44 | Fourteen Bullets

On May 5, 1994, South Australian police officer Derrick McManus was shot 14 times in under five seconds and left bleeding on the ground for nearly three hours while a 40-hour siege raged around him. In this raw conversation, Derrick reconstructs those first seconds, the long climb through surgeries and rehab (including a steel plate in his forearm), and the mental frameworks that kept him calm when survival looked impossible. We talk suffering, meaning, and mortality—and what his ordeal ultimately took, gave, and taught him about human durability.

Story Producer: Dan Bush

If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story! Please email us at [e-mail] We’d love to hear your story!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
My name's Derek McManus.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
In nineteen ninety four, I was shot fourteen times. I
was bleeding from multiple massive injuries, and the first doctor
to get to me said that I was about thirty
seconds from death and he thought I was already dead
when he first got there. Since then, I've been talking

(00:40):
about what I now call human durability, and this our
ability to sustain optimal performance under immense pressures.

Speaker 1 (00:53):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories

(01:15):
to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
for some listener and discretion as advised.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
So I was born in Scotland, came out here when
I was three to Australia. I did bring my parents
with me. I was brought up in Elizabeth, which is
a suburb which was built for immigrants from the UK
in Adelaide, South Australia. Essentially, it was a tough place

(01:48):
to grow up. It's become kind of like the Bronx
of Adelaide. It's a tough place to grow up. My
parents were absolutely exceptional and brought us up.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
In a very loving environment.

Speaker 3 (02:03):
But I always had a passion to do something to
help people, and I became a police officer at the
age of seventeen. I went through training for three years,
graduated when I was twenty and have been a police
officer all my life. So policing originally was appealing to
me because the hero in my life as I was

(02:24):
growing up with my big brother, and my big brother
wanted to be a police officer, and I've just gone
I can't think of anything else, so I'm going to
be a police officer as well. My whole family said,
you only want to do it because Brian's doing it,
and I've got no no my idea. My brother changed
his mind and he became a butcher. I couldn't change
my mind otherwise that would prove every one of my

(02:45):
family rights. So that took me into policing. I absolutely
loved doing the job. But I wasn't one of the
passionate police officers that eat, breathe, sleeps policing every holiday,
you're going visit other police officers.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
That wasn't me. But I really enjoyed what I did.
But I got to a.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
Point where I was looking for another challenge and I
was actually looking outside the police department, and then somebody
said to me, why don't you try Star Group, which
is special task and rescue, high risk, arrest, hostage, siege,
counter terrorism, cliff rescue, cave rescue, mine rescue, helicopter operations.
It's police, but it's the equivalent of your Marines. It's

(03:29):
the equivalent of your Delta Force. I was trained by
our military elite, which is the SAS, which is the
equivalent of Delta Force. I was trained by them in
counter terrorism, so we're operating.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
At that level.

Speaker 3 (03:44):
But our skills are very similar to what theirs are.
And I've gone that sounds interesting. And when I got
into that session, that became my passion. I absolutely loved
that environment. It gave me all the challenges that I need,
all the adrenaline that I needed, all the stepping up
to leadership that I needed, all the problem solving creativity

(04:07):
that I needed to overcome those challenges.

Speaker 2 (04:09):
It did become my passion.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Third of May nineteen ninety four, just finished having a
veranda and cardboard built on the back of the house,
and as I left for work, my wife said to me,
when you get home tonight, we are going to have
a Scones jam cream and a cup of tea underneath
our brand new veranda. And so when I left work,
that's what I had a picture. I'm coming home to

(04:39):
this beautiful little celebration of this new extension to our house.
And the day was an ordinary day and I rode
my bike twenty kilometers my push bike twenty kimas to work.
I did an hour of exercise paid intense training.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
When I first got to work. That's part of Star Group.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
Once I finished that intense training, I then went and
played police basketball, which is a social basketball. My resting
heart rate at the time was thirty eight. I was
reasonably physically fit. We got a call around about probably
eleven o'clock in the morning to say we've got this offender.

(05:22):
We've dealt with him a couple of times before and
had interactions with him. We know that there's a potential
for him to be violent. He has threatened to shoot
police in the past, never ever done it, never acted
anything on violence, never done anything, but he's had these threats.
So Star Group are asked to do a high risk
arrest of this offender. On the day, we had a

(05:44):
really in depth briefing. We knew what we were doing,
but everything was just normal. We'd certainly been in situations
where we had arrested people in high risk situation. They'd
been armed with weapons, they had been armed with machetes

(06:05):
and swords, and just highly trained, violent people and unpredictable people.
So I've been in those situations a fair bit prior
to This was nothing new to us, and we went
in as prepared as we could, knowing what was possible,
but also knowing that this person has never done anything
of violence. So we couldn't just go in and smash

(06:28):
the door down and arrest this violent person. He just
threatened violence, he's ever actually done anything, so we had
to do it the socially friendly way and lock on
the door, ask him to come to the door, and
let him make a mistake before we could take action.

(06:51):
As I'm approaching the house, I'm thinking to myself, the
offenders inside the house, his wife is inside the house,
his two young children inside the house. And it's going
through my head. What might that impact be if there
becomes a firefight and I have to start shooting, I
may hit him, I may hit his wife, I may
hit one of the children. These things are running through

(07:12):
my head. As I'm driving up, I get out of
the car. My passenger, another police officer in Star Group
gets out of the car. On the other side. Two
people from Star Group in the car behind me get out.
They follow us up to the house. I've approached the
corner of the house. I'm standing on the corner of
the house. I watch the sergeant knock on the door

(07:33):
and call out to the offender, mister Grosso, it's the police.
We want to talk to you. There's no answer at
this stage. I moved down the side of the house
towards this glass sliding door because I knew that there
was an opportunity for us to go in through this
sliding door more effectively, more efficiently, safer and faster.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
And as I.

Speaker 3 (07:58):
Approach this glass sliding door, there's curtains across the door,
heavy curtains. There's no way in the world. He could
see me through those curtains. I felt safe to stand
in front of them. There was no shadow being cast
onto the curtains, so it was safe to be there
because he couldn't see me. But there was a small
gap between the end of the curtain and where the

(08:20):
door handle is.

Speaker 4 (08:21):
Now.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
I know there's a risk, but I figure that risk
is reasonably small, and everything we do carries a risk
in this environment. So I think to myself, I'm just
going to reach across air sif doors open. As I
reach out, all I know is I'm suddenly falling to
the ground. He fired eighteen times with a SKK Chinese

(08:45):
military weapon, with the same bullets that the Chinese use
when they go to war. They fired eighteen times and
hit me fourteen times. I don't feel any pain, I
don't feel any impact. I don't even hear the sound
of gunfire. All I'm I know as I'm suddenly falling
to the ground, and I start getting angry with myself
and it's spirating myself absolutely livid. How could I be

(09:09):
so stupid to fall for no reason. I'm about halfway
to the ground and I slowly look over at this
sliding door and I see there are small round holes
there that hadn't been there just a moment before. And
then I hear the sound look on fire somewhere in
the distance. I still haven't felt any impact. I still

(09:30):
haven't felt any pain. But as I'm falling to the ground,
I start thinking to myself, Derek, you're falling because you're
being shot. Don't be too hard on yourself, because if
you're getting shot, it's quite acceptable to fall over. And
that is literally what I thought. This was because I

(09:50):
believe I was prepared so well. I've gone through the
thought process if I get shot, what's it going to
feel like?

Speaker 2 (09:56):
What am I going to do?

Speaker 3 (09:57):
That I was able to start processing and understand I'm
being shot.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
I now have a plan.

Speaker 3 (10:04):
Of action that I'm going to put into place. I
fall to the ground. I fall onto my back. My
feet are pointing directly of where the bullets are coming from.
My head's facing away.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
He's still shooting me.

Speaker 3 (10:19):
He fired eighteen times in less than five seconds. The
only two bullets I remember fearing hit me up while
I'm lying on the ground on my back, and two
bullets hit my left thigh. The first bullet hits me
and time slows down, feels like these two bullets are
thirty seconds. In actual fact, they're about that length at time.

(10:41):
And as I'm lying on my back, the first one
hits me, and it's like a sledgehammer. A shockwaves through
my body all the way to the top of my head.
And then that shock wave slowly comes back down my
body again, back down to the point of impact. And
then the second bullet hits me again. It's that sledgehammer,
it's that shockwave. It's eemingly thirty seconds. And I'm thinking

(11:01):
to myself, how can I lie here and just accept
being shot. I wanted to fire back, and I knew
that I could not see the offender inside. All I
can see is this dark door a curtain behind it.
But I can hear the sound of gunfire, and I

(11:22):
just want to fire in the direction of that to
give him something to worry about, give him some reason
to stop shooting and run and hide himself.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
As I line up to fire back.

Speaker 3 (11:35):
I start thinking to myself, I'm firing along the length
of my body. At the other end of my body
are my feet. My feet are pointing up, and I
know that I need to get up just that little
bit so I can shoot over the top of my feet.
But as I lift my upper body up, I've got
a flat vest on, I've got weaponry. My upper body

(11:55):
is much heavier than my feet, and as I lift
my upper body up, come up the counterbalance. And the
thought runs through my head. If I shoot now, there's
a real chance I may shoot myself in the foot.
And if I shoot myself in the foot, the guys
at work are going to give me shit for the
rest of my life. And that's literally what I'm thinking

(12:17):
at this point. It doesn't stop me acting, it does
not delay anything at all. But I had this thought
outside the square, and then I still took that action.
I wanted to fire back six or seven times. I
couldn't see the target. I knew I had fifteen rounds
in my weapon. As I pulled the trigger, instead of

(12:38):
shooting six or seven times, I actually fired thirteen times.
He fired, I fired back, he fired again, And that
was all within five seconds. I now roll to my
right a couple of times, barrel roll along the ground.
I get to my feet. I'm dealing with some massive injuries.

(12:58):
I later talked to the doctors and they say, I
don't know how I stood, but I stand up. I
start walking, and I find I can only stagger.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Now.

Speaker 3 (13:07):
I've lost thirty percent of the muscle in my left thigh,
my right achilles tendon, eighty percent of the thickness of
my right achilles tendon has been taken out. My forearm
is broken in two places because a bullet went through
my radius and severed the radial archery. There's a piece
of shrapnel in my right wrist and that has severed
the ulner archery in my right wrist. I've got two

(13:29):
bullets of my stomach, and I lose forty five centimeters
of bowl in my stomach. But I stagger around the corner,
and I'm looking for somewhere safe to hide. And my
legs start to give way, and I know that I
just need to lean against the wall to gather my thoughts.
And as I lean against the walls, another quite hilarious

(13:49):
story in this moment. This flash over to the original
Naked Gun movie. One of the opening scenes where OJ
Simpson goes on to a boat to arrest half a
dozen offenders. He tries to break into the room on
the boat, stuffs that up. When he gets in, they
start shooting him. He's getting filled full of holes. But

(14:11):
he puts his hand out to balance himself, but puts
it on a hot combustion eater and burns his hand.
And then he falls against the door and gets weight
painted on his jacket. And that's the scene that ran
through my mind, because as I lean against the wall,
my whole hand folds back along the top of my forearm.
My forearm is broken in two places. There is no

(14:34):
support for my wrist that completely folds on top of itself.
And I look at that and I have this flash
over to the naked gun, and I just say to myself, damn,
this is not a good day. And that's how calm
I was in that circumstance. I knew that if I

(14:54):
get shot, there are going to be some challenges within it,
but I've already s set myself up with a mindset
to be able to manage it. So I knew that
where I was at that time isn't a safe place.
I know that I need to move to the next
corner of the house. And as I move away from
that house, my legs grow weaker still and I drop

(15:15):
to my knees. I'm crawling along on my hands and knees.
I've gone around the next corner of the house and
I look up in front of me, and there in
front of me is a fence and there is no
way that I have the energy to be able to
climb over this fence. And at that point I'm dropped
to the ground. I roll onto my back and I

(15:38):
start worrying about what I'm going to do. Now I
know that I am absolutely helpless. I have my pistol

(15:58):
in my hand so that I know that if if
he comes out, I'm able to shoot. I've got the
fence to my back to give me some protection that way,
and I'm facing the direction that he is most likely
to come from, and I.

Speaker 2 (16:13):
Have my pistol ready.

Speaker 3 (16:14):
If he shows I'll be able to shoot him if
I need to. I've got massive injuries, their life threatening.
But I'm lying there for three hours, consciously bleeding for
three hours. And as I'm lying there, I started thinking
to myself, what have I How have I planned for
this in the past. Back in nineteen eighty seven, seven

(16:41):
years prior to the shooting, I was in another incident
where I was on general patrols before I went to
Star Group and on general patrols. Twenty minutes past midnight,
my partner and I found a couple of people sitting
in a car and they've been shooting up drugs. The
male driver of the vehicle reached a cross grabbed a
pistol that was in a handbag of the passenger, grabbed

(17:05):
that pistol, pointed it at my partner's chest and started
pulling the trigger. The gun was broken, so it needed
to be cocked before it would actually fire. We got
into a wrestling match, and in the middle of this
wrestling match, the guy is calling out to his girlfriend,
cocked the gun.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
Cocked the gun.

Speaker 3 (17:26):
So she has scrambled over the three of us wrestling
and she has cocked the gun. And when she has
cocked the gun, I have slipped my thumb between the
hammer and the gun to hold the hammer back so
that it wouldn't fire. That came from a discussion that
we were having months before on night shift. We were

(17:49):
sitting around playing hypotheticals. What would you do if, what
would you do if? And this is one of the
scenarios we'd discussed. If you got into a wrestling match,
you know, you had to try and stop the gun
from firing. How many ways could you actually do that?
And that was one of the things we discussed. So
I was in the midst of this high pressure situation,

(18:10):
though are reflective back on what I had learned in
the past and implemented it. When I got into the
shooting in nineteen ninety four, I had already gone through
a scenario and visualization of seeing myself if I ever
get into a situation where I get shot, what will
I naturally want to do? What would my mind and

(18:32):
body naturally want to do, and what would be absolute
perfection if I had everything the right way?

Speaker 2 (18:38):
And I visualized that.

Speaker 3 (18:39):
So when I actually got shot, it felt like I'd
been through this before and I was out to implant
those things that I had taught about. And what I
knew I needed to do was four things. I needed
to control panic, not let panic take controller of the situation.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
I needed to.

Speaker 3 (19:01):
Control shock, my natural body's response to physical psychological trauma.
I needed to slow down my heart rate, and I
needed to slow down my breathing. And I did those
four things consciously and deliberately, but I'm laying the three
hours I finally work out that the trajectory of the

(19:23):
bullets that he's firing the dust that is coming out.
He is firing from an elevated place, and he is
in the attic of the roof, because the dust from
those bullets was going straight out from that level, and
so that meant he was up there. At that point,
I start relaxing because he is not a threat to

(19:44):
me while he's up there, and that's when I can
start focusing on my body and slow down my heart rates,
slow down my breathing, control, panic, control, shock. When he
stopped shooting, I start panicking, where is he? What's he doing?
Is he coming to hunt me again?

Speaker 2 (20:00):
Worrying.

Speaker 3 (20:00):
My heart rate elevates, my breathing is now shallow and panting,
until he starts shooting again, and I know that he's
still up in the attic of the house, and then
I can relax. And I'm lying there for three hours,
going through these heightened emotions and then going into the
relative calm of I know where he is. I can

(20:21):
start focusing on my body and relaxing and controlling it again.
But there's a whole series of thoughts that runs through
my mind, and I am reflecting on conversation that I
had with my wife five years prior to the shooting,
and that was I know, there's a real possibility I
may be shot and injured.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
I may be shot and killed.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
And I said to her, if I get shot, there's
a real possibility if I survive, that I may get
a spinal injury and I may spend the rest of
my life in a wheelchair. And if that becomes reality,
I need you to know that I will be able
to find a way to make life satisfying because I'm
taking responsibility for my choice, my behavior, my consequences, but

(21:07):
the future afterwards as well. I'd already thought, if I get.

Speaker 2 (21:11):
Shot, what will that future potentially look like?

Speaker 3 (21:21):
Lying there for three hours, continuously bleeding, I'm feeling my
legs closing down and blood is now being re rooted
to my core. My arms start closing down, they get cold,
they get weak. Pistol that I'm holding on two falls
out of my hands and it just falls onto my stomach,
but I don't have the strength to pick it back

(21:43):
up again. And I start thinking to myself, the future
looks like I may spend the rest of my life
in a wheelchair. But at that point I start thinking,
and I always retain this sense of optimism, no matter
what happens to me. I reflect on words my father
used to say to me as a child, and when

(22:04):
it was raining, he'd say, look for the silver lining
around the edge of every dark storm cloud, and that
was an ethos for life. Behind every cloud, there is
a silver lining. So it was that sense of optimism.
And while I'm lying on the ground, my body's closing down.
I'm accepting the fact I may spend the rest of
my life in a wheelchair. I start thinking, how am

(22:26):
I going to make life interesting? And my thought process
goes to I played basketball at the moment. I played
basketball this morning. I'd be able to put basketball together
with wheelchair. I'll be able to play wheelchair basketball. This
will be some outlet. Now, remember, my body is closing down.
He's still firing continuously.

Speaker 2 (22:48):
Bullets pounding through the bricks.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
My body's closing down, and I'm starting to think I
could play wheelchair basketball. I don't know if you know,
guys and the Special Forces, but we have a slightly
bigger ego than the average person. And that ego kicked
in and I literally this is exactly what I was thinking.
And while I'm lying on the ground, my body's closing down.

(23:11):
I started thinking to myself, I'm damn good at basketball.
If I can add something to what they're already doing well,
we may make the Paralympic finals. I may end up
with a gold medal. So it was always this continual
sense of optimism. I was not giving up. I was

(23:32):
fighting on there was something to fight for. But the
one thing I knew that I wanted above everything else
goes back to a conversation with.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
A hat that I had with my wife.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
Even if I spend the rest of my life in
the wheelchair, so long as I'm able to interact with
my children. And my children were two, four, fifteen, and
seventeen at the time, so long as I'm able to
interact with those children, I will be happy. I will
find a way to be happy. And they are what
I was focusing on for that three hours I was
lying on the ground. At two hours forty five is

(24:10):
the last time I've looked at my watch before my
vision closed down. I expected my vision to go to
shades of gray or black, because I was a pragmatic copper.
But my vision went to this absolutely pristine white.

Speaker 2 (24:30):
It wasn't a white light.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
It was just an absolute white out, just absolute pristine white,
and I can't describe how pure white it was. But
I started thinking to myself, is this what they talk
about at the end of life?

Speaker 2 (24:53):
Is this it? Am I dying?

Speaker 3 (24:55):
But it's also at that point that I started fighting
even harder. I started moving my body, and I'm moving
my body just this little bit to give myself confidence
that I've got something left. I'm speaking out loud to
myself and saying, Derek, don't give up, Derek, keep on fighting.
Fortunately for me, two rifle shots are fired from outside

(25:18):
the house, back towards the house. When I hear those
two rifle shots, I know that's my mates from Star
Group on their way to get me. For the three
hours that I'm lying on the ground, one of the
things that runs through my mind continuously was this absolute

(25:41):
belief that my mates would be with me as soon
as they possibly could. My mates that were with me
at the time, they got pinned down by what the
shooter was doing. They couldn't get me. I've had conversations
with them afterwards. They wanted to do it, but it
just seemed too dangerous, so they were pinned down. These
two rifle shots were confirmation that backup had arrived and

(26:03):
they were on their way to come and get me.
Dump of adrenaline into my body, indorphins from my brain,
and my vision snap back up to absolutely perfect. But
then I start passing. I'm now passing in and out
of consciousness because I just don't have enough blood left
to keep my body and my brain going. The boys

(26:29):
get to me within about fifteen minutes of those two
rifle shots. And when the first guy gets to me,
I come back to consciousness and I know that we
had this conversation.

Speaker 2 (26:43):
I was a diver. He was a diver as well.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
He was part of Star Group, and we were both divers,
and as divers, we get the privilege of wearing seahorses
on our collar to signify that we have the specialist
skill of diving. And these seahorses, they are something that
is treasured and revered. It's like the crosses that a

(27:06):
minister will wear. They are absolutely precious. But Starry's we're
very good at playing pranks on each other. And if
you left your shirt lying around where it shouldn't be,
or you disregard it, people would steal your sea horses
off of your collars and then hold them to ransom
for half a dozen beers or sticky buns or something

(27:27):
like that. And when this diver gets to me and
I'm lying on the ground, my body's closing down. But
this diver looked at me, he saw my seahorses, and
the first thing he said to me was, Derek, at
least you've still got your seahorses. He looked at my forearm.
He knew that my forearm broken, bones poking out of it.

(27:48):
He thought I was going to lose it from the elbow,
but he knew that He just needed to break the
tension of that moment.

Speaker 2 (27:54):
And Derek, at least you've still got your sea horses.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
We both had a ry smile and then bang into
act and they got me out of there. One of
the other guys that got to me around about the
same time said to me later, Derek, I didn't even
recognize you. I knew it was you, but I couldn't
recognize you. There was no color in my body because

(28:20):
I've lost so much blood. The boys risked their lives.
They picked me up, threw me into the van, and
got me to the doctor. I'm passing in and out
of consciousness at this point. He said, I wasn't moving,
I wasn't breathing, and I wasn't making any sounds, and.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
He thought I was already dead.

Speaker 3 (28:42):
He said, I then took what he describes as a
last gasping breath, and there was a flicker of my eyelid,
and he thought he may as well at least try,
because there was this glimmer of hope. I remember the
doctor saying, and these words reverberated my mind on a
regular basis. I can't find a pulse, I can't find

(29:04):
a blood pressure. Find me a blood pressure. Essentially, he
was trying to get an indravenus strip into my veins,
but I had so little blood left in my body.
My veins had all collapsed. He finally found a place
and then they just filled me with blood. He estimated
that I was down to the last two units of
blood in my body. He later said in a news interview.

(29:26):
All the textbooks so that Derek should have died. The
only reason Derrius alive is Derek hadn't read the textbooks.
There's an estimation that he fired about two thousand rounds
during that three hours that I was lying on the ground.
My mindset, my mindset was the one thing that kept

(29:46):
me alive.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
Having that planning.

Speaker 3 (29:49):
Mind already of a controlling planet, controlling shocks, flying down
my heart rates, slowing down my breathing. I'd already pictured
five years prior to the shooting and the lead up
to it. I'd picture myself being in this situation, and
I said to myself, what will.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
My mind want to do? What will my body want
to do?

Speaker 3 (30:07):
And so I anticipated that I would go into this
panic and I don't need to stay positive, and I
have this natural sense of optimism, and that comes from
being able to accept the fact that I made the
choice to put myself in a situation where I may
get shot. I now am shot. It's me that needs
to take control and influence the outcome. Look for help

(30:30):
from anywhere I can get it, but I've got to
drive it. And retaining that sense of optimism for the
future is one of those big things for me, and
I think that's why I started thinking about if I
live the rest of my life in a wheelchair, how
can I make that interesting. It gave me some reason
to keep on fighting, because if everything was bad, I

(30:50):
may as well just give up, and so maintaining that
positive mindset always having a determination that I needed to
find something I could to positively influence the situation that
I was in at the time. One thing that stands

(31:12):
out for me that has never been able to be explained,
and I don't understand it, is while I was lying
on the ground in the initial stages, I saw a
helicopter in the distance. It was a pure white helicopter.
It had no markings on it, which is just illogical

(31:32):
for any sort of air transport in any way, shape
or form. And it was just hovering in the distance,
this white helicopter, and I remember lifting my pistol and
just waving at this helicopter, sort of trying to signal
I'm alive, I'm here, get me some help. When I

(31:56):
came out afterwards and spoke to people who were at
the scene as well, I said, where's that helicopter come from?
And you know whose was it? And people say, there
was no helicopter there. I don't know what.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
You're talking about.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
So I don't understand that this was within the first
twenty minutes of the shooting, and so I'm fully conscious
in my mind, I'm fully conscious. A lot of people
say that this was something sent from God.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
To give me a signal.

Speaker 3 (32:28):
I'm not religious, but I understand what people are saying,
and I cannot explain it any other way. I am
convinced that there was no helicopter there. It was something
that I saw in my mind, or you know, if
there is a god, it plays on my mind.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
Where was it? What was it?

Speaker 3 (32:48):
Why did I have this vision of a helicopter that
wasn't there? For me, this was a sign everything was
going to be all right. Re gave me a sense
of relief, a sense of optimism.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
At that time.

Speaker 3 (33:11):
They stabilized me, They pumped me full of blood, and
then flew me to hospital. I had six hours of surgery,
and as I went into surgery, my wife was told
I am a fifty to fifty chance of surviving surgery
because of the complications I had from the massive injuries.
And when I survived surgery, I was still a fifty

(33:32):
to fifty chance of having major complications because two bullets
of my stomach, the amount of bowel content and feces
that emptied into that cavity, there could be major complications
with bacteria and infections, and there was still a risk
of me dying at that stage. So it was pretty bad.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
And then the doctors told me.

Speaker 3 (33:58):
Once I got through most conscious and having conversations with them,
they told me that there was a real possibility I
would never walk properly again. Damaged meculees tendon, thirty percent
of muscle missing in my left thigh, you know, my
stomach was going to be a problem for the rest
of my life. Thirty percent of the muscle was taken

(34:19):
out of my left forearm as well, and I would
probably never walk properly again. I may spend the rest
of my life in a wheelchair or at least with
a walking stick. But when I'm on my own in
the middle of the night, there is absolute calamity outside
my room and there's a clanging of metal and it

(34:41):
basically wakes up half the hospital.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
It was so loud.

Speaker 3 (34:44):
I went straight into panic attack, and I thought somebody
is coming in. They're destroying everybody else, and they're coming
to shoot me. Now I'm all bandished up, I can't
get out of bed, I can't move. That caused myself
extreme bay and for five to ten minutes, I am
just lying there, absolute panic, thinking that somebody is going
to kill me. And I'm just sitting there waiting to

(35:04):
be murdered. After about ten minutes, I start thinking to
myself to know something. There's no other calamity, there's no screaming,
there's no shooting, nobody's come into the room. And I
start thinking to myself, Okay, so it was just maybe
an accident. And my emotions start coming down. But I
don't berate myself for this. I don't get angry. I

(35:27):
go and within five days I throw my hand in
the air and I go to know something.

Speaker 2 (35:32):
I need to talk to a psich. It took three months.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Before I was able to get to a pyke. And
in that three months, I've had bad dreams. I've had
a nightmare of what I call a pseudo nightmare. And
this pseudo nightmare, I have been to work and I
get shot, and this is all in the dream. I've
been to work, I get shot, I've recovered, I've returned

(35:57):
to a star group, and I know that somebody out
there is still threatening to shoot me again. And so
I'm staying in the shadows, being protected, looking after myself
and not exposing myself to any danger. And in my dream,
I have this conversation with my police partner, and I say,
this is not living, this is an existence. This is

(36:20):
not living. I'm not enjoying my life. And if I'm
going to get shot, I don't know whether it is
or it isn't going to happen, but I'm going to
live my life, and if I do get shot again,
I will find a way to manage that as well.
And then my dream flashes over to where people are loading.
There's two offenders, and one of them is loading a

(36:40):
rifle with really sharp bullets. Why sharp bullets, I don't know,
but that's what the dream was. He loads that.

Speaker 2 (36:49):
The dream comes back to me and as I walk
out out of.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
A shop, I get shot in my left shoulder and
I get woken out of my sleep. I sit upright
in bed, and the pain.

Speaker 2 (37:01):
That I feel in.

Speaker 3 (37:02):
My left shoulder is the excruciating pain that you would
expect to feel from being shot. It was worse than
the day I actually did get shot. This was excruciating pain.
But I forced myself to keep my eyes closed, and
I forced myself to go back to sleep because I
wanted to find out how the dream finished.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
And I went back into the dream and I rolled
around the corner. I crawled around the corner, rolled.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Into a safe spot, and I woke up and so
I called my pseudo nightmare. Started out as a nightmare,
but I went back into it and I took control
of what that outcome was going to be. Now they
call this lucid dreaming, as I have since learned. But
when I went to the psychiatrist three months after the shooting,

(37:46):
I told him that I had this panic attack of
oh my god, I think I'm going to be murdered.
I told him about this pseudo nightmare. I told him
about the bad dreams that I've got back to Star
Group and I've gone into houses with half dozen other
Star Group and we've shot offenders, and we've diffused bonds
and we've broken down drug labs.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
But always a good outcome.

Speaker 3 (38:08):
It will struggle when I'm sweating, and I picked his
brain about who's dealt with it? Well, who's dealt with
a bad leave? What can I anticipate if I And
he's picked my brain about if you experienced this, how
might you handle it? What might you think about it?
And we had a really good about two to three
hour discussion, and at the end of it, he's gone

(38:29):
derect Psychologically, you have no PTSD, you have no anxiety,
you have no depression. Yes, you've got these little incidents
that are happening, but.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
They are not prolonged.

Speaker 3 (38:39):
They are one off and they are not repeated. And
you've got a really good concept of what you might
experience and how you might be able to deal with it.
So I'm going to clear use psychologically to go back
to work tomorrow, and you don't need any ongoing therapy.
How is this possible? Most people thought I should be
in therapy for decades, and I certainly didn't rule that

(39:00):
out either. But when he said I was psychologically able
to go back to work, I was just like, Okay,
I'm very very fortunate that I'm a driven person. I'm
also a very fortunate person none of those bullet kidneys, livers,
all that sort of stuff. So very very fortunate in

(39:21):
that way. But I'm also a very driven person. The
one thing that I wanted was to be able to
get back and interact with my kids, and all I
wanted to do was run, hop, skip and jump with them,
and that was my drive. Initially, there was always this
dream that if I had perfection, I would go back
to stargroup with what the doctors were saying to me

(39:41):
that was going to be very, very unlikely. But the
fitter I got, and the more I started running, hopping,
skipping with the kids, I then started looking at what
could I do, what more could I do, and the
glimmer of hope that I'd be able to get back
to fully operational with Stargroup growing in the distance. And

(40:03):
it took two and a half years of physical growing,
highs lows, tears, fears, successes, failures, absolute catastrophic failures of
my body, but always kicking back. And two and a
half years later I went back to fully operational with
Star Group, went back to Sniper, went back to Diver,

(40:26):
went back to high risk arrests, hostage, siege, helicopters. All
the stuff that I love I got. And again, I'm
very fortunate that I managed to get back there and
be fully operational again. And here I am twenty percent
of an Achilles tendon. I've gone back to Stargroup, I
have competed in triathlons, I have ridden my mountain bike

(40:50):
over the top of the Himalayas, higher than Everest Base camp.
And so I'm living this full life what I now
talk about with psychio tists and psychologists is that I
didn't have post traumatic stress. I had post traumatic growth.
And that is a really powerful thing for anybody that
goes through trauma to come out with that growth mindset

(41:12):
of what have I learned and what can I share
with other people to better prepare them for their challenges.
And this post traumatic growth is, as I see it,
collateral benefit that has come from my approach to it
five years prior, when I started preparing for it, the
way I managed it on the day, and certainly my

(41:33):
recovery afterwards.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
The big thing that.

Speaker 3 (41:39):
Changed for me was my concept of the power of
our minds. I haven't gone to the point where I
think I'm superhuman. I don't think that I'm able to
achieve things that I've never been able to achieve and
can do things that other people can't. I'm just an
ordinary bloke. I'm still just an ordinary bloke who will
get injured the same as everybody else. But I know

(42:02):
that my mindset is different, and that's what I like
to do these days, show other people how they could
have that really strong mindset as well, but as preparing
for the challenges that they can expect in their life.
They don't have to prepare for being shot, but it's
about acknowledging exactly what could possibly happen and then preparing

(42:22):
well for it physically, mentally, and emotionally. There's a theory,
and I can't remember whose theory it is, that within
every eighteen month period, there is some sort of catastrophe
in our life.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
Now, it may be a.

Speaker 3 (42:37):
Physical injury to us, it may be an illness. It
may be the car engine blows up, it could be
the dog gets injured, it could be problems with the house.
But within every eighteen month period there is something that
happens that really challenges us, and we just need to
be able to accept, Okay, there is another challenge. What

(42:58):
do I need to do to be to get through
it and be happy and manage it in the best
way we can. I've got a model for human durability
and the Golden circle, and the underlying principle behind it
is open on us confronting conversations about the reality of
our choices and the possible consequences for the future. There

(43:20):
isn't anything new that happens in life. We all know
that other people's houses burned down, and there's an outside
chance that may happen to our house, so we need
to have insurance. We need to have fire alarms, we
need to have fire extinguishers and all.

Speaker 2 (43:37):
That sort of stuff available to us.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
Majority people will never need to use them, but we
need to have them there because there's this possibility. So
we should have in our mind there's possibility the house
may burn down, we may have a car accident, somebody
may get set. We've got health insurance, all those things
in place to help cover those things, and we just need.

Speaker 2 (43:58):
To not dwell and not wallow in worry.

Speaker 3 (44:04):
But just be aware of what the worst thing that
might happen as well as the best thing. And it
is that balance of understanding those two extremes and not
being overwhelmed by one or the other and just accepting.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
I've got some idea that they may happen.

Speaker 3 (44:29):
If they do, what might I do, rather than going, oh,
that will never happen to me, and I don't want
to think about it, because if I think about it,
oh my gosh, I'm going to be too scared to
even go to sleep at night thinking about No. No,
let's just be aware of it that it's possible and
have some idea of what we might do, and if
that is too much, then let's not put ourselves in

(44:50):
the circumstances where that could happen. If you're really worried
about the house burning down, then take extra measures to
make sure that you protect yourself from that. I think
the ebb and flow of happiness and challenge, it's just
a natural part of life. I think that we will

(45:13):
go through life and we'll get to a point where
we are really good at something, and we don't just
sit there and go, i'm good at this. I'm going
to stay in this moment. We go i'm good at this,
and now on board, I want to take on another challenge.
And so we quite often just bring challenges upon ourselves
because we choose to do so, because there's something better

(45:34):
we want to do, there's something that we want to achieve.
We may want to do things for other people, but
we push ourselves to find that next challenge. And if
you don't find your next challenge, your next challenge will
find you anyway, and so we're always going to be
dealing with it. But the catastrophes in life, the fires,

(45:57):
the deaths of loved ones, the car engine blowing up,
the house needing major renovation, all those sorts of things
that naturally happen. I don't know why they happen, but
I just know that they are part of life. You
look back through history, and from the day that history

(46:18):
has been written, everybody has been dealing with some sort
of challenge throughout their life. Then they'll get into a
really happy place, and then there'll be another challenge, and
then they'll find another happy place.

Speaker 2 (46:28):
It's just the.

Speaker 3 (46:29):
Ebb and flow of life. And I think the more
that we accept at and we say it is going
to be normal for us to have challenges, so let's
approach it positively, get through it as fast as we
can and get back to that happy place, the more
time we're going to spend in happiness. And it's not
going to be a resentment of I hate what is

(46:49):
happening to me. It's kind of like, well, now these
things are going to happen. It's not that I enjoyed
being shot, but I certainly accept it because the choices
I made, this was a real possibility.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
So I suffered terribly it interrupting my life.

Speaker 3 (47:07):
I went through a lot of pain in surgery and
recovery and pushing myself to get fit was absolutely excruciating
at times, but there was a purpose, and it's that
purpose I think that we've got to keep on focusing on.
I do risky stuff throughout my life now. I'm still
riding bikes and the Himalayas, I walk the Coda track,

(47:29):
I skydive. I still do risky stuff now, but I
don't see myself as a risk taker. I see myself
as a risk manager, and there's a really distinct difference.

Speaker 2 (47:39):
I look at what skills and.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
Environment and support I have around me to give me
the best chance of success. I'm not afraid to die.
I don't want to die, but it's going to happen
to us all. I had a conversation with my children
as I was sitting next to my mother as she
was passing.

Speaker 2 (48:00):
Was I upset? Absolutely? Was I crying? Absolutely?

Speaker 3 (48:04):
But it was also celebrated Mum's life. But I turned
to my children and said, you need to be aware
of what's happening here, because eventually what's going to happen
is it's me that's going to be in the bed
and you're going to be sitting here, and we need
to have this environment where we're comfortable that this is
a part of the process of life.

Speaker 1 (48:45):
Welcome back, This is Alive again, joining me for a
conversation about today's story. Are my other Alive against story
producers Lauren Vogelbaum, Nicholas Dakowski and Brent Die And I'm
your host.

Speaker 4 (48:56):
Dan Bush loved talking to Derek mcmahonus. Yeah, what a story. Huh.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (49:02):
I was kind of in awe of him the whole
time because I'm like, I'm listening to and I'm like, God,
I wish my brain would go to that place. But
I you know, I that's not any of the trading
I had. I went to theater school.

Speaker 4 (49:21):
I just thought he was I was like this, this
is this guy's superhuman. He's special. This isn't normal. This
seems insane to me that he was able to conjure
so much calm in the moment after having been shot
fourteen times. And also the stuff he laughs at himself about,
like with ego flaring up and him going, oh, well,
I'm going to be a gold medalist now. You know,

(49:43):
you get shot fourteen times and you're on your back,
bleeding out and you're thinking I'm going to be a
gold medalist.

Speaker 6 (49:47):
Now, worry this is great.

Speaker 3 (49:48):
Yeah, this my basketball.

Speaker 4 (49:50):
Not exactly, but like, that's that kind of resilience or whatever.
He has a different.

Speaker 5 (49:56):
Word for it, human durability.

Speaker 4 (49:58):
Human durability, but he's I was like, that's not human,
that's not normal. But then I started kind of going
through it, and I was like, well, what are the
because he insists that no, this is not there's nothing
special about me. It's it's simply a forcing yourself to
review these potentialities before they happen. I don't know if
you could do them all, but I do that with
my kids. I'm like, Okay, let's in the event of

(50:19):
a fire, we're gonna have a fire drill. You know,
here's what we're going to do. You jump out the
window whatever, Here's how you open the window. And we
do actually do these fire drills sometimes, and I'll actually
set off the fire alarm in my house just to
add some you know, because those are the conditions that
they would have to rehearse. You know that they would
actually be into some degree, right, and I feel good
that they know exactly what to do. We meet in

(50:40):
the driveway or whatever, but you can't rehearse every situation.
But it was just insane. How he was able to
sort of find calm despite all the things that were
happening to him physically and mentally, I don't know.

Speaker 5 (50:52):
And I wonder if that is because of his intensive
training that he's gone through, or if he's just built
that way in.

Speaker 7 (51:03):
The fires in Hawaii, and Eily's concordance said the same thing.
You know, while Heino was burning down, she just kept thinking,
what is my next step would I have to do
to survive over the next three minutes? And I guess
she had dive training, so she knew how to handle
herself in the water. But beyond that, you know, getting
from the burning down city down to the water, she

(51:26):
was just taking it one minute at a time. And
then another thing in Nate Dorn's story, he talked about
when he was a kid and he would do all
these stunts, like jumping off the.

Speaker 2 (51:37):
Roof of a building or something.

Speaker 7 (51:38):
He could always he would always see how he was
going to land in his mind.

Speaker 4 (51:41):
He would always see the role.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
He was going to do.

Speaker 4 (51:43):
Yeah, if you can pre visualize the situation, maybe that
statistically raises your chances of actual survival.

Speaker 6 (51:49):
Well.

Speaker 7 (51:49):
I thought it was interesting too what he said about
how he had to modulate his like breathing and his
blood like he had to he physically would calm himself
down and bring his blood pressure and all that, and
it sounded almost like you're regulating a machine.

Speaker 4 (52:03):
I love the naked gun story. Yeah. Can you imagine
your shot fourteen times and you stagger back and you
put your hand up, hold yourself up. You flashed to
the naked gun.

Speaker 5 (52:17):
I wonder how, I wonder how much of that was shock? Yeah,
it was his body going into shock and just like
protecting him from that. I mean, I've never been in
a situation where I was that battered and that close
to bleeding out that my body has done that. So
I yeah, I mean this is I'm not going to say,

(52:41):
completely alien to me. I've gotten very calm under very
stressful situations, but this just seemed so much more intense.

Speaker 6 (52:51):
Yeah, I mean right, I mean, you know, I haven't
gone through this level of training where you're asked to
think about and to act through these sort of scenarios
all the time. They say in disaster preparedness that, right,
if you can just get like shave like a second
off of your reaction time, give yourself a little bit

(53:12):
of an opportunity to set yourself up for better success.
And listening to this story in particular, I was thinking like, like,
is this superhuman? Is this more normal than we think
it is, or is it like those diagrams of the
planes that came back where you're like, oh, they didn't
get shot in the wings, and so they did come back.

(53:34):
And that's why we're seeing that. That's why we're hearing
this story because he had this training.

Speaker 4 (53:39):
I think he ascribes a lot to the training. I mean,
he spends a lot of time saying, well, he even
goes back. At one point he's like he stops and
he's like, well, I had had a similar situation, not
a similar situation completely, but he had to put his
thumb between the hammer of the gun, yeah, after she
had cocked it. And he had visualized that scenario too,

(54:02):
in a weird way, not exactly, but it wasn't wrestling
in a car, but he had to visualize what if
somebody was trying to cock a gun and there's no
other way to stop them. The other thing, too, is
that kind of a counterpoint to like pre visualizing and
seeing an outcome, This idea that if you really it's
really hard to do. But I think you know, people
who meditate a lot are better at this. Instead of

(54:24):
being reactive to a situation, sort of what you were saying,
learn about being non reactive and sort of learning how
to train yourself to calm your breathing and to slow
your breathing and to slow your heart rate. What I've
noticed lately is that when I try to just really
ground down, whether I'm trying to do a meditation session
or not, just or I'm just sitting outside, like with

(54:44):
all the stuff that's happening in the world and how
terrifying it is, and for me to stop and go,
I'm not being attacked by a lion right now. You know,
it's hard not to imagine that a horrible future that
might come because of, you know, everything that's happening in
the world and all of the things that you can be
afraid of, and the violence that we see that we're
inundated with at all times through social media, and the

(55:06):
violence we see on all of our feeds, and it
starts to get into you, and it's maybe some low
level stress that you start to carry. But then I'll
look out and I'll say I've got my cup of coffee.
I'm looking at the sun, I can hear the birds,
and I start to calm down and just kind of
realizing lately that the future does not exist. It doesn't
exist at all. You know, the past did exist, but

(55:28):
it doesn't exist anymore either. The only thing that actually
exists is the present and if there's nothing attacking me
right now. And it's this idea of sort of of
course from that, but maybe aligned with it is you know,
if you think you're going to be happy someday, you know,
some day, if only this would happen, or if only
this person would be president, or if only I could

(55:48):
have this house, or if only I could meet this person,
you know, you will not be happy someday if you
cannot be happy in the present moment. And the same
thing goes for the opposite of that. So it's not
just about happiness. It's all so true about trauma. Right.

Speaker 5 (56:02):
Fuck, I'm in trouble.

Speaker 4 (56:08):
Right but I find myself spiraling in these in these
fearful thoughts, and talking to Derek, I was I was like,
if he can do that under this extreme situation where
in the present moment he actually is dying, then why
can't I do it in my day to day where
all of my fears, whether valid or not, are not

(56:29):
actually you know, they're not. They don't exist. Nothing's happening now.
If we can ground into the moment, it's a counterpoint
to pre visualizing the outcome. That might also be another tool.
I think also his survival mode, his resilience came from
this optimism, so being calm in the moment, being able
to foresee a potential outcome. But besides that, this optimism

(56:51):
that he had, in the sense of humor that he had,
that also carried him through recovery. Like a lot of
people I think could have. You know, I would have
probably suffered a lot more and had a lot more
doubt about whether or not I could make a full recovery.
But Derek, he just kind of blew past that and

(57:12):
imagine himself rejoining Star Group at some point, and he did,
in fact have this full recovery after about a year
and a half or two years and jumped back in
and kept doing rescue. I don't know, I've never heard
of anything like that. It just sounds it sounds superhuman
to me.

Speaker 2 (57:25):
But oh yeah, I could.

Speaker 5 (57:26):
I mean, I imagine in the same situation. If I
didn't just assume I'd be dead, I'd be like, I'm
going to be a I'm going to be just like
a head in a jar. This body is done.

Speaker 4 (57:37):
It's easy to look at the negative possibilities when we
lose all the things that we're used to, When we
lose a limb, or we lose our voice, or we
lose our sight, or we lose it would be it's
very easy to quickly go into a spiral of Okay,
my life is over. And I've never had to do it.
But I wonder, at least not to that extreme, but
I wonder we all have that capacity to shift from

(57:58):
that and go, okay, but what does this give me?
He did it in two seconds. I'm going to be
a gold medalist in a wheelchair. You know. But how
do we how do we you know, where we find
the capacity to shift in our lives with our challenges,
as big or little as they are, to a more positive,
you know vision, I guess, and not just to have it,

(58:20):
not just to go oh, got to be positive now,
but rather just to kind of have that as part
of you, to just have it as like your first
thought is like, oh cool, well this means I'm going
to be a gold medalist.

Speaker 6 (58:31):
Yeah. As a as a sort of depressive person, I
find the optimism part equally superhuman to the getting shot teen.

Speaker 3 (58:41):
Times and shame.

Speaker 6 (58:43):
I'm like, I'm like, I I don't operate that positively
on a good day.

Speaker 5 (58:48):
Although I have to admit, like one of those like
weird passing fantasies that I've always had when I'm just
stressed out with my life is like maybe I could
just like maybe I could just go into a coma,
Like maybe if if something bad happened to me, truly bad,

(59:10):
to take me out of this, Like maybe it would.

Speaker 6 (59:14):
Be a beautiful coma. I would love to just lie
down for a while.

Speaker 5 (59:18):
Which is like, yeah, maybe I could get some rest.

Speaker 4 (59:21):
Well, all of this does his story really does heavily
point towards this idea for me and reiterated for me,
like panicking or worry and stress about a future that
you have no idea whether it will exist, and at
the moment it absolutely does not exist. I guess his
message to me is one of preparedness, Like be prepared

(59:43):
so that you don't have to live in a state
of constant you know, stress, so I'm just thinking about
this across the entire spectrum of human experience, you know,
from being shot fourteen times and lying it there bleeding out,
to you know, just doing the dishes like.

Speaker 5 (01:00:03):
That's the that's the same thing.

Speaker 4 (01:00:06):
Anyway, it was a real delight to talk to to Derek.
He was incredibly generous with his time, and he had
he had some really good stories that did not make
the cut, but I just I really enjoyed talking to him,
and he's just an incredible guy and it was it
was very inspiring to talk to him.

Speaker 5 (01:00:23):
Yeah, I'm a big fan.

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music by Ben Lovett, additional
music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
production support. Our studio engineer are Rima L. K Ali
and Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhart Slovitchka,

(01:01:05):
Brent Die, and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and
Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host, Dan Bush, Alive Again is
a production of i Art Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If
you have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd
love to hear your story. Please email us at Alive
Again Project at gmail dot com. That's a l i

(01:01:28):
v e A g A I N p R O
j e c T at gmail dot com.