A Cop Recalls the Wreck that Changed Him

On this episode of Our American Stories, Richard Muniz tells the story of the night he would never forget while working as a deputy for the Conejos County Sheriff's Department.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American stories, and we tell stories about
everything here on this show. And our favorites, well they
come from you, the listeners. And up next a story
from a listener named Richard Munez. Today he shares with
us the story of an unforgettable night that changed his
life when he was working in law enforcement. Take it away, Richard, how.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
You tell you I'm probably the last person in the
world that was cut out ever to be a cop.
I took my degree in astrophysics, and right there, that
means you're not this rough, tough individual. You know, you're
very much intellectual. However, let me tell you how astro
physicists got their jobs. They didn't go to the help
wanted sections. They went to the old bits. The year

(00:53):
I graduated, no one wanted to lay down to die.
So you know, right there, I have a problem. Further,
Sam sent me started sending the letter saying, hey, you know,
it was nice enough to give you student loans and
stuff I got, and now it would be nice enough
he started paying that back. So I had to find
a job. Now. I started looking around. Fortunately, I'd taken

(01:14):
a lot of classes in psychology and sociology and stuff
like that. And I was always somewhat interested in police work.
So I went down to our local police department and
they were hiring. U. Put an application. I tested for
the position, and they did a background checking all that stuff,
and I figured, yeah, it'll be a cold day. And
you know where before they ever called me. Well, guess

(01:36):
what about three months later they called me said hey,
are you interested in coming aboard? I said, yeah, you know,
I needed a job. What can I say? So I
went aboard. Well I wound up, you know, look at
a police officer, and I began to realize that maybe
this isn't what I wanted. And then I got injured

(01:57):
in the line of duty, and I mean it just
really seriously threw me into a tail spend. Wound up
leaving that department for another department. Then Sheriff Toby Madrid
approached me and said, hey, I need a deputy. Would
you be interested coming aboard? And I said, yeah, I'd
be interested. So I joined the Kiness County Sheriff's office.

(02:20):
And I remember it was the twenty seventh of December,
so day I'll never forget. It was cold, you know,
after all, A couple of days after Christmas in the
sand Louis Valley. Hey, it should be cold. It was
a quiet night up to that point. It was a
Saturday night, and Saturday nights have a way of going
south on you really really quick. Well there's a town

(02:40):
in Knness County called Antnito, Colorado. Well what happened on
a Saturday night. The kids would drag Maine. But that means,
you know, they're just cruising Maine. They're in a car
and they just go up main Street, get to the
city limits, turn it, make a U turn, come back
into town. You know, let's just repeat the cycle. You know.
After all, we didn't have cable TV down er yet,
stuff like that, so we had to do something. Well,

(03:00):
we get word of a wreck just north of Antnido.
What had been happening here is the city police have
been you know after the kids, you know, stopping to
doing new turns in town. You know it's not safe. Well,
all they did was, rather than you know, half the
cops hassle them, they just went up a little bit
out into the county and then there's a crossroads there.

(03:21):
They would make their U turn there. Well that's where
the wreck was. It was right outside a little nightclub
called the Rainbow Nightclub. I was within a mile of it,
and so I go down there, and as I'm coming
up on, all of a sudden, I realized that this

(03:42):
car has not been hit. It's been ran over by
a semi I get out, you know, I got my
cruiser position there, and of course everybody in the bar's
coming out. And then once see what the heck's going on.
I mean, it's you know a little bit like sharks,

(04:02):
you know, showing up, you know when whenever it's a
little bit of blood in the water. They got to
see what's going on. Well, I get out there, and
the first thing I see is that the the literally
the front end of the car is crumpled down like
a like a tin can. And I run up there
and I can see the passenger. He's in bad shape.
I mean, he's torn up pretty good. He's unconscious and
you know, he's really able to breathe and stuff like that.

(04:25):
I can't see the driver, I mean, the car literally
crumpled down around him. And there's two girls in the
back seat. They look like they're okay. The only person
I saw that right away that I knew was a
guy by the name of pat Rice funny part of mind.
It was Patt had been an inmate in our jail
a couple of weeks before. The Red Cross has just
recently come down and recertified us on first date and CPR,

(04:49):
and Pat was trusting and he saw this and he
thought to himself, Hey, this looks pretty cool stuff like that.
And he asked, Hey, can I take this? I might
need it someday. And I told me, said, I'll tell
you what I will pay for your class and your test,
provided if I ever need you, you're there for me. Okay,
that's cool. Well, guess what I collected that night? And

(05:11):
he and I went over there and we started getting
the girls out of the car. I had to crawl
into the car. We got the first girl out okay,
but the other girl, she was kind of pinned in
the car a little bit by the seat. I had
to get in there and push the seat off of her,
and she had crawled over me to get out. Now
we've got the driver and the passenger. I'm very reluctant
to move the passenger because I can see that he
has seriously injured and I'm very much afraid that if

(05:33):
I move him, I'm gonna do more damage than good.
And I'm trying to find the driver. So I'm reaching
through the wreckage and I found him, and astonishingly, he's
still alive, but he's unconscious also. So we're there and
I'm just going from one to the passenger to the driver,
passenger to the driver. I'm checking the checking make sure
I say I've a pulled stuff like that. I'm waiting
for the ambulance to show up. I just checked the passenger,

(05:55):
I go back to the driver, checked him, go back
to the passenger. Nothing. In about the ten seconds between
the time I checked him to going back to the
driver to check him, his heart had stopped. And that's
when I yelled at Pat. I said, he's in full
of restless. Get him out of here and start doing cprs.
We start doing CPR on it. You want to find

(06:16):
out what kind of shape you're in. Do CPR on
a fellow human being. I mean, it is a demanding
task and once you start, you don't stop. It's all
this to it. So here's dozens of people staying around
watching this. Me and another guy are fighting to keep
somebody alive, and the EMTs finally showed up. I remember

(06:40):
one of the MT's jumped out and yelled, who's worse,
And I pointed down, said he is. And Pat was exhausted.
He had been sitting there doing CPR along with me,
all joining this. EMT joins me and we started doing CPR.
I took over the breathing part of it well as
he did the compression. The guy threw up in my
mouth and that did it. I mean I had nothing left.

(07:03):
I walked away. I mean I kind of stumbled away,
and I started throwing up. When Pat saw me throwing up,
he started throwing up. I remember somebody starts laughing and say,
what's the matter, Rice, can't you take it? And Pat
is hauled off and popped the guy in the face.
And the guy comes up, how a want to press
charges like that? And I did, basically look at us,
just get the hell out of here. Well, we wound
up having to take the car apart to get the

(07:24):
driver out. A passenger died at the scene. I mean,
there was nothing we could do for him, got him out,
got in flight for life to Denver, where he wanted
u dying. The two girls made it through just fine.
After we got more help out there, they sent Pat
and I to get cleaned up. And when we got

(07:45):
to the shref's office, I saw we looked like we
were cut from head to toe with other people's blood.
And the funny part about it was we were actually
starving to death. We were hungry beyond the measure, and
so I made us a couple of sandwiches and stuff
like that. We washed our hands, we sat there and
we ate while cover somebody else's blood. And I remember
a few days before that, I had a discussion with

(08:07):
my parents. They thought I had a pretty cake job.
The completely nicholar could the fact that that's the police officer.
There was a very real chance every time I left home,
I had never been coming back. Well, I decided to
show him just what kind of a cake job I had.
I had the dispatcher to take a picture of me.
Here I am covered a head and told with somebody
else's blood, and I had him take a picture of me.
And I was staying with my folks at the time.

(08:28):
When I got home, I left that picture on the
diningroom table. So next time they told me that I
had a cake job, all the to do was look
at that. A couple of weeks later, I was working
a basketball game provided security for it, and I just

(08:51):
walked out to check the parking lot and I walked
back in and all sinners, just a little cheerleader stand
in front of me. She's in a uniform. She sticks
out her hand and she introduces herself and she says,
I want to thank you for trying to save my
brother's life. I remember I stammered something, and for a
long time it haunted me. I didn't have an answer

(09:12):
for her, you know what, why, What was the point
of her brother passing away? What happened to her? Did
any good come out of it? Well? There is some good.
It took me a long time to realize that. And
I'm a man of prayer, and I'm a man of faith,
and I used to pray to God. What was the
point of all this? You know? Was a wasted And

(09:35):
then in the course of writing my first novel, I'm
relating the incident. But I'd done it. As I taken
the incident, I put it in. I made it happen
to somebody else, basically. But in the middle of all this,
he's talking to his pastor about it, and the answer came,
were you the same person you were when when this

(09:55):
when this is over, and I had to admit I wasn't.
I mean that evening I was seriously thinking about hanging
up law enforcement forever. I mean, like I said, I
took my degree in astrophysics. I'm an intellectual. Last thing
I ever thought myself was as was a tough guy
out there, you know, to fight and wrestle around with

(10:16):
the bad guys and stuff like that. I enjoyed, enjoyed
the detective worker. I didn't enjoy that. You know that
that part of it. Well, guess what that night changed me.
When this case is transformed me for the good. It
made me realize, at least on some level, I was
out there trying to make a difference.

Speaker 1 (10:40):
Richard Munez's story The Wreck here on our American Stories