The cop who should have been dead
Niagara constable Neal Ridley was nearly killed in a gun battle in 2015. On Monday, he’ll be running the Boston Marathon, a feat he hopes will help his life return to some kind of normal
THERE REALLY IS A WHITE LIGHT
you see as you’re dying.
He saw it that day as he wobbled on his hands and knees, frantically watching the blood from his neck grow into a larger and larger puddle beneath him.
And as he heard the gun battle between the shooter and his fellow police officers rage terrifyingly above him. The glow was only the size of a pinhead but it was clearly there.
“I knew this was it,” Neal Ridley says.
It should’ve been. Just about everyone agrees on that.
He should’ve been dead. Says so himself. Yet on Monday, two and a half years after the shooting, he’ll be running the Boston Marathon.
Want to read about a miracle? Here you go.
Ridley had been working as a financial adviser for 10 years when he learned the police were hiring. Being a cop had been his childhood dream. Trouble was, now that it might be a reality he was horribly out of shape.
“I couldn’t run to the end of my block,” the 42-year-old says.
He’d been a runner in high school and was actually pretty good at it back then. Even reached regionals a few times. But when he graduated and moved on in life, he kind of left it behind. Still, when he pulled on his sneakers and hit the road for a jog, it came back pretty quickly.
He did a few half marathons. In 2012, he ran the Around The Bay Race and finished in under three hours, though he says 30k almost did him in. Still, having been able to finish, he figured he should probably up the ante a bit and do a marathon.
In his first, he crossed the line in 3:30. Somehow he came to learn he was only 15 minutes off the qualifying time for the Boston Marathon, the granddaddy of the distance-running game. This immediately became his new bucket list item.
Race after race, he got closer and closer until he hit 3:17 at the Erie Marathon in Pennsylvania in September 2015. Two minutes is all that separated him from his goal. So he signed up for the Road2Hope Marathon here in Hamilton eight weeks away to finally get over the hump.
In the meantime, he still had to work.
On the Thanksgiving weekend — Oct. 10, to be exact — he and his partner were dispatched to an apartment building in Fenwick (just southwest of St. Catharines) to check on a distraught man who might have some weapons.
“We’re basically there to set eyes on the door and ensure public safety,” Ridley says.
The third-floor hallway outside the apartment was narrow. The nine-year veteran of the service had been standing 15 feet from the door carrying on a conversation with the guy about getting him to the hospital for some medical care when the subject announced he was coming out. Which he did, with his hands up.
But as the man approached, he wasn’t responding to instructions, wouldn’t stop moving toward the officers and wouldn’t go down on his knees.
When he got to within three feet, he suddenly lifted his shirt. Which is when Ridley saw the butt of the gun.
“I turned (to my partner) and yelled ‘Gun!’”
That was the only word he got out.
Cops call a .45 calibre bullet “the flying ashtray.” It’s huge. When it slammed into him, Ridley says it felt like a professional baseball player had swung as hard as he could with an aluminum bat. The projectile ripped into his right shoulder blowing a chunk of bone apart, exited by his collarbone, re-entered his neck where it emerged again and winged off his jaw.
Knocked off his feet, he scrambled to his hands and knees. Unable to breathe and staring at so much of his own blood pouring onto the floor, he was dazed but clear-headed enough to know this was bad.
“This is how you die,” he remembers thinking. “This is how you will die.”
He doesn’t recall if it was at that exact moment or a few seconds later that he thought about his wife and two young sons and wondered what they were going to think.
Had they known him long enough to remember him? Would it somehow make it easier for them that he’d died in the line of duty? What would his wife do?
In the midst of all this instantaneous reflection, mayhem was going on around him.
The suspect shot eight more times, grazing Ridley’s forearm with one while another bullet somehow ricocheted off his utility belt. The other three officers in the hallway had returned fire. In total 17 shots — including the first one that felled him — had been fired.
In the midst of it all, Ridley somehow ended up back on his feet, feeling like he was being pulled up by strings controlled by a puppeteer. Then did what he could to help control the dire situation.
The province’s Special Investigations Unit would later clear the officers of any wrongdoing. But that was irrelevant at this moment. He was in desperate shape.
A doctor would later hold his thumb and forefinger as close as they could be without touching and say that’s how close Ridley came to a truly horrible fate. Millimetres separated him from being gone. Maybe less.
“I should be dead,” Ridley says. The bullet could’ve lodged in his spine, paralyzing him. It could’ve shredded his jugular vein or ripped his esophagus apart. That would’ve killed him. So, too, if it had found his brain. Best-case scenario might’ve been that it had simply blown his jaw clear off, leaving him unable to eat or talk and horribly disfigured.
But he lived. He can walk and talk. Sure, he winces and grabs at his shoulder every few minutes. It still hurts. But he can hug his wife and kids. So it’s all better. Actually, not exactly.
It’s been 918 days. The physical scar on his neck is there but it’s healed. You have to look closely even to see it now. The emotional scars are something else.
“I haven’t slept comfortably since the day this happened,” he says.
The other night he jumped out of bed during what he describes as one of the scariest things he’s ever experienced. It was only a nightmare but it was so real.
He gets anxious if his back is exposed while sitting somewhere. If he sees someone who reminds him of the shooter, he reacts. He has flashbacks. And he’s largely alone with these challenges.
He went to South Carolina a while back to speak to 33 cops who were dealing with being involved in critical situations. He was the only one who’d been shot. There aren’t many like him to whom he can go to for counsel.
Late in 2016, he began thinking he had to set a goal to get his life back to some kind of normal. Which is when he started thinking about that Road2Hope marathon in Hamilton he was never able to run.
The thought stuck. Four months after his final surgery, he pulled on his running shoes and went for a gentle exploratory jog just to see what would happen.
He sobbed as he ran. His shoulder hurt.
But it answered his questions. “I came home and I was like, ‘I think I can do this,’” he says.
It’s a long way from a relaxed five-kilometre run to breaking 3:15 over 42.195 kilometres. But no pain he’d feel on the road could compare to what he’s been through, he told himself.
So he got working at it. He ran the Around The Bay in 2:16 and by May, he lowered his marathon time at a race in Buffalo to exactly 3:15. Unfortunately, he had to
beat 3:15 to qualify for Boston. So he headed back to Erie — the last marathon he ran before the shooting — for one final push. It was glorious. He was in great form. As he cruised across the finish line in 3:09, he let out a scream of unbridled joy.
“It was a personal vindication that not all of me was lost,” he says.
This still doesn’t mean everything is back to normal and perfect. He remains off work on medical leave.
He still battles anxiety and depression.
Just last week, the shooter — who’d been shot in the head but survived — was declared unfit to stand trial. Ridley doesn’t say much about him but he appears frustrated with that decision.
He’s alive, though. He can race. He can chase goals and achieve them. He can see his boys grow up.
He was able to go with the other cops on scene that day to receive the Medal of Bravery from Governor General Julie Payette.
And on Monday in Boston, he’ll get to run alongside his twin brother — who qualified for Boston with the exact same 3:09 at a different event.
All things considered, it’s good. It’s really good.
“I was knocked down that day,” Ridley says, “and I got up with different eyes.”
Eyes that no longer see a white light in front of him.
Instead, eyes that see a yellow and blue strip painted across Boylston Street that simply says FINISH.
‘‘ I was knocked down that day, and I got up with different eyes. CONST. NEAL RIDLEY