

He had no remorse. There's no remorse whatsoever from him. It was my fault. I shouldn't have been there. The whole nine. I didn't deserve something so heinous, but I see how people are so easily overcome by the dark. It's just so easy to submit to that and not want to try to get past it and be the light.

I've really made a very conscious effort to really be kind. I want to spread love and light. I want to leave people better than I found them. I want to be calm and direct and quiet and not have chaos.

I think if people just would exhibit more love in situations than immediately going right to rage and acting out and violence, just because you were shown that in the past doesn't mean you have to continue that cycle of nonsense.

I thought for a minute about finding something else to do. Maybe I could just be a regular tow truck driver again. But I then thought about all the people that have given me hugs when I'm leaving with their car. The people that want to stick their hand out and shake mine and say, thank you for being so nice. This is such an embarrassment. This is a bad day for me. Thank you. It's easy to be angry. It's hard to be happy.

And if you can put time and energy into being happy, you will spread that shit like wildfire. From this, I could have let it make me be a very bitter, nasty, hateful, spiteful person. But I can't let negative define me. I want to, when I'm dead and gone from this earth, people think about me, they smile. Man, that guy was funny. Man, that guy can make me laugh. I wanted to leave people with that.

And I refuse to let my light be extinguished by the darkness. Today's episode featured Brian White. The following is a message Brian sent to me that he wanted me to share. On January 31st, 2023, my little brother, Jonathan White, was declared brain dead after a severe asthma attack caused by cardiac failure that left him without oxygen to his brain for an unknown amount of time. He was 39.

were very devastated by his sudden unexpected passing of a very special soul. He was an organ donor, and in all this ugliness, he managed to give life to four people via organ donation. Medical colleges received some tissue in his bladder for research, and some pants were donated to search and rescue dog training. He would love to know this.

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