Peak Points | "I Was Covered in Blood" - Terrifying Moments as a Police Officer

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Speaker 3 How do you cope?

Speaker 2 So we just got in a you know Mexican standoff with him and I was covered in blood. My clothing was covered in blood.

Speaker 3 Why do you think there were no shots fired? We were being hunted.

Speaker 2 Well the older guy said the body's a gift.

Speaker 3 Kind of being recruited by the cartel.

Speaker 2 That's when I realized that there's no winning here. Not like this.
I resigned that day. She said, there's no such thing as coming back home, man.

Speaker 2 Either you change on your way back to home or the home you left changes when you're gone and you don't recognize it when you come back.

Speaker 3 How long into your career, to your law enforcement career in Tijuana,

Speaker 3 did it take for it to become real?

Speaker 2 Where

Speaker 3 this was in a fucking game?

Speaker 2 As soon as I got out, probably the second day on the job,

Speaker 2 we were kind of spread out

Speaker 2 in Baja State.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I got to see

Speaker 2 immediately

Speaker 2 the no fucks given by the cartels.

Speaker 2 So I remember

Speaker 2 me and probably eight other guys moving through downtown Tijuana in

Speaker 2 full kit, driving around in some marked vehicles and getting the order to stop from the lead car that was in front of us. And we parked aside and everybody

Speaker 2 ran out of the cars and adopted defensive positions.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 a convoy of probably, I'd say probably somewhere 15 vehicles just passed right next to us. All of them, a few of them armored.

Speaker 2 All of them were the AK-47s. Some of them had federal police uniforms.
Some of them have army uniforms.

Speaker 2 We didn't know who they were. We're getting calls from

Speaker 2 the 911 service they have down there from the municipal police that

Speaker 2 they were municipal cops, but they clearly weren't municipal cops. So we just got in a Mexican standoff with them.
Nobody shot around, but they just passed by us.

Speaker 2 We called for support from the local police,

Speaker 2 and nobody showed up.

Speaker 3 How many of you guys were there?

Speaker 2 Probably nine.

Speaker 3 Nine? Nine guys. What's that? Two cars?

Speaker 2 That's two cars, yeah.

Speaker 3 And they had 15 fucking vehicles.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so we that's when I realized that there's no winning here.

Speaker 2 Not like this.

Speaker 2 Fuck, man. There's no winning, not like this.
And

Speaker 3 why do you think there were no shots fired?

Speaker 2 They didn't feel threatened by us. They didn't have any fear.

Speaker 2 So they just passed by and they actually went to a local little restaurant there and adapted positions around it that had dinner and then went back to their cars and left. No support came on our end.

Speaker 2 So it's one of those that's when you realize how fucked you are and how no support and how there's just no backing there. This was before the Fidelity Picard administration.
Um,

Speaker 2 slowly but surely, things changed. We started getting more support, started getting more vehicles, more people coming in.

Speaker 2 Uh, we started working directly with the military and directly with some federal

Speaker 2 operational uh police forces, uh,

Speaker 2 eventually getting fear

Speaker 2 put into the the opponent, the enemy, right? The cartel guys.

Speaker 2 It took it took some time at the start of it. it was just hopeless.
Just hopeless.

Speaker 2 Going through the motions.

Speaker 2 I think it took about a year into it that a few of my friends were killed.

Speaker 2 They used to rent out hotels for us to stay in.

Speaker 2 And we had this buddy system going on. So if you wanted to go outside, you had to have one of your buddy system, right? But you would have to inform that you were going out.
They didn't inform.

Speaker 2 They went to the store. They thought it was easy.
So they just crossed the street, went to this convenience store.

Speaker 2 And they got picked up by

Speaker 2 some cartel guys dressed as federal agents. They had the blue uniforms and everything with the patches, everything, like down to every detail.

Speaker 2 And they were, you know, they were taken. They were zip-died

Speaker 2 and put into a van. They were found.
24 hours later, one of them had his ID screwed to his forehead.

Speaker 2 They We were being hunted.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 that's when, like, paranoia.

Speaker 3 Less than a year.

Speaker 3 That's less than a year.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I came out of there in a generation of 32 people.

Speaker 2 And a lot of them are gone.

Speaker 2 But those were the first really close ones to me that I saw leave, but just leave in a horrible way.

Speaker 2 They're all young, you know. Like I knew, I knew the, like, I'd just been to

Speaker 2 a party with the girl, and I met the girlfriend of one of them. And it was the things I told them,

Speaker 2 don't marry, don't get girlfriends because you don't want to leave widows.

Speaker 2 Just for perspective,

Speaker 2 it's a thing to be ashamed of or to hide

Speaker 2 if your profession is a cop, or at least it was back then.

Speaker 2 Damn. So because we're not the

Speaker 2 depending on where you were, cops are

Speaker 2 despised.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So kind of wrapping up your career,

Speaker 3 you talk about kind of being recruited by the cartel.

Speaker 3 And I kind of wanted to go a little deeper into that. And

Speaker 3 I would imagine that you're recruited.

Speaker 3 several times or had friends you had already said that you had friends that had been recruited out of the out of the police or maybe the military and to the cartel.

Speaker 2 I mean, the offer was, it was an offer.

Speaker 2 You would always get intermediaries approaching you like, hey, yeah, and like,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 this is much money. These are all that it takes for you to work with us, you know.
But

Speaker 2 it was obvious to anybody. You know, as soon as you take an offer like that, you're owned.
You're theirs.

Speaker 2 If you fuck up, if you're not useful, or if somebody finds out you're working for somebody that they're they're not a part of you'll either get arrested get killed by the rival group that you're working against

Speaker 2 um or your career ends right so i got a lot of offers a lot of them uh never took any of them um a lot of my friends and a lot of the people that i used to work with did or eventually will put were put into a position where there was no choice plata o plomo silver or lead colombian term but it's popular in mexico yeah another code for it it was one finger up and one finger down you know what do you want you want uh you want plata or plomo you know you want to be on the ground or you want to stay up here in the world of the living um

Speaker 2 i wasn't greedy uh

Speaker 2 there's a lot of people that went into policing in mexico they wanted to find a million dollars and burying a wall or something or

Speaker 2 uh or just be on the payroll of somebody. I remember going to some of the meetings at the office and seeing

Speaker 2 some new hummers outside and some of the guys owned. I was kind of scratching my head at it.

Speaker 2 A lot of us went through a certification process called CALIA. It's an American certification process.
And with that, a lot of confidence exams, polygraph testing, all this type of stuff.

Speaker 2 All of us went through it.

Speaker 2 A lot of people got kicked out or fired after they went through that process.

Speaker 2 which to us, to me, you know, I passed, so I stayed on. So I figured that all the people that had passed stayed on.
They were on the up and up.

Speaker 2 But people can be corrupted from one day to another, right? So we were careful about everything, but I felt a bit better that everybody was going through it.

Speaker 2 Administration ends, somebody comes, another administration comes in, and a landmark case declares everybody that was fired based on the polygraph exam or the confidence exams as unconstitutional.

Speaker 2 And all of a sudden you have six years' worth of people that were kicked out of the job coming back into the job, their

Speaker 2 wages being paid forward.

Speaker 2 And you had people that were suspected of seeing a lower cartel participation in the office now, back at the office.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 it got really bad.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, basically brought into the office, all the work that I was doing

Speaker 2 ended. I got an offer to work for a single side of it, basically.
They told us, hey, remember you're working here? Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well, we're going to work against these guys over here only. And we want you to come in.

Speaker 2 Okay, let me think about it. Basically, we want us to work against one side, which means you want us to work for this side.

Speaker 2 I resigned that day.

Speaker 2 There was just no getting out of it or squirming out of it or going somewhere else.

Speaker 2 I didn't have any, all the people that I knew within high-level government were gone because the administration changed.

Speaker 2 All the people that I knew in the leadership in the office were moved around and I just had no choice. So I

Speaker 2 went outside, got my resignation printed out, signed it, handed everything in in a duffel bag, handed in my MP5, my gun, my badge, everything, radio.

Speaker 2 Got myself into a car, called some of my friends, my American friends.

Speaker 2 Actually,

Speaker 2 two of them went down there, kind of helped me out to get out of there.

Speaker 2 Marines,

Speaker 2 God bless the United States Marine Corps.

Speaker 2 And they helped me cross the border. And

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 family in tow by this point, which was, that was probably the hardest part.

Speaker 3 I know everybody out there has to be

Speaker 3 just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force feed us.

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Speaker 2 I had choices in the U.S. that I didn't have in Mexico.

Speaker 3 Yeah. It sounds like China's taking a major interest in

Speaker 3 the cartels in Mexico. And

Speaker 3 I've operated around China overseas several times. And those motherfuckers are just as ruthless, if not more,

Speaker 3 than some of the cartels.

Speaker 3 Why is China's interest in Mexico becoming so strong?

Speaker 2 It's your Achilles heel as a country. It's your number two largest consumer of American products in the world.
It's a very destable place that's getting

Speaker 2 destabilized even more.

Speaker 2 So this whole weird thought process that Americans have that the cartels are getting their fentanyl from China, from some sort of criminal element within China. Like, let's be clear.

Speaker 2 Nothing comes out of China, nothing happens in China without the Chinese state being involved or knowing about it.

Speaker 2 This is a place where Big Brother is the real thing, right? Everybody's monitored. You saw it during the COVID shutdown.
You saw it with the way they're handling the Uyghur population.

Speaker 2 So nothing coming out of China is coming out of China without them knowing.

Speaker 2 So, so all that fentanyl being brought out of China into Mexico that's being put into heroin or some of these fentanyl fabrication sites that are being found in Mexico now with clear instruction by Chinese

Speaker 2 laboratory specialists. That's not a private entity.
That's not the triads or that's not a criminal activity. That's a Chinese state sponsored activity.

Speaker 2 It's clear as day to anybody that kind of looks into this.

Speaker 2 One thing is regional destabilization.

Speaker 2 That usually happens when they want something from that country. So one thing happened politically

Speaker 2 within the US and Mexico relationship, the Trump phenomenon, right?

Speaker 2 Trump came into office and said, we're going to take a lot of our business out of Mexico, going to bring it back. That was one of the things

Speaker 2 that he said that was going to happen and did happen. A lot of businesses took their...

Speaker 2 took their plants and American businesses took their plants and companies out of Mexico.

Speaker 2 Instead of it affecting Mexico in a negative way chinese plants

Speaker 2 and chinese companies surplanted them immediately no

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 something happened in that interval where somebody on this side figured out that's probably a mistake and things started balancing out interesting thing to note we currently have in mexico a leftist president that is open chavista that's open maduro supporter but somehow there's an open and like really friendly relationship with the u.s when it comes to the president and uh Trump and the president down there.

Speaker 2 I think Trump is very much aware of the danger that Mexico is in with the Chinese influence and the foreign influence within the country.

Speaker 2 Another factor that doesn't get talked a lot about is that Mexico has probably the largest mineable deposits of lithium right on the border. And

Speaker 2 China,

Speaker 2 through a Canadian company, actually won the rights to mine that a few years back and their mining rights got canceled. And I'm not

Speaker 2 going to go into Alex Jones' territory, right? But

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 the conspiracy part of it.

Speaker 2 Right where

Speaker 2 that mining discovery was made, that's where

Speaker 2 the Mormon massacre happened.

Speaker 2 So it's a key place and things happen there. It's a very strange kind of environment for all the influences and all the pushing and pulling that's happening in that area.

Speaker 2 Some of the people that I've talked to

Speaker 2 in the security field, some of the people that I've talked to in the security field outside of the friendly neighbors of the U.S.,

Speaker 2 like in Mexico, there's a lot of Cuban intelligence

Speaker 2 service operations going on all over the place, just like places like Venezuela. You can see a clear partnership and influence with China there, right?

Speaker 2 It's in their best interest to gain ownership or control over a place like Mexico, which is going currently going through

Speaker 2 a lot of bad stuff,

Speaker 2 a lot of crime, a lot of destabilization. There's whole swaths of Mexico that are controlled by cartels.

Speaker 2 The new generation cartel, I think, in a way is a product of that outside influence. It's the only cartel that grew during the COVID epidemic shutdown.

Speaker 2 That tells me that there's some sort of outside influence from China there.

Speaker 3 Are you seeing a lot of Chinese coming into Mexico and kind of setting up shop?

Speaker 2 The largest, largest, one of the largest cash seizures was

Speaker 2 done

Speaker 2 on a guy, Jen Li Segon, a Chinese Mexican national, somewhere in the vicinity of $100 million cash found at his house. He was trafficking fentanyl legally

Speaker 2 and meth precursors into the country. And there's some sort of paperwork legality.
So there's some shady stuff going on there.

Speaker 3 How long has this shit been going on with China?

Speaker 2 As soon as the U.S. got a taste for meth, I I think that's probably the start of it.

Speaker 3 When was that? 10 years ago?

Speaker 2 Probably a bit more further back than probably 15 years ago. 15 years? Yeah.
Then there's this been, this has just been exponentially growing.

Speaker 3 Is it weird?

Speaker 3 How do I phrase this?

Speaker 3 Are you seeing more and more Chinese people? Is it becoming like a common thing?

Speaker 2 One of the largest communities of Chinese

Speaker 2 nationals

Speaker 2 are growing all along the border.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 2 Right. So,

Speaker 2 I mean, again,

Speaker 2 this is not something. This is not something in the realm of conspiracy.

Speaker 2 This is clearly happening

Speaker 2 out in the open

Speaker 2 in a lot of regards. And people can research this and

Speaker 2 see it for themselves.

Speaker 2 To deny that the... largest cartel in Mexico has grew during the COVID epidemic because they clearly had a supply chain chain from China.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Is to deny what's right in front of your face, to deny that more and more Narenco-made military-grade stuff is popping up in print places in Mexico is also missing something that's in front of your face.

Speaker 2 And to deny that,

Speaker 2 so how many people die from fentanyl-related issues here in the U.S.?

Speaker 3 Tons.

Speaker 2 If you want to confront a military, the U.S. is a superior military force.

Speaker 2 how can you corrode that

Speaker 3 it makes perfect sense generational and the thing with china is they're fucking extremely effective no way at whatever they do

Speaker 3 they have a lifetime president yeah when one one being they don't

Speaker 3 they don't fucking play by rules either yeah and uh you know china will come in and uh

Speaker 3 they'll open a whorehouse immediately to start gathering intelligence because people are going to go to the fucking whorehouse. They're going to fuck a Chinese hooker.

Speaker 3 The hooker is going to milk them for information. The information gets to where it needs to go.
It happens like that.

Speaker 2 It's a Cuban intelligence services that are operating all over Central America and specifically Venezuela. That's how they act, right? That's they're

Speaker 2 people are playing checkers with these guys that are playing chess and they play the long game. That's something I think the U.S.
doesn't get.

Speaker 2 Example: China has a lifetime president.

Speaker 2 Cuba has a lifetime regime with

Speaker 2 the Castros. They're playing a really long game against

Speaker 2 a country that has elections

Speaker 2 and politics change every

Speaker 2 every

Speaker 2 four, eight years.

Speaker 2 And they see

Speaker 2 the clear line and divide. So, I mean, there's blood in the water.
And I think they can smell that.

Speaker 3 Everybody's taking advantage of it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And

Speaker 2 again, foreign eyes,

Speaker 2 I'm new here. I'm trying to earn my way into becoming an American.

Speaker 2 But I still have that outside perspective. People getting offended by, you know, the whole Chinese virus wording or

Speaker 2 China isn't the villain and there's a country and people kind of coming into the defense of that. People within the NVA not wanting to speak up about China because

Speaker 2 the Chinese are the best,

Speaker 2 one of their best clients as far as buying some of the rights to launching some of these NBA games. Disney.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 you can't say anything wrong.

Speaker 2 How surreal is it that you can't speak critically about China if you work for the NBA?

Speaker 2 I mean, that is outside of the, that's

Speaker 2 outside of the realm of what I thought being an American was.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Right. So I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's a weird time.

Speaker 2 But I think that's

Speaker 2 they're clearly waging some sort of long-term war campaign against the U.S. And

Speaker 2 Mexico is being utilized as a as a tool for that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 How do you cope with all the shit that you've seen? We talked about

Speaker 3 some of the stuff you've seen. We've talked about, you know, the disposing bodies and some of the gruesome stuff that you've seen the cartel do down there.

Speaker 3 We covered the fact that you've gone on 2,700 fucking times.

Speaker 2 There's no numbers.

Speaker 2 It's just the blur of years and blurs. I don't know how many of those.

Speaker 3 Well, you know, nine years.

Speaker 2 That whole experience.

Speaker 2 Humor be a big part of it, I think. One of the things I've always recognized with all the people that I meet that have, you know, people like you that have an experience base, uh,

Speaker 2 other people like that that had kind of went through their own thing. There's certain commonalities that I see in people like that.

Speaker 2 Um, humor is one of them. Usually, I could tell a lot about somebody if

Speaker 2 they don't have a sense of humor, you know, they take themselves too seriously. There's something, there's something amiss there.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 2 um, humor is one of those big things that has helped me out. Kind of,

Speaker 2 it's a good mask, yeah,

Speaker 2 it's a good cloaking device, humor.

Speaker 3 It helps get through the misery when you're in the middle of it, too.

Speaker 2 I had this

Speaker 2 one of my closest friends

Speaker 2 when I was working. His name was Haramiyo.
Very infamous name. I've kind of made him famous.

Speaker 2 It's my way of keeping him alive.

Speaker 2 He was one of the older guys that I worked with. He was a mess.
I mean, he was a dumpster fire inside of a dumpster fire of a person. But he was very loyal.
He was a very good guy.

Speaker 2 He gave me some of the biggest laughs in my life, usually unintentional, you know.

Speaker 2 He'd always kind of basically, you know, keep me laughing.

Speaker 2 He would push me into going into weird places and kind of getting out of my comfort zone. And just...

Speaker 2 taking every day as if it's the last one.

Speaker 2 We went on some weird adventures, including one that included a donkey show, which we won't get into.

Speaker 2 And we would always get shit-faced drunk every time we would come back from something.

Speaker 2 There's a word that I discovered or learned about up here in the U.S. called PTSD.

Speaker 2 It's not a word that we know down there in Mexico.

Speaker 2 There's no concept of a veteran or

Speaker 2 a support network for people that go through the experiences that I went through. A lot of people that go through those experiences now, there's

Speaker 2 no talk about that.

Speaker 2 There's a sense of machismo.

Speaker 2 You just take it, you know, it's fine. You know, just don't go crazy.

Speaker 2 So you'd get a few days off. You know,

Speaker 2 you get to leave and you would go get drunk and come back and

Speaker 2 you would get asked if you were okay and you would lie your ass off and say yes and just go through with it all just go through the motions.

Speaker 2 I'm into history, and I like reading about other warrior cultures and people that did, you know, things that they had to do. You know, PTSD has always been with us.
Yeah,

Speaker 2 it's been this is the this, this, what you talked about, your experience, what I'm talking about. We're not talking about anything new, this is the history of the world.

Speaker 2 Yeah, um, but I think there's something that happened culturally that separated us from

Speaker 2 how Beatle used to handle some of these things, or how some people would talk about some of these things.

Speaker 2 From

Speaker 2 spirit quest, as they used to kill them, or

Speaker 2 finding yourself, or

Speaker 2 going off on these pilgrimages, or

Speaker 2 whatever form they took, ceremony.

Speaker 2 A ceremony is simply

Speaker 2 performing an act with a symbology just to convince your subconscious mind of something.

Speaker 2 So from going to Mass and eating a a cracker that's supposed to be the body of Jesus and drinking wine that's supposed to be the blood of Jesus, there's a symbology there,

Speaker 2 to getting, to get it, to getting handed a silver coin at the start of a leadership position and getting told that you're going to get another one because you go into it knowing it's going to end.

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Speaker 2 I think some of those things are missing in some of our

Speaker 2 kind of modern way of approaching some of these things. Some of these things have been amputated from us.

Speaker 2 We're suffering from a phantom limb syndrome when it comes to some of these things,

Speaker 2 What happens after? Like, I grew up having parties at the cemetery during Day of the Dead.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I get a weird feeling every time I travel up here and I see empty cemeteries with no people there.

Speaker 2 It's like a

Speaker 2 forgotten

Speaker 3 space.

Speaker 2 There's no relationship there.

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 2 I think that whole culture of suck it up, be a man,

Speaker 2 go through it.

Speaker 2 I get that.

Speaker 2 It worked.

Speaker 3 It fucking worked. You know, it works when you're in.

Speaker 3 It works when you're in it.

Speaker 3 And it makes you fucked up.

Speaker 2 When you're off the bus.

Speaker 3 When you're out, you're fucked.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, my mom used to say that whole,

Speaker 2 like, I'll quote that. I'll give that quote again.

Speaker 2 I went through a horrible

Speaker 2 few bad situations, but I think one of the first ones,

Speaker 2 the war that I fought was at home

Speaker 2 with an enemy that spoke the same language that I did. Every now and then we would share funerary homes with the enemy.

Speaker 2 The counter guys were burying burial, were being mourned over on that side of the street, and we were having our services for our guys who were here.

Speaker 2 So it's different, just it was

Speaker 2 different in that way.

Speaker 2 I had a very horrible thing happen.

Speaker 2 Very traumatic. I lost a few people.

Speaker 2 And I was covered in blood. My clothing was covered in blood.

Speaker 2 My sneakers, my socks, feel in my toes. And blood has a tendency to kind of dry out and crust a little bit.

Speaker 2 I remember I wrote the reports that I had to write and talked to the people that I had to talk. And I was

Speaker 2 told to go to the hotel and wash up and come back the second day. I got in the car and drove straight home,

Speaker 2 like unconsciously, just drove to my parents' house. I drove probably three hours in the night straight there.

Speaker 2 I showed up some time in the early mornings, and my mom opened the door.

Speaker 2 She saw,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 she didn't say anything. She sat me down, took my clothing off,

Speaker 2 put in the washer,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 made me some coffee. She didn't ask anything.

Speaker 2 The next morning, I passed out for a bit.

Speaker 2 And she asked me that, what do you want to do?

Speaker 2 I said, I want to go home.

Speaker 2 She said,

Speaker 2 there's no such thing as going back home, Ed.

Speaker 2 Either you change on your way back to home,

Speaker 2 or the home you left changes when you're gone and you don't recognize it when you come back.

Speaker 2 So she told me, going back home is that trains left the station. There's no going back home.

Speaker 2 So you have to figure out what that looks like for your next.

Speaker 2 That was very

Speaker 2 mind-altering.

Speaker 2 She lived through a lot herself, so

Speaker 2 she was very wise.

Speaker 3 Sounds like it.

Speaker 2 In her own way, she told me to suck it up.

Speaker 2 I stood up and

Speaker 2 I remember smelling my clothes. They were like downy fresh, you know.

Speaker 2 She bagged me a lunch, got in the car.

Speaker 2 I saw all the missing, missed phone calls on my cell phone.

Speaker 2 People were angry. I went back and faced the music.
Told me, where'd you go? So I just needed, I just needed a moment.

Speaker 2 I got reprimanded for leaving.

Speaker 3 Damn.

Speaker 2 But, you know, it was,

Speaker 2 I realized that

Speaker 2 there was no going back home.

Speaker 2 So that gave me focus on going straight.

Speaker 2 uh, surviving, figuring out what that, uh, where that road would lead me.

Speaker 3 I was aimless, it changes you, yeah.

Speaker 3 How long did it take for you to realize your mom was bugging right on the money?

Speaker 2 I'd say,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 probably, probably

Speaker 2 a few days after she passed away,

Speaker 2 she

Speaker 2 she uh

Speaker 2 she she struggled for a long time with a few issues um

Speaker 2 and uh before she went she told me to leave that job

Speaker 2 leave that thankless job and

Speaker 2 that's not that's no longer the war you should fight that's not your war anymore

Speaker 2 uh she passed away and uh

Speaker 2 I did a lot of self-reflection again I got two days off to mourn my mom

Speaker 3 damn um

Speaker 2 She got to meet my kid, which I think was

Speaker 2 very soothing to my

Speaker 2 mourning process. And

Speaker 2 everything kind of aligned after that. She passed away and you know, a few things kind of shifted politically down there and I had to leave.

Speaker 2 I kind of, she gave me that push at the end, I think.

Speaker 2 I remember thinking back to that moment and I kind of wrote it down.

Speaker 2 I've shared that on,

Speaker 2 I've shared that openly a few times.

Speaker 2 I remember and every time I smell that morning coffee, I remember that moment. It kind of brings me back to that

Speaker 2 weird moment where there's no more innocence.

Speaker 2 You're facing your mom and you're not,

Speaker 2 you're not what you were.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I know that feeling.

Speaker 3 Sorry to hear that, but, you know, sounds like she was looking out for you, man.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, but

Speaker 3 and sounds like she still is

Speaker 3 after she passed.

Speaker 2 She's she's always here.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Everything I do,

Speaker 2 she's always been like a big inspiration. It's one of those teachers that you don't recognize as a teacher until they're not there anymore.

Speaker 2 One of the things she used to do and pushed me to was volunteer work. And um

Speaker 2 yeah we would go and feed some of the uh

Speaker 2 some of the people at the tijuana canal and heroin addicts

Speaker 2 uh she gave me

Speaker 2 she gave me the eyes to see humanity even even at the lowest levels um i remember she had one of the first self-defense classes i gave was through a church group that would work with some of the prostitutes in Tijuana.

Speaker 2 And that was my mom pushing me to do that.

Speaker 2 You knew all this cool shit. You're thinking of some expert and stuff like that.
Go teach them. They need it.

Speaker 2 She gave me eyes.

Speaker 2 Instead of dehumanizing people, I think that's

Speaker 2 probably one of the biggest things she gave me was the human factor. So

Speaker 2 I could relate to people and talk to people.

Speaker 2 despite that they were trying to kill me only a few moments later.

Speaker 2 I could sit them down, give them a phone, have them phone maybe a family member to tell them they're okay,

Speaker 2 give them a cigarette,

Speaker 2 uh,

Speaker 2 give them a swig of tequila, and talk to people.

Speaker 2 Um, that's a

Speaker 2 powerful armor that she gave me with that,

Speaker 2 and it's something that I've been using to try and process that whole

Speaker 2 life that I left behind. Again,

Speaker 2 the world has ended for me a few times over, yeah.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 um,

Speaker 2 part of my process to kind of,

Speaker 2 there is no getting better. There is no healing.
There's there's learning how to live with things.

Speaker 2 There's learning how to how to find a new normal,

Speaker 2 how to find a new center or a new base. That's what I think I'm kind of looking towards.

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