Episode 5 – Ed Hinchey: Surviving and Recovering After Being Shot
Jon Becker: My name is Jon Becker.
For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.
The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.
Welcome to The Debrief!
My guest today is Ed Hinchey. Ed is a former Forest Hills, Pennsylvania police sergeant who spent 21 years on the force working a variety of assignments. Ed retired from the department after an officer involved shooting where the suspect did not survive. And Ed, having received serious life threatening injuries, was left clinging to life, having been saved by his armor.
Since his retirement, he's dedicated his time to ensuring that police officers are properly armored and that those who are shot in the line of duty are cared for the way they should be. Ed's current role is as the armored technical specialist for Safariland and the head of the Safariland saves program.
Ed, thank you for joining me today on The Debrief!
Ed Hinchey: Jon, thanks for having me!
Jon Becker: So maybe start with just kind of your history, the beginning of your career, and kind of working the way forward.
Ed Hinchey:
Sure. I got into law enforcement early. I went to the academy when I was 19 years old, while I was working my way through college, hired on with a couple of small departments before I was lucky enough to get on with the Forest Hills Police department.
Jon Becker: So at some point in your career, you start to care about body armor. When is that?
Ed Hinchey: Well into my career, I'd been like the other officers I was issued to me. I wanted something comfortable, something soft, something I could function in. One of my best friends, Ed Limbacher, was working the state AG's office in a task force when he was shot in his chest and his body armor failed.
After coming home from the hospital and crossing our fingers that he was going to survive, I'm holding the vest in my hand with a hole in it that shouldn't be there. And I called down to the NIJ. I got through to Lance Miller, explained to him what I had going on, and I've got to tell you, the NIJ jumped in a car, drove from DC to Pittsburgh, and we were all in the crime lab 24 hours later trying to figure out what happened.
Jon Becker: So let's walk through what happened, because that was the one catastrophic failure of body armor in history. That was hit with a round that was supposed to stop, right?
Ed Hinchey: What we learned later was the vest was made of a monolithic construction. It was Zylon front to back. Zylon initially was touted as material that was stronger than Kevlar, lighter, more flexible, higher performance. And initially, as it's woven, it probably was. As it got worn and exposed to moisture and UV radiation, its degradation curve was drastic. It basically fell off a cliff.
Ed's vest was only five and a half months old, but he worked in that jump out van, so he sweated through it all day, every day, and he got shot June 23rd, 2003, and the round just blew through him. It went in, it went through his lung, his intestines, into his spine.
When I get over to him in the parking lot, and he's on his back and he's holding a picture that he always carried in his plate pocket of his family, his wife and little girls, that – I've never had an emotion go through me like that before. And he's looking at me, he says, you know, you go to go get my wife and girls. And I, you know, that day, that moment will live with me forever.
Jon Becker: Yeah, I imagine it would. What went wrong with the vest? Like, let's kind of talk about the NIJ recall, and, you know, what actually was the problem?
Ed Hinchey: Yeah, they've looked at a lot of causation factors of what degrade Zylon, and the best that they can come up with is UV radiation. And a lot of the rolls. The armor shows up in a roll, it gets pulled out on a Gerber cutting machine. It gets cut to fit. The package you're building gets sometimes stitched together, sometimes tacked together, put inside.
At that time, under that particular standard, a water resistant cover, and then issued to the officer, they anticipate a little bit of a degradation. But the UV radiation and moisture combination on Zylon was like nothing they'd ever seen before. And the long term testing, as came out later, showed that, well, at that.
Jon Becker: Point, with the NIJ standard, you also. There were a lot of flaws in the standard at that point, right?
Ed Hinchey: There was no condition testing. They really didn't look at it down the road. There was no fit audits at that point in time.
Jon Becker: Let's define those for people that don't know. So, condition testing.
Ed Hinchey: Right, condition testing is when they take the armor in its new. You submit 28 packages, and they take a grouping of those, and they put them in an industrial tumbler. Now, it's 149 degrees, 80% humidity. It tumbles 72,000 rotations for ten straight days, and then they take it out and under the current standard, they reduce the speed, but use the same rounds they test new armor with, and they shoot the armor, and it's got to perform the same as it did in its new conditions.
Jon Becker: Because we're looking at a degradation curve now.
Ed Hinchey: Correct.
Jon Becker: So, previously, under the old standard, you just had to pass on the day of the game.
Ed Hinchey: Right. The first day, in the best possible condition that vest will ever be, it passed a standard.
Jon Becker: And using potentially the hottest material the manufacturer has and…
Ed Hinchey: Produce in the largest size, there was no size limitation.
Jon Becker: So you could send a horse blanket built out of the best material you have, and even if you failed, you could resubmit the same package.
Ed Hinchey: Correct.
Jon Becker: And as long as you passed one time, you were good to go.
Ed Hinchey: Exactly.
Jon Becker: And so, in Ed's case, he gets, at that point, the thinnest, lightest vest on the market.
Ed Hinchey: Correct.
Jon Becker: That had passed the horse blanket standard.
Ed Hinchey: Yes.
Jon Becker: Probably with the hottest material possible.
Ed Hinchey: Exactly.
Jon Becker: Meaning. And when I say hottest material, I mean the material that shoots the best.
Ed Hinchey: They lot tested it and made sure it had the highest numbers.
Jon Becker: Yep. And then he starts wearing the vest, and five and a half months later, it falls. You know, if you think of the standard as a horizontal line, it falls below that line.
Ed Hinchey: Well below.
Jon Becker: And what was he shot with?
Ed Hinchey: What was the round 40 cal? And we don't know that the gun was filled with a couple different types of ammo. It was really a piece of crap street gun wrapped with electrical tape.
Jon Becker: 40 is not, you know, amazing bullet.
Ed Hinchey: Usually not a huge challenge for body armor. Correct. Yeah. This should have been easily defeated by the vest. The vest should.
Jon Becker: So, on the heels of ed shooting, they recalled Zylon.
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker: Which required that every vest currently on the street that contains Zylon be replaced.
Ed Hinchey: Exactly.
Jon Becker: And at the same time, they started to revise the standard to the new NIJ standard.
Ed Hinchey: Yeah. And that's. I've got to give the NIJ credit. They work directly with Ed Lembacher. They had him involved in it. They came to our buildings to figure out, was it. We're in an old building. Was it radon gas? Was it this? They looked at every possible causative factor, but they also considered what Eddie been through, the traumatic injuries that he had, what his family had to suffer, and they looked at it going forward.
So Eddie's sacrifice, what he went through, has paid it forward to law enforcement. Every officer that wears body armor today should call in Ed Lembacher and tell him. Thank you.
Jon Becker: Yeah. Unfortunately, Ed became the canary in the coal mine for the NIJ standard and for materials. And fortunately survived, correct?
Ed Hinchey: Correct.
Jon Becker: Which was amazing in and of itself.
Ed Hinchey: Absolutely. And it's a testament to Eddie's being in shape and his will to live. I mean, the guy's an absolute warrior. And I can't say enough about him as a man, about him as a police officer. He was phenomenal. He's one of the guys I chose to be on my shift. He was that guy. And it was no surprise to me. He's the first guy coming out of the van for the AG's on a jump out because that's Ed Lembacher.
And, I mean, to this day, I look at what we do in the lab, and I know a lot of that. The condition testing, the waterproof versus water resistant, the lot testing, the fit audits were the NIJ comes in and what are you making on the floor today at Safariland? We're making these three packages. Great. We'll take the next grouping off the line of each. We're going to send it to one of our independent labs. It better do just as well as it did when we started it, and we're going to cut it open and make sure you build it right. It better meet the build sheet specs.
Jon Becker: Yeah. You better have the right layers of material, because prior to that, there was no inspection.
Ed Hinchey: None.
Jon Becker: As long as you're, you know, as long as the package you submitted for testing passed, that was it. You were done.
Ed Hinchey: Yeah. And it was never looked at again. And they didn't care what size you built it. They didn't care if the C-1 performed as well as the C-5. The horse blanket, you know, the small, the 110 pound officer who's as lean as can be wearing the smallest panel that we can build. That performance now has to be the same as the largest one we make.
Jon Becker: Yeah. And from a kinetic energy standpoint, it's a lot easier to pass with a horse blanket than it is to pass with a baby gap.
Ed Hinchey: Oh, without a doubt. Yeah. That's the analogy I like, is the horse blanket, because truly, if you take a look at some of the panels that had been submitted in the past, and we only thought about this after I started working with the NIJ after Eddie'd been shot and his vest failed. And I saw some of the. The size of the panels coming in, there was no limit you could put horse blankets in.
Jon Becker: It's ridiculous.
Ed Hinchey: Yeah. So, great job on the NIJ's part. They. They reacted to it, recognized there were failures in the, the way the, the forward testing was that it didn't exist. And so they limited, they took theC-1 through C-5. You can look at the CPL today, the compliant products list, and you'll see there's still armor out there that's C-2 through C-5. C-3 through C-5 means the small and medium panels didn't pass.
Jon Becker: Yeah. Which is crazy!
Ed Hinchey: Oh, yeah.
Jon Becker: So it's, you know, you're going to. You're buying armor for your department. You're like, oh, well, the small people, they're not going to wear it.
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker: Yeah, it's. It's. I think one of the things that frustrates me most with armor is the consumer is not particularly well educated, truly. And part of that's because that's not their job. But it has led to, over the years, there being some pretty unscrupulous practices in body armor.
Ed Hinchey: Oh, absolutely.
Jon Becker: It's a point of frustration and passion for me that literally prompted me to write an article for NTOA about plates because there were so many people playing fast and loose with the standards.
Ed Hinchey: I mean, I get asked all the time while I'm out in the field, do you have a three plus plus? I mean, that animal doesn't exist. That's not a type from the NIJ.
Jon Becker: I mean, hopefully, under the new standards, it will be.
Ed Hinchey: I believe they're addressing it and they're being very strict about it. And the NIJ stamp on it now is a game changer.
Jon Becker: So then, at this point, you've gone from a guy who's kind of marginally interested in body armor to a guy who cares passionately about armor.
Ed Hinchey: Oh, weird. And again, the process that happened with that Zylon armor, as we began to look into it, there was a whistleblower involved from the company that had built the Zylon. They knew the degradation curve was drastic. He'd written a company wide memo saying, we are going to get a phone call about an officer killed because his body armor failed.
So they knew which – You've got this young, like I said, true warrior officer who's got a wife and incredibly young family, and he's wondering, how do I provide? How do I do this? And then he finds out more and more and more that should have never happened in the first place.
And again, the NIJ's response was phenomenal. We did our best to be with him throughout the entire process as he moved forward. We knew relatively early on from doctors that he wasn't going to be able to come back to work and his preparation for the next phase of his life. And it could have gone a lot of different ways.
And again, I always say Eddie was the right guy because he never shut down. He knew that he had to step up. Regardless, he can't be his passion anymore. He can't be that police officer. What can I do to carry the day, you know? And he's presently still in public service. He's a fire chief now, you know, here's the guy you want next to you.
Jon Becker: So after Ed shooting, how long is it until your shooting occurs?
Ed Hinchey: About 19 months.
Jon Becker: So you are working on body armor because of edge shooting.
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker: And 19 months later, your life will literally depend on it.
Ed Hinchey: If I didn't have body armor that worked that day, somebody else is tucking in my kids and kissing my wife good night.
Jon Becker: So walk me through what happened.
Ed Hinchey: It was in between shifts. I was doing a double day before I was supposed to go on vacation. And we get a call. My dispatcher, Joe Klimko, yells up to us, hey, there's something bad going on up on the pike. Start up towards Bob's lounge, and we. We go up the hill. We're going over. We border with Wilkins Township on that side. And he's given us details as we go. It's a severe domestic woman has run into a bar, which is called the plaza. She's got a child, really young child, tucked under arms. She's screaming that her ex husband is trying to kill them. He's on his way to kill the mother. We've got a unit responding to that location. The mother actually lives in Forest hills.
I call out that I'm going to go ahead and get to the mothers and secure that location, which I do. As soon as I knocked on the door, the mother of the first two victims, I knew on her face because she saw my uniform, and her first words to me was, my baby's all right, what's happened? And so we begin to try and calm her down and get information on who we're looking for.
Wilkins Township pulls up. He has the first two victims of the ex wife and child in the car. I've never seen a baby look terrified. That was a big red flag for me, because this baby looked terrified. She was young, and it was. The look on Janelle's face was just terror. And she wanted to know if her mom was okay.
So we realized we got to get them off the X, get that area secured. They took them to get medical. I called out I'd set a command post directly across the street. In Bob's lounge, and we began to go out and try and find this guy. We had a good description of him. We had a good description of the car. I swing in, I go down the street. I'm gonna make a quick loop before I park in that parking lot. He is literally parked in the next lot down from Bob's lounge, basically, where he can see where we're at.
And I call out that I've got him located. And I fully anticipate a chase. If he goes one direction, we're going out towards the country. Other direction is right in towards the city of Pittsburgh. I'm in an unmarked car, but I'm fully lit up, and I come across, and I position myself so I can go either way. Whatever he chooses, I'll get in behind him, and we'll begin this.
And as soon as I pulled up, I watched the car go from. He's actually a floor shifter go from park. You can watch the brake lights flick. And so I knew he was in drive, and he came out. He came into the parking lot, and I'm on the radio. I'm telling him, hey, we're going to be in a pursuit here. I've got, you know, I'll let you know which way. And he never deviates from the front of my car. He comes across in a gravel lot, and he hits the front of my car, just literally dead.
And I'm looking at him, and we're looking across two hoods now, and I'm looking at him thinking, well, no one's ever done that before. Yeah, well, that's new. This is new. And I call out, you know, you know, hey, we're up here in a lot. Get me some units up here.
I just been through a class run by Brian Avery, and again, we'll talk about training as we go on here. I'd been lucky enough throughout my career to have some absolutely phenomenal training and Brian Avery's happened to have been the most recent. And it was a lot of containment, and you know, what we do in those exact type situations.
So, six weeks prior to this incident, we'd been up on the Beaver Valley racetrack practicing what happens if you've got to get a car contained? And it was a lot of that front end collision. Let's get him, you know, cornered in. Now I'm by myself. I'm one on one here, but I'm able to floor my car. I'm still up on the pavement. And get him kind of locked under. He had an old Solero and it was really kind of scooped down on the front end.
So I got up over top of his front end a little bit, hit the emergency brake, put it in park, came out of my door, went around to the passenger side, went over top. We knew he was armed with a knife. We didn't know what else he had. I will admit that I missed a complete red flag. One of the pictures, I saw him, he's in dress blues. It didn't throw the right numbers for me that I'm dealing with a military veteran who probably has combat experience. And I begin again to try and de-escalate the situation. I'm telling, shut it down. I've seen your wife and baby. They're okay. I've seen your mother in law. Everything's okay. Let's figure out what we can do here. Shut the car off.
He opens a beer, takes a drink, throws me the finger. You know, this guy's engaging me in a completely different way than I've had, you know, 23 and a half years of experience. This is, this is not the way things usually go. Second officer arrives on a scene, I have him take my post. I go back around to my pillar. I want to see inside the car. I want to know if there's anybody else in there.
When I half moon out, I get a good look in the car, and I come back and I call out that he's alone in the car. We need some more units up here right now. And he starts to go from reverse to drive. Reverse to drive with a floor shifter to break the cars free. I know I've got them contained. I make a decision at that point and I tell Bill, hey, I'm going to move up. I'm going to bust out a window and put some spray in. It's late November. It's cold out. I know his window's down on his side of the car, the driver's side window of the assailant.
I tell again the other officer who arrived on scene. Where I'm going, I move up, I break out the window with a collapsible baton. So I'm by the front wheel, front wheel drive car. He's throwing some gravel up.
Jon Becker :And you're on the driver's side, passenger side?
Ed Hinchey: I'm on the passenger side. I'm moving from my driver's side to his passenger side.
Jon Becker: So you're looking at it this way. He's sitting here. You're looking at him this way.
Ed Hinchey: Exactly. I'm Caddy corner across the hoods. And he's in full postal uniformity. He was working as a mail delivery person. That's one of the ways, I think he got into the secure apartment building that his ex wife and child lived in. It's the holidays. Who's not going to hold the door for the mailman? That's an easy way for him to get in there at that point in time. I'm thinking, I've got the window broken out. I know his window's down. I want my partner. I'm going to put spray in.
The second red flag that I missed was he looked at me and said, don't spray me now. I'd taken my spray out. I shook it up behind me. I don't think there was any way for him to know that's my next step, unless he'd thought this through. And it's one of the things I've gone back to in my head several times, doing kind of debriefs. And he truly knew what I was about to do. He really did. And I wanted him not to be able to take off if he got free of the front of my car. We're on foot in a parking lot. He's gonna. He's gonna go. One of us.
Jon Becker: Yeah.
Ed Hinchey: He's either gonna take Billy out or myself. And so we need to get him to the point where he really can't operate a vehicle. And so I make the decision to spray. I let Billy know I'm doing it. As I step forward to get the left hand in to the window. His hand had moved from a shifter to what I didn't see, which was a Glock 23. And it's coming up. And my exact reaction was exactly that.
I see the gun coming up, and I realized I've got a handful of collapsible batons and a handful of spray, and that's not where I need to be. And they found both of those next to where the first blood splatter was. First round came in just over the top of the door sill of the car, because he's leaned across the street.
Now he's this far away, and it comes in at an upward angle. It goes into my groin all the way through. I didn't realize what it had done. Destroyed my femoral and saphenous veins, and pieces of it splattered out, and then a big portion of it went into my hip bone. It was much hotter than I was prepared for. One of the first things that went through my mind as I'm starting to try and get off the x was, oh, my God, that's hot.
Something that, you know, in all my years, I'd never heard of anyone. We'd heard the terms hot rounds before. We just assumed they're fast rounds. You know, when you're shooting, you get that one. That really gives you a little laser kick. Well, that was hot round. This was a whole new level of meaning. Hot rounds.
Jon Becker: A completely different meaning of hot round.
Ed Hinchey: This one resonates now, you know, I get it. He hit me two more times. Almost immediately, the gun's climbing up a little bit. He's shooting one handed. So I get hit through the groin. I get hit towards the bottom of my armor, again at an upward angle, and then I get hit directly against the rib cage up here. He fired a total of ten shots and hit three times. Three times out of those ten, I'm now moving back to my a pillar. I've got one hand clamped completely over where the. What I know is the worst of the three wounds I draw, and I put 14 rounds through the medium of the windshield.
At that point in time, I look over to see where my partner's at. He's moving. He had lost a sight picture, I think, in discussions and taking a look at the scene and pictures later when the bad guy. And I don't think the bad guy consciously knew he was getting behind the engine block from there. He just wanted to get to me.
Jon Becker: Yeah, he was just leaning out to shoot you, but bought himself cover.
Ed Hinchey: Exactly. The ancillary side of that, getting closer to me, was putting himself behind the engine block so that the sight picture for Billy just kind of disappeared. And at that point in time, I reload. I'm looking back at him, I'm watching him reload. And I'm thinking to myself, I've got to be faster. I've got to be faster. I get another 13 rounds through the medium of the windshield.
I hear a shot come from behind me, and it was a muffled sound. That auditory exclusion thing was working strong that evening, Brian Armstrong, my K9 officer, had arrived at the scene, moved up behind, assessed the situation, got around downrange, came up, and I called to him, clear the vehicle. Clear the vehicle. I've got you covered. Clear the vehicle. Brian's a combat veteran marine again, one of those guys you want with you if it goes bad and he moves up, clears calls.
I'm already on the radio calling for two ambulances, getting supervisors, getting county homicide notified, making all the calls out there, trying to make sure everybody else is okay. And I keep checking with my hand. I can't control the bleeding. That's, you know, and I know it's bad and I'm pushing. I'm doing what I can. And I also, at that exact same moment, realize these don't burn. You know, it sucked. It felt like getting punched by someone that really knows how to throw a punch. They don't burn. I'm okay there. And I dismissed those wounds at that moment. I'm okay there. Those aren't. Those aren't bothering me at all.
Brian comes back, and there's a pause as he gets to me, and I'm like, okay. And he gets his vehicle. He's a k nine guy. Swings up beside me. He's like, we got to go now. There's some things we need to do here. We've got some stuff going on. Thank God for Brian Armstrong. He doesn't take my direct orders as his sergeant. He recognizes he needs to save my life.
And he throws me in his car, clears the front seat, throws me in, and we take off out of the parking lot. I get on the radio, hand it off to the guys who are coming in. Carl Parabola, some of the other officers I know, I can hear them on the radio. They're coming. They're my guys. And at that point in time, Brian, I've called that I'm en route to Mercy hospital with a gunshot victim. And Mercy hospital is a great hospital. I have family that are surgeons down there. That's where I know I need to get to.
We have several great hospitals in Pittsburgh, so we're kind of blessed that way. Brian immediately turns off, we have a non-trauma hospital right down the road from us. And I said to him, Brian, Brian, where are you going? He said, we're going to Braddock. I said, no, Brian. We absolutely need to be going downtown to Pittsburgh. And I'm looking at myself. I'm creating a puddle. I can't control this bleeding.
And he looks over at me and he says, get your hand inside the gun belt and get your finger in a hole now. And he's white knuckled on the wheel, and he's rolling. Maybe not the world's best driver, but we're okay with that. And we're hustling, man. We're really moving. And I said to Brian, I'm gonna give you direct order. You need to take me to Mercy. And his answer to that was, sarge, I'm gonna knock you the f*** out. Okay? I went back on the mic. I called. We're en route to Braddock hospital, and you can literally hear a pause in the radio traffic.
And Joe Klimko, who's my dispatcher, one of my dearest friends, he was the dispatcher for Eddie when Eddie got shot and handled the scene like nobody I could have ever. If you had to take every great dispatcher in the world and compile him into one and say, this is the program for police dispatcher. You get Joe Klimko.
And he'd been through the Eddie ordeal, and now he's got me. And he says, switch attack, sarge, who shot. And I look right at Brian, and Brian's got that look on his face. And I said, I am. Apparently, I'm just winged. He goes, ten four. [Crosstalk]
And so we go back off, and now we're on the wing with a femoral vein. Yeah, yeah. And I didn't want anything going on over the radio. I didn't want people hearing things that didn't hear it from me. And we get. Pull up into Braddock, jump on. He's got the back of my gumball. We walk into the first hospital. I got blessed there. I had incredibly experienced nurses. They rip everything off me.
And one of the nurses gets his fingers and gets up inside me and really controls the bleeding. But now he's in a very stationary mode. Joe Klimko again, has called. They've shut down the parkway that surrounds the city of Pittsburgh. They've shut down the line that'll take us directly to Presby Hospital, another phenomenal, you know, trauma hospital in the city. And they're part of this, you know, smaller, non-trauma center that I'm at now. And they've got an ambulance on the way to get me there. They're doing everything they can. They're getting fluids in me.
One of the things I will tell you is you can hear what everybody says. I don't think, you know, we take that into consideration as officers, that they think you're focused on combat breathing and trying to get better and, you know, survive. I can hear guys in the background, and I hear a couple of them saying things like, there's no way he makes it out of this hospital. He's gonna die right here, that kind of stuff. Who's gonna tell his wife? Who's? You hear all of that?
So if there's one thing we can talk about, you know, maybe later on the debrief, it's, you know, here's how to talk. When you're standing around a guy who's bleeding out. Here's one of the things you gotta consider. His faculties aren't down. They're heightened.
Jon Becker: Yeah, they're all.
Ed Hinchey: They are truly heightened. I. And he's picking up on everything, and so they're getting fluids into me. You know, I get on the phone, I make a phone call to one of the guys that I've known my entire adult life, one of my work partners, and again, another one of those great policemen that we're blessed to have in this industry. And he's the lieutenant for the county homicide. And I call him to let him know what's going on, because now I don't have a radio. I don't have a. Anything.
And give him a heads up and also say, hey, man, my family. And I look at the nurse. I said, where am I going? They said, you're going to Presby. I said, I'll be at Presby. And so he'd already been given an indication he'd already had the calls from dispatchers and everything that runs through while a critical incident goes on. So he kind of had a heads up that he's got a lot of work in front of him. And at that point in time, they roll me out and they get me down to Presby.
So I'm on my back in the ambulance. The nurse is over top of me, and he's a young, experienced, incredible trauma nurse. His fingers are up inside me. Brian is over top of him with his arm around his waist and his hand on the top of the ambulance, keeping him steady. And I've got those two faces above me, and you can kind of hear what's going on. I wear St. Michael's medal. I have a ring that never comes off that, it's got a claw on it.
And, you know, my wife put that on my hand. I know I'm going into surgery, and I don't want those getting lost. And so I kind of work it, and Brian's helping me do it. And I've mentioned Brian's a marine combat veteran. It's one of those guys. You give them. You give him a suggestion, it's. It's going to get done. So it comes off me. It's covered in blood. My rings covered in blood. And I reach.
I said, you need these. You need to get these to tam my wife. You've got to make that happen. And he says, sergeants, I've got them. And he locks them up in his fist. And, you know, we get down to Presby, doors open. Dr. Tishman's waiting for me, and they saved my life.
Jon Becker: So when they roll you into the hospital, kind of walk me through what happens next.
Ed Hinchey: Again, I had. While I'm on the gurney at the first hospital, and they're getting lines into me. They're doing everything. I grab my phone and I flip it open, and I call Chris. I know somebody needs to tell my wife. I want it to be somebody she knows. I live a fair distance outside of forest hills. I know they don't have time to get anybody out there, and I know they're busy up at the crime scene.
So I call Chris again. You talk about a friend you've had your entire adult life, entire career. You've hashed every incident with somebody, and he happens to live four doors down the street. And I call him. I said, listen, here's what's going on. You need to get your best team up to Bob's lounge. I've been in a shooting. I'm pretty sure I killed the guy. I'm hit. I said, you need to grab Tam and the kids. My daughter was eight. My son was six at that time. You need to get him down to Presby hospital.
And so he says, all right. He says, I'm going to take care of everything here. He said, you're going to call Tam, let her know I'm coming, right? I said, absolutely. They'd gotten a line into my left arm. Brian's behind me. Nurse has his fingers in my hip. I flipped the phone back open.
Another nurse takes that phone right out of my hand. She's got to get a second line in my arm because I'm crashing. They need to pump fluids me in because I'm pumping them out. Like I said, my femoral and saphenous vein were destroyed. They were gone. My leg was beginning a compartment syndrome.
I didn't know any of this at the time. I just knew there was a lot of blood. And I was practicing combat breathing. I was trying to get, you know, a whole lot of things done. The administrator side, have all the right people been notified? Do we have people at the scene? How are the initial victims? You're going through that whole side of it.
And I said, hey, listen, I need the phone back. And she says, sarge, you need to quit moving. So I never get to notify my wife. So I'm in there. They roll me in. Dr. Tishman starts to work on me. They get the first clamps inside me to start trying to control the bleeding. Chris comes through the door, my friend.
And I know when I see Chris, that means my family's there. I didn't find out until later. He had brought my wife down. He had brought his wife up to keep an eye on my kids, because he knew that hospital atmosphere and surgery and everything else was not the right, again, ultimate professional.
I'm surrounded by some of the best people in the world. I was absolutely blessed. And I said to him, hey, man, I said, bring my family. I really need to see him right now. And Dr. Tishman intervenes, and he says, sarge, he says, we can save you. You can see your family. It's not going to be both.
And so I had to make a decision right there. Knowing my family's on the exact opposite side of those doors, knowing I might not come out of this to take a shot at living. And probably one of the hardest decisions I've ever made, because there was nothing more in my core being that I wanted than to see my wife and kids. That's all I wanted.
And so I knew that when I went upstairs, they're going to knock me out. And I don't know what's after that. I have no idea. But Dr. Tishman, ultimate professional, said, sarge, we have to go right now. And Chris looks at me and says, I will take care of everybody. And off I went.
Jon Becker: Well, and you were really fortunate as far as Tischman being there.
Ed Hinchey: Oh, my goodness! One of the most incredible experienced trauma surgeons, especially for gunshot wounds, with his background in existence, let alone in Pittsburgh, let alone there. That night, he was there checking up on some other patients. Just happened to be on his way out when they called him, said, hey, they're bringing an officer in, gunshot victim.
And so he stood by the ambulance, had gotten to the crime scene. They did transport the shooter down to the exact same hospital. Dr. Tishman had another team waiting for him. I think they probably had information that. That there wasn't anything they were gonna be able to do. He was pronounced there, and Dr. Tishman had his best team waiting as I came out of the ambulance. Worked on me several times.
Originally, we thought we were gonna have to take my leg off. I'd signed all the paperwork for that. They assigned a nurse to sit at the bottom of my bed. So in between surgeries, she had a set of headphones on, and she was looking for any kind of pulse in my foot. And I knew that if they didn't find it, and they were, they'd explained to me they were going to try and take it below the knee, but there was no guarantee. It may have to be above the knee.
And I told him, I said, listen, I said, the light comes off. As long as I wake up and I see that family, we're all good here. Do whatever you've got to do. And about 2 hours before the actual surgery, she told me to hit my. My call button, and I didn't understand what was going on, and I hit the call button.
Another nurse comes in. They whisper back and forth. That nurse goes back out. Doctor comes in, lifts the headphones off. They work the foot, and he says, we've got a pulse. Can't guarantee that's going to be later today into the tomorrow, you know, in the future, but for right now, you're going to go ahead and keep the leg.
Jon Becker: So you were 2 hours from having your leg amputated?
Ed Hinchey: Yeah. Yep. And like I said, I had a five point fasciotomy done on it. They. They cut all the way through the calf.
Jon Becker: Why don't you explain what a fascia is?
Ed Hinchey: Fasciotomy is where they have to take the internal pressure off your legs, killing itself by the pressure that's built up inside it.
Jon Becker: By the fluids that are leaking.
Ed Hinchey: All the blood could get into the leg. It had no way to get back out. The veins that deliver the vein back out are gone. Luckily for me, somewhere along the way there, my femoral artery allowed sympathetic flow. The doctors explained to me later, there's no way to induce that. Your body either does it or doesn't do it.
Jon Becker: When you say sympathetic flow, what do you mean?
Ed Hinchey: My femoral artery delivers blood into my leg and back out. I got lucky. I have a good femoral artery. I got sympathetic flow in there. And they. I said, did you make that happen? What did you do? And I said, no, we can't make that happen. We can't induce that.
Jon Becker: So your body just makes a decision.
Ed Hinchey: Either happens, it's a defense mechanism. It either happens or it doesn't. The pressure was so bad on the leg, the leg was killing itself. It was. It was so big. It was just. I've never seen, I couldn't imagine that was a human leg, let alone my human leg. Black, just blood ridden. I mean, it was truly, there were, there were SWAT guys that couldn't go on that side of the bed. It just wasn't going to happen.
And introduced my eight year old daughter, Caitlin, who has locked her fingers to the side of the gurney on my side of the bed, and she has refused to leave my hospital room. She stayed the first 72 hours. And Dr. Tishman was like, sergeant, if you don't mind her staying. I don't mind her staying because trying to get her out of here is not going to be a good thing.
Jon Becker: Yeah.
Ed Hinchey: You know, so here she is. I should have known that I had my hands full, because at eight years old, she's staring down a surgeon saying, I am not leaving my daddy.
Jon Becker: I love that!
Ed Hinchey: I am not leaving my daddy. That's not going to happen. And my son's out playing football in the hallway with the other SWAT guys, which was good. It was a good place for him. And, you know, my wife was trying to balance the two of them. Me life with me laid up there, you know? So at that point in time.
Jon Becker: So they fillet your leg open.
Ed Hinchey: They fillet the leg open from the knee to the hip on top, from the knee to the groin on the inside, from the knee to the hip on the outside, and then through the calf from behind the knee down to the achilles.
Jon Becker: Just open it completely open to give the tissue room to expand.
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker: So it turns your leg into a chinese lantern.
Ed Hinchey: Exactly. So it's up on a thing. And they've got to change the wound dressings every couple hours. So you've got wound dressings inside there that literally have to be peeled out. You've got a fresh batch of them that need to be pushed back in. It was open for five days.
Jon Becker: That sounds like a barrel.
Ed Hinchey: Yeah. And we had. It's a training hospital, teaching hospital. And we had groups of interns coming in, and I looked at him, I said, you never seen a knee before like that? And he goes, not anyone that was alive. So that's a great thing to hear from the intern sitting next to your bed, you know, glad I hear for you. But again, the nurses. My mom was a nurse. Her grandmother on my wife's side was a nurse. It's kind of in the family. My sister's a nurse. They literally gowned her up, gave her a set of gloves, and she would stand there and hold the tray of the packing material.
Jon Becker: Oh, my God!
Ed Hinchey: And she's on this side going, daddy, we're doing really good. Are you okay? And she's literally a giant brown eye staring up at me.
Jon Becker: Your daughter's a badass.
Ed Hinchey: And, oh, she's just incredible. And my wife's like, hey, we got to get Connor out of here for a little bit. I'm going to be gone for a little bit. And Caitlin was like, I've got this. Like, I'm here. And just. Just amazing. And so she stayed for. She did not leave the hospital. Slept in a chair next to me. Surprisingly, the right side of my body was 100% fine. There was nothing wrong with it.
And truly, I mean, she's an angel, absolute angel. But she is her mother's daughter. Day three, she's still there, and we've got things calmed down a little bit. There's probably no more surgeries on the horizon. They are rolling in a cauterization cartae on a daily basis, because as they unpack it and there's still little tiny bleeds inside there. They cauterize those. Good times. Great smell.
Jon Becker: That sounds like fun.
Ed Hinchey: Good times. There's some things you learn.
Jon Becker: So we got your leg turned into a chinese lantern, and just for fun, we're gonna go through and light it on fire.
Ed Hinchey: Exactly. Exactly. Let's introduce this.
Jon Becker: Can you feel that?
Ed Hinchey: Yes, I can.
Jon Becker: And Caitlin is there for that.
Ed Hinchey: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Jon Becker: Just smelling dad cooking.
Ed Hinchey: Absolutely on top of it. So we get a little break. There's a couple, you know, incredible nurses taking care of us. They're bringing her some drinks and everything. And I look around, I realize these are the good nurses. These are no doctors in the room. These are. I said, hey, Caitlin, come on up. She goes, really? Come on up here. I need to hold my little girl.
Jon Becker: Yeah.
Ed Hinchey: You know? She climbs up, she gets cuddly. Now, like I said, she is her mother's daughter, okay? She looks up at me with the biggest brown eyes you're ever gonna see, and she says, daddy, are you gonna be okay? And, I mean, I'm like, baby, I said, I'm gonna be just fine. I'm absolutely gonna be just fine. Don't you worry about a thing. But my thoughts are, are you gonna be okay? She gives it a full dramatic pause, nails me with the big bronze, and she says, I'd be better if I had a puppy.
Jon Becker: Wow! My God, what a fantastic time! Deliver a dog.
Ed Hinchey: She'd been waiting for probably 71 hours to nail me with that one.
Jon Becker: Well played.
Ed Hinchey: Kept it. Kept it right in the back pocket till it was time. Yeah, yeah, she's good. She's good. Yep, yep, yep. The puppy's name was Bailey. Yeah. Carrie blue terrier, you know, absolutely positive. We drove out together when I was okay to drive a car. Again, crutches in the backseat. Picking up the. Picking up the puppy. Yeah.
Jon Becker: Well, and just, I mean, this kind of fast forwards a little bit, but, like, that permanently impacted Caitlin. Arguably, in a very positive way, absolutely.
Ed Hinchey: If you think it doesn't affect your family. And I'd love to go in depth with that throughout the interview today. Again, my wife is in the medical field, she's a pharmacist. Her grandmother was a nurse. My mom was a nurse. Caitlin had nursed me through the worst time of my life right there. And fast forward to when she graduates high school, begins nursing school, and becomes a trauma nurse at the same hospital.
Fast forward another two years. My son graduates, goes off to WVU for a little bit, enlists in the military, does a deployment to Jordan. He got sworn in four weeks ago in the Dormont police department. Yeah, the whole family, it's, yeah, no, that's, it resonates and it becomes a part of their lives as much as it becomes an incident for us.
Jon Becker: Well, I think that's, I think that's something we should discuss in more depth as we go on today, because I think that it's, I don't think people understand necessarily the impact that it has not only on the officer, but everybody around them.
Ed Hinchey: Oh, absolutely.
Jon Becker: Coworkers, family like. It's a much broader reach. Why don't we, let's kind of finish out your career and then we'll come back and talk in that. So how long is it till you get out of the hospital?
Ed Hinchey: I'm in the hospital in ICU for eleven days. It's a little bit disruptive. They've got police in the hallway. You have to be code worded in to get in. I'm taking up a lot of their space time and it's one of those, I need to get home. I want to get a good night's sleep. Dr. Tishman has a talk with my family again. My wife's a pharmacist, neighbors are nurses. We've got doctors on the street, we've got a court, we've got, again, family that are surgeons.
My road department goes over, literally installs railings in my home because they explain I'm not going to be ambulatory. They get everything set up for me. They get a bed, a recliner that lays flat. My agency, my guys from my department had laid out cash for things that they needed immediately and didn't have time to go through a po. The ambulance came and I got to ride back to my home in the ambulance that was originally sent to take me from the crime scene where I got shot to the hospital. Every one of those paramedics chewed me out for not waiting for them.
So I caught a lot of heat from Rob and the crew. I said, hey, I'm here now, you know, take me home. And he said, you have no idea how mad we were. And I said, sorry, guys. Brian Armstrong. You ever try to say no to Brian Armstrong when he's made up his mind?
Jon Becker: Well, there's a funny story about Brian, too, when he goes to put you in the car, right?
Ed Hinchey: Oh, yeah.
Jon Becker: You're refusing?
Ed Hinchey: Yeah. He's not taking no for an answer. And I still want to get a couple things done. And the marine, and let's get it now, because he knows how bad I'm hurt. He's seen this in the field. I don't. But he absolutely knows time is the one thing that's against us here. And I had a bruise right here from the common perennial strike that drove me into the car.
Jon Becker: So he planted a knee in you.
Ed Hinchey: Brian, picked you up by the seat of your pants and threw you. There was no discussion. There was no longer a sergeant patrolman relationship. There was a Brian Armstrong is going to save my life relationship going on. And no matter what it took. And even if he had to throw.
Jon Becker: You in the car?
Ed Hinchey: Exactly. And almost carry me into the hospital, all of those things. And that was, again, I'm surrounded by the right people at the right time. They talk about it being, you're on the job because of the guy next to you, and never more.
Jon Becker: True.
Ed Hinchey: Absolutely.
Jon Becker: So how long is it before life begins to get a normal cadence?
Ed Hinchey: Well, I get home, my wife's been given time off from work. Her employer was great about it, but now it's been two weeks. They need the pharmacist back. She's like, honey, I got to go. And I will tell you that part of me had been the alpha male. I take care of everything. The kids need something, I'll take care of it. My wife needs something, I'll take care of it. She's an incredibly independent woman.
But again, I'm a police officer. Let's take care of business here. All of a sudden, I can't even get myself a drink of water. I can't stand up without both hands locked onto a walker. I can barely. Barely get the words out to the folks like, hey, everyone needs to leave the room for a minute because I've got to go to the bathroom. That's who I am now. I've got my kids bringing me a snack, bringing me a glass of water. Six years and eight years old, they're taking care of me.
My wife sitting next to me, holding my hand like, honey, I actually have to leave. I have to go to work. And it's breaking her heart that she's got a. She's got to step up and do that. And I'm like, I got caitlin. We're good. Like, everything's going to be okay. And the neighbors had all chipped in. They were all waiting again. It's wintertime. The whole neighborhood's waiting.
When I come home, they've cleared everything that needed done so the ambulance could come and get everything in. They moved furniture, I mean, you name it, everything had been taken care of. And so she goes to work shortly after, a couple of days goes by, life does begin a little bit to return to normal. We're counting on some other people to help get our kids places.
One of those places is actually Sunday school. And so it's time for, you know, Caitlin to go back to Sunday school. And, you know, I'm gonna have a little quiet time in the house there. Phone rings and it's Sunday school calling, telling me my daughter is being disruptive and I need to come get her.
You know, again, you mentioned what can happen to the families, things that never get discussed. The lesson plan that day was the Ten Commandments, and they got to thou shalt not kill. And she tells the nuns, hey, my daddy had to kill somebody. And their answer to that was, well, your daddy's going to h***, and she loses it. And so we had a way to go get her.
Jon Becker: And that's when Ed slapped a nun.
Ed Hinchey: Yeah, well, we've never. Let's say we've never been back there. Yeah, yeah. And luckily, Father Lou Valone was around, a good friend of mine who rides motorcycles and is a priest. And it kind of explained that there's a big difference between thou shalt not commit murder and thou shalt not kill, and that God still loves daddy and everything.
But my wife's at work. She's got co-workers who she thought were her friends who aren't speaking to her because I killed somebody and I don't find out about this right away. They don't want me to have to deal with that. While I'm dealing with some of that, the kids at school are saying different things to my kids. The news stories. There's still reporters showing up, pounding on the door of the house, trying to get, you know, an interview and answer.
We also had some great reporters, you know, guys like Mike Clark, who called, went through channels, through the agency, went through, you know, my family to make sure everything was okay and to assure me that it was going to be respectful and, you know, we discussed what. What we were okay discussing.
Jon Becker: Yeah.
Ed Hinchey: And so there was some incredible reporting being done, but there was the other side of it, as well. Articles in the paper weren't correct. Everybody's racing to get the story out first rather than correctly. So we suffered through some bad reporting, but we also had some great stuff. Folks came out to the house and actually showed what we were going through. Medical devices on the floor, a restructured home, walkers port a potties. I had to live on the first floor of my house for months. My bedroom is upstairs.
Jon Becker: I imagine it's probably a challenge to try to remain positive and try to focus on the good things that are happening when there is this negative stuff that's going on, you know, the Sunday school and the reporters and, like, how did you manage that? How did you keep yourself focused on surviving and getting healthy and not allow yourself to get mired down?
Ed Hinchey: My wife, Tammy, she sat next to me every moment she could and would not tolerate me being down. Just wouldn't put up with it, you know, and she'd say, you're alive. We love you. We have the best kids there are. What else do you want? Focus. Get focused. Look what you have. You know, and I'm, you know, I'm worried, I'm not going to be the man I was. I don't know if my leg is going to come back. I've got rehabilitation folks telling me I'll never walk correctly again, let alone be able to go back on the job.
And in the end, part of that was. Right? I was not able to go back to work. I was medically retired. I couldn't pass the independent medical exam. I could pass the physical agility test, but I couldn't pass the independent medical exam.
Jon Becker: Blood flow issues.
Ed Hinchey: Right. I was device dependent. I had to use a lymphedema press to get the swelling down. Every day I wear compression stockings. They took me in. They done ascending venograms, trying to figure out what the mapping was inside there. Good times. That's really exciting stuff. That's where they plug the needle into your foot. They put you on an inversion board. They push all the fluid backwards and map it with chemicals.
Jon Becker: That sounds.
Ed Hinchey: That's exciting.
Jon Becker: This one, they actually give you a bite stick. Oh, yeah. Good times. And they don't talk about that part, you know, if you're watching the TV, The Hour TV show, he got shot. He's back, he's fine. Yeah, yeah.
Jon Becker: No, that's the part we miss all that stuff.
Ed Hinchey: No, we don't. We don't get the, you know, eight, eight season documentary of your life is now completely different, which is, again, I'm blessed, surrounded by all the right people, my wife leading the way. You know, from the time we came home, from the time we got to the hospital and she was allowed in the room the first time she took charge, you know, just, you know, she is. Her dad was a Pennsylvania state trooper, so she grew up in a law enforcement family.
I think that aspect of it played into it. You know, she came from a very strong, well structured. Her grandmother, the nurse, her mom. Everything along that way was, was solid. And so she just wasn't taking no for an answer. She's honey. She goes, if we have to move on. If we have to leave law enforcement behind, you're still at Hinchey. You're still going to get the job done. We will figure this out.
Jon Becker: So how far after the shooting did you make the decision that you were going to retire?
Ed Hinchey: Actually, it was like I said, it was a doctor they brought in, the independent medical examiner. They had me on the table. He's listening to me. He's working me through. And he said, sergeant, stay here for a minute.
So I'm there with the nurse. He goes back out and he came and he says, get dressed and meet me in my office. And he was actually a little bit upset with me. He says, I just spent the last 30 minutes looking for your femoral and saphenous veins, and I couldn't figure out where they were. He said, you don't have any. They ligated them out from below your aorta to your knee as well. The bullet helped that along.
Jon Becker: Yeah, they didn't ligate them. They stopped the bleeding.
Ed Hinchey: Yeah, they went below to where there was actually a structure and kind of tied down, to be fair.
Jon Becker: The suspect ligated, right?
Ed Hinchey: Yeah, yeah, instantaneously. First shot of the gunfight. What I found out later, again from Dr. Tishman, was good news, bad news. Had it hit the femoral artery? I don't make it. I flat out don't make it. Even with Brian's incredible work, I don't make it.
Jon Becker: Yeah, just that limit, that limited reduction in pressure was like your life literally hung in that battle.
Ed Hinchey: Oh, yeah. And they X where the hit was. I mean, they were that close. A couple millimeters the other direction, it's lights out of the hit up here. If you look at the angle you work, the trajectory of the round to me, my aorta is on the other side of the hit. My armor flat out saved my life. Either one of these rounds hits my intestines, my lungs and my heart, and all they did was put leave a little burn on my chest behind it.
But back to the doctor explaining things to me. He explains that there's no way to put a new vein in that technology doesn't exist yet. The best they can do is make this leg compromised by cutting the saphenous vein in my ankle, fishing it out of this leg, fishing it across my groin, trying to reestablish it in this leg. And there's only about a 40% chance it'll take.
Jon Becker: And if it doesn't, then you've lost this.
Ed Hinchey: There's 100% chance I've now diminished function in this leg. So this is explained to me by the doctors, by the independent medical examiner. He said, if I'd have known, if I'd have seen in your file those veins were ligated out, we'd have never gone in there to look and begin your exam. He said, sergeant, your leg isn't going to work. And he said, you're going to retire out.
So they retired me out at the end of the year, about a year and a few months after it had happened. In the meantime, before I get retired out and before I go see this independent medical examiner, I get a phone call from armor holdings, what is now Safariland. A guy by the name of Steve Samek calls me. He runs a couple of their programs there. Incredible lieutenant from Pueblo, Colorado.
And he says, hey, we do a thing here with saves, and you're a save, and your story's kind of out there. We'd like to bring you down to South beach to the IACP conference so you can meet the folks that built your armor. And I'm like, I need to tell a whole lot of people. Thank you. And that was something that kind of dawned on me. Like, I knew the armor saved my life and kept me in the fight. I knew my training kept me in the fight and saved my life. I knew how to thank my trainers.
Brian Avery was in the hospital room, and that was the first person besides Brian and Chris that my wife wanted to speak to. And she wanted assurance that I'd done my job right because she knew I'd be a bear to live with if I hadn't.
So once she had that, she said she felt a lot better, that part of it, for me to go thank the folks that actually built my body armor was kind of the first time I realized there's more out there I need to go say thank you to, because I thanked the medical people. I thanked the nurses at the first hospital. I thanked everybody. Joe Klimko. I couldn't see the guy without giving him a hug. His voice on the radio carried the day. But now I knew there was a whole nother level to that.
There are a lot of people I'd never heard of that helped bring me home. And so I said, listen, I'd love to come do that. I said, the problem with that is my family has stood by my side for the last year and a half. I can't jump on a plane and come down to South beach and leave them back here in Pittsburgh. And Steve Simmons, this apparently I wasn't clear. We'd like to have you and your family come to South beach so you can meet the folks that built your armor. That was my introduction to the Saves club.
And so I went down. We did all that. There was another event shortly thereafter called November to remember. I got to go to and be the save and meet more people. These were people from Dupont and Honeywell, and they had built Tajon that built the material that was inside my armor. So going a whole nother layer beyond the folks that designed and built it. Here's the folks that created the material that they designed and built into armor.
And I knew about these folks from working with the NIJ on the limb walker part of it. And now it's all coming together. All the pieces are falling into place to make me understand the industry a little better. And at that point in time, I explained to John Gaucher and a couple guys that worked for us that, hey, it looks like they're going to retire me out. That second visit. I'm like, because they wanted me to come to shot show.
And John got a smile on his face. Rod Dornsife got a smile. They went off and had a talk. They came back and they said, if they retire you, when do you think it'll be? I said, end of the year. They said, great. If that happens, we'd like you to get on a plane to come to Florida. And sure enough, they created a position for me.
Steve Sammick was moving on. They needed somebody to pull a three different groupings of saves clubs because armor holdings was a holding group. We had an ABA camp. We had a second chance camp. They purchased second chance off the auction block after it went bankrupt. Because of what went on was Zilon and Eddie Limbacher's fest. You had Safariland. You had Bianchi.
There was a lot of different moving parts. And Scott O'Brien sat me down and said, I want you to pull it all together. You understand this. You are safe. You know what your family's been through. Cause we'd had these same kind of discussions one on one. Cause Scott was a hands on boss. We're blessed to have him. He's still with us. He's just moved up the chain a little tiny bit. And so he sat me down and he said, you know, the directive is this.
Once they become a save at Safariland, they should want for nothing. They should get their armor when they're ready for it, their replacement armor. They should get what support we can give them. If we make it and they need it, it's theirs. He said, I want them to know we care. And, you know, he said, you know, this is a together thing. This is. He says, nobody rents a chair at Safariland. You own a chair. He said, I want the people inside Safariland to know that's what they did. They saved a hero. And I want that hero to know they've got a family right behind them.
Everybody with a Safariland on their shirt is part of this. He said, whether it's the person that carried that role into the building and secured it behind a curtain, because now nothing's allowed to see UV radiation. If it's the person who cut it on the gerber, if it's the stitcher, if it's any of this, that's all part of it. Your job is to make it all come together.
And of course, being Scott, he said, if there's anything in your way, you don't work your way to me, you call me. And I said, yes, sir. And there was career number two.
Jon Becker: And that began your career with the saves program?
Ed Hinchey: It sure did. Yeah. And I couldn't ask for a better second career. I went from catching bad guys to taking care of the good guys. I'm blessed. I couldn't be in a better place.
Jon Becker: I love it. So, Ed, how long have you run the saves program at Safari?
Ed Hinchey: Over 16 years now.
Jon Becker: And in that time, how many saves has Safariland had in the last 16 years?
Ed Hinchey: Right now, we've announced 2128 officers saved in a line of duty.
Jon Becker: And how many of those 2100 do you think you've personally interacted with?
Ed Hinchey: I am saved, 941. I came in a few saves after me as they were kind of pulling the Saves club together. And in my time with Safariland, I have inducted over 1100 saves into the club. But all the guys who were still active duty that were saved prior to me, I got to interact with. I've worked with over 1000 officers shot in the line of duty.
Jon Becker: I don't know that there's anybody else maybe in the world that has interacted with as many officers shot in the line of duty you have. So what I would love to do is dig into the lessons learned.
Ed Hinchey: Oh, absolutely. And this is where the Safariland umbrella really gets some teeth in it. Most of the other groupings out there. And any save, I don't care whose brands on the front of your armor is a great save. If the armor helps bring you home. If the duty gear helps bring you home, the helmet, the shield, the plate helps bring you home and makes you a save regardless of brand, and keeps your name off the wall. In Judiciary Square in Washington, DC. It's a great day for law enforcement.
Jon Becker: Yeah. So let's say for the industry, too.
Ed Hinchey: Exactly. Let's get right out in front of that. But I'm blessed to have a position with Safariland who has two out of every three saves, so. And we were able to include duty gear. We've got an officer by the name of Janine Triolo who was beat to the ground on a snowbank on a side of a road by an assailant who was doing everything he could to kill her. He pulled a gun out that he just didn't know how to use. Tried to kill her with that. He used it to beat her. You know, he broke bones in her face. He put her on the ground, and then he grabbed her gun and tried to get it out to use it.
The holster was a retention holster. It was a Safariland holster. He could not get that gun out of the holster. He was literally lifting off the ground by it, and he couldn't get the gun out of the holster. Janine, absolute warrior, kicks him backwards. Her gum functions perfectly, even after the assault from….
Jon Becker: Because she knew.
Ed Hinchey: She knew how to use the retention and had been taught how to use a retention holster, and she was able to end that assailant. So she's here because of her gear. We've got plate saves. We've got, you know, Kevin Malone, who took a round in a helmet. Buddy Brown, that took a round in a helmet. We've got Dorian desantis. That was part of that navy yard shooting in Washington, DC, where his plate took a center punch.
Jon Becker: Sean Harris, who took a….
Ed Hinchey: Oh, gosh! Sean Harris down in Texas. The list goes on. Jared Reston, Katie Lawson, who won the Presidential medal of Valor. You know, I get to work with heroes. So again, I don't know who's watching over me up there, but I have the best job on the planet being a motor sergeant in Forest hills surrounded by the best group of guys on the planet.
And now I get Scott O'Brien tapping me on the shoulder, saying, there's a whole crew of heroes out there that need you. Go take care of them, groundhog. Yeah, and it's, you know, I've been to Australia to take care of saves. We've worked with guys in Portugal and Italy, and anywhere Safariland touches, there's most likely going to be a save.
Jon Becker: In the time that you've worked with these guys and girls. Let's walk through what you think from a surviving a shooting standpoint. What have you seen as a common pattern?
Ed Hinchey: Training would be absolute number one. And let's go back a step further than that. Selection process. You've got to have the right clay to mold into a professional police officer. So selection process, I truly believe that we're failing the communities, the nation a little bit at the moment today because we're looking for officers who are really nice and community oriented, and we need them. That should be part of every officer. That officer also may be called upon to have to visit incredible violence on somebody or take their life. They've got to be prepared for all of that.
Again, my son just graduated the academy. A huge percentage of his training is community oriented policing. It's, you know, how to apply the law fairly equally, and I'm a huge believer in all of that. But the preparedness for the physical side of this, again, when there becomes no choice, you've got to save somebody else's life or your own or your partner's.
You know, it's that civilian first you've got your community, you've got your partner, and then that priority of life becomes the person trying to end all that around you, and you give them every chance you can to survive. But sometimes it takes incredible violence to stop that threat.
Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting! I recently read a book called when violence is the answer and which we'll link to in the show notes. The whole premise of the book is, yeah, you should avoid violence whenever you can.
Ed Hinchey: Absolutely.
Jon Becker: But in those percentage of cases like yours, like Buddy Brown's, where the person is going to kill you, violence is the only answer.
Ed Hinchey: Absolutely.
Jon Becker: And being more violent more quickly than they are is the only way to win the fight. What do you think is wrong with our selection process? Are we trying to find you know, people that are really nice but not, not, I don't want to use the word hardened enough, but don't have that warrior ethos in them.
Ed Hinchey: I truly believe, and I've sat in through all type of selection process, they're trying to avoid that warrior ethos. They're staying away from the person who can flip the switch when they need to. They're more worried about civil liability if they have that guy on who may go the distance. And that's atrocious. It's atrocious to the community when someone calls 911. They need the true professional who has the whole playbook with them. And they may be calling, want 911 because their baby's choking. He needs to come in there and know how to provide the immediate treatment to save the child.
It's a great day for the family. It's a great day for the community. It's a great day for law enforcement. He needs to be the one that can console somebody when you have to knock on the door and say, hey, you're your child. That it was away at college, isn't coming home. You know, those are tough days. You have to be sympathetic to what information you're about to deliver. It's going to change their world forever. It may just be the lonely widow who calls because she hears something up back, but she's just that. She's a lonely widow. She wants to see a human, that's all.
You know, shovel the wok on your way up. Make sure she has groceries in the fridge. Check in with her. Put a little note on your notepad. If I'm going by, I see you're in the window, I'm gonna stop and say, hi, you gotta be that guy. But if the call is, hey, you know, we just had two victims run into a bar covered in blood. Her ex husband's gonna go try and kill her mom. You gotta be that guy, too.
Jon Becker: Yeah.
Ed Hinchey: And, you know, where we're failing is we're not preparing the officer in the academy at that level to come out and be ready to flip a switch.
Jon Becker: I think it's an interesting theme. Like, you know, in a lot of the interviews that I've done, there is a recurring theme, and in my brain, it's that we. We've become too safe.
Ed Hinchey: Yes.
Jon Becker: We've become too comfortable. And we've moved so far up the Maslow triangle that we're starting to think, well, I mean, we don't really want to see policemen. We don't really want to think about violence. And the problem is that, yeah, violence is relatively rare in the United States, and really, truly sociopathic violence is extremely rare relative to other cultures, but it still happens.
Ed Hinchey: True.
Jon Becker: And when it does, the only solution is having people on the street to deal with that situation who have that capability. Doesn't mean we want psychopaths running around. It doesn't mean we want people that enjoy killing people.
Ed Hinchey: No, but there's no enjoyment.
Jon Becker: We do a disservice to the community and to the officer, because I'm sure in your career you've seen a lot of people who probably shouldn't be on the job that end up getting shot and it destroys them.
Ed Hinchey: Absolutely. It's heartbreaking for me. And there's a failing again, begins with a selection process. Maybe this person should have never been placed out there. Number two, no one ever sat them down and explained to them, you may have to take a life. Do you assume that the person knows that when they're getting sworn in, you're a policeman, you've watched tv shows, you know what police work is.
But if you ever sat them down and explained to them, you may have to go home to your family and say, hey, I killed somebody tonight. Have they ever prepared the officer for the aftermath of a lethal incident? Is he gonna bottle it up and not discuss it? Is he gonna start to eat his lunch?
You know, there's for the saves that I've been blessed enough to work with, who came out of it strong and better, and paying it forward, and doing after action debriefs and showing, hey, here's a red flag I missed. Here's this. Let's not make. Let's make sure that doesn't happen to anybody going forward. Building the playbook better based on real life experience.
The ones that came out of it strong, they had great training, continual training, well above and beyond the mandatory minimum, you know, in service hours. These are guys that took time out of their own lives, money out of their own pocket often, and went to extra training. I literally, I took Brian Avery's training on my time. I worked shifts, drove to the raceway, went back and worked shifts. I knew how important that training was. I wanted to come home to my family. I knew bad things could happen, and I knew training would make me better when that event took place.
Jon Becker: Yeah. Recurring theme in my interviews is being a student of the game. Absolutely, it is. Being a student of the profession and understanding far beyond what you're going to get in the academy.
Ed Hinchey: Yeah. Professor McIntyre up at IUP, who was a retired DC officer, one of the best guys I ever met, took a class from, referred to himself, and it always resonated with me as the eternal rookie. He said, I'm the eternal worker. I want to learn something every single day that makes me better.
Jon Becker: And the thing is, I think even apart from the profession, it's good life philosophy. Every year, I'll pick something up that I don't know how to do. It might be playing the piano, it might be a foreign language, it might be whatever. But it's like, take yourself out of your comfort zone, because especially in this line of work, being comfortable is a very dangerous place.
Ed Hinchey: It's stoicism. The obstacle is the way. Yeah, that's what it is.
Jon Becker: Yeah. It's interesting. I remember years ago, I was working on a demo, and we had LAPD's bomb squad there, and Sid Heal and I were rigging an explosive. And I looked over and all the LAPD bomb squad guys are behind their suburbans, said, stop. I said, why? Bomb squads hiding behind their cars? So walked over to Joe Powell at the. As a sergeant. I said, why are you hiding behind your car?
He goes, you guys are going to blow yourself up. And I said, why are we going to blow ourselves up? He goes, you are way too comfortable with explosives. He said, if you ever find yourself comfortable with something that can kill you, it's about to kill you. Oh, yeah, and those words, that was really early in my career, and those words stuck with me. And he said, the thing is, you have to remember. And then I had a firearms instructor that said the same thing. You have to remember the difference between an operational act and administrative act.
Putting together an explosive device is an administrative thing. It's not an operational thing. It's kind of like loading and unloading a gun.
Ed Hinchey: Oh, yeah, right.
Jon Becker: It's an administrative act. You can take as long as you want, be as careful as you want. Reloading a gun, operational act, got to be a little faster, got to be a little looser. It feels to me that we are seeing a point in time where society is becoming too comfortable and the profession is becoming too comfortable.
And there's this tension between, well, we want you to be trained in these 25 different IT devices, and we want you to understand community oriented policing, all of which matters. But if we're gonna continue to add things, we need to expand the amount of time we take to prepare a police officer. And it feels like a mindset, and training has got to be part of that.
Ed Hinchey: Training is absolutely. Mindset comes from training. It's got to be there. And I think we're failing the officers out there with it right now. I think we need to do a better job. And as much as it's comfortable, they're becoming comfortable in their profession, I think they're also becoming a little too cautious in their approach to use of force. They're worried. It's actually, I've had saves who were shot in the line of duty, who didn't draw a gun because they were worried about civil liability, which is horrifying. Yeah, they are – They are – Someone is actively trying to kill them, and they would not.
Someone else had to come in and expose their lives and end it, rather than you have the moment, you have the ability, you have the sworn oath to do, and you chose not to because you were worried about the report afterwards.
Jon Becker: Yeah. I mean, I don't want you to fire a gun until you are constitutionally permitted to do so. I don't want the government to use violence against people unless they have to. But I also don't want that thought to inhibit a police officer from protecting him or herself.
Ed Hinchey: And that is happening. And it's on a supervisory level, too. I've seen active shooters, hostage situations, or truly a non barricaded suspect who's waving a gun at police officers who were there. And an administrator says, somebody go get a beanbag shotgun or somebody get a taser. We're going to try that first. We have incidents, reported incidences in law enforcement where officers were killed trying to deploy less lethal force in a lethal force situation. California supervisory issue.
Jon Becker: California just amended the penal code to require that it's not only that the person has the ability to kill somebody, but that it's, it's imminent. So, you know, I've got a hostage. I come out on the porch, I tell you I'm going to kill him. I come out on the porch, you have a shot at me. You can't take that shot because I'm not imminently killing them like this is the thing. And I think that there is a recurring theme also in the interviews that I'm doing of we're not doing enough to educate the public about what actually has to happen in law enforcement.
Ed Hinchey: Right. And I think part of that is the public perception has been skewed. I can't tell you how often I watch an interview about an active shooting involving law enforcement. You've got an officer, they'll be reporting, three officers were shot in an incident. And the first thing asked of the public information officer who's reporting on how these, if they're going to live, if these officers are even going to live, is why did the officer stop the vehicle? The officer was just shot. May die. Your first question is why did he stop the vehicle? That was your concern. You're looking for the story. You want that next?
Jon Becker: Yeah. It's man bites dog. Right? Like, it's. This is, this is part of it is the problem with our news cycle where we have just, we are so driven by our evolutionary biology to look for, for negative news that, that that's what we consume. Right? We don't want to hear that.
You know, Officer Smith, you know, helped a kid, you know, helped a kitty out of a tree. We don't want to hear that. We want to hear that he shot the cat and that cat fell out of the tree because that's what our dopamine system wants to hear, so. Oh, that's really bad. Oh, I'll pay attention to that. I mean, you look at what happens on social media and we'll talk, you know, in a minute about, about the effect of social media on officers.
What if Ed Hinchey is the czar of the universe in law enforcement training and selection? What does that look like?
Ed Hinchey: I'm going to surround myself with a lot smarter people than me, and we're Going to start building…
Jon Becker: For either of us. Either of us. That's an easy thing to do.
Ed Hinchey: We're going to start building that playbook. But we take the lesson learned. We go back to the Ron McCarthy's, the people that have lived through a cycle like we're in now, and we find out, what did you find? Worked with interaction with the public. What did you find work with training. What did you find work. Because the circumstances haven't changed. It's the speed at which we're aware of them that has social media cameras at a scene from 80 different angles while you're trying to take somebody into custody. All that's changed. So perceptions have changed.
We are starting to pick up on the fact that this camera angle may show this and it may look bad, but this camera angle shows what the officer saw, which is a whole different, which we've just seen a couple guys cleared recently who were crucified in the media. And then when the entire story came out, we find out they had no other choice.
Jon Becker: Yeah, it's interesting. Initially, I was not a fan of body worn cameras because I thought it was going to create a situation where, you know, everybody's going to second chat. You know, we're all going to. We're going to Monday morning court. Realistically, we're going to Monday morning quarterback. Anyways, let's at least have the game highlight film.
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker: And it does seem that the way that it is working now, more often than not, is, you know, people go, oh, you know, he wasn't armed and the police officer shot him and he was running away and it's like, no, that's him pointing a gun at the officer, you know, pulling the trigger and the round going over the officer's shoulder. Oh, yeah. So I agree with you. I think that there's benefit there.
Ed Hinchey: There's huge benefit. Yeah. And it's, you know, there's been studies done. There's a couple famous ones out there and we'll link to them, I hope, later, where public funding. Funding was given grant money to show that there is an unequal application of use of force in law enforcement today. And these studies were done by incredibly smart people who admitted, I truly thought I'd discover that, yes, in fact, there's racially motivated, there's worse stuff going on. And that's not what turned out.
The study showed, in fact, the exact opposite, which is great for us. And the body cameras support all that. So good cops have no problems recording good police work. That's what we do. We didn't have body cameras when I got shot, but we had car cameras.
And honestly, I think that made it easier for the shooter's family because they knew we did try and give every chance we could. And when they brought some lawyers in to see if there was going to be any civil side to it, they said, we might want to see this tape first. So my family didn't have to go through civil actions or anything else to defend my actions.
Jon Becker: Yeah. Or threats of criminal prosecution. I mean, this is kind of the new thing in a lot of bigger states is, you know, we're not only going to look at it civilly, we're going to look at it criminally. We're going to have a, you know, the LA County DA's office. That's become kind of a project for them too. We're no longer putting crooks in jail, but let's see how many cops we can put in jail.
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker: Because that's somehow going to help. But, you know, it's, you see this kind of movement towards that and, you know, what you see is an officer that's involved in a shooting and it's a year before the DA's office clears them.
Ed Hinchey: That's so criminal.
Jon Becker: These things are hanging over their heads, you got threats of civil. I mean, I honestly look at a lot of these situations go, I don't know why anybody would want to do.
Ed Hinchey: This anymore now, because we have people that we need who know doing the right thing for a living is an honorable career.
Jon Becker: Yeah, thank God. I mean, because it is becoming less and less a job where you're thanked and appreciated and more and more a job where you're under threat kind of constantly, you know, it almost drives a siege mentality.
Ed Hinchey: I look at my son, Conor, and I kind of knew this is the direction he was always going to go. But a lot of things happened between when he graduated high school, when he went to college and enlisted and served, a lot of media attention, the George Floyd stuff, everything that went on.
And he came to us and say, I'm going to get Air Force money now. I'm going to go to the academy. I'm like, sure about this? He got a big smile on his face. He's like, dad. He goes, yeah, I'll sure this. I was never more proud. I knew what he was going to do and he knew what he's going to do, and it's for all the right reasons. He's that guy. He's the guy you want at the end of the 911 line.
Jon Becker: Yeah. Which that's the thing, is ultimately doing what I've done for 35 years, the number of those people that I've been exposed to, and a lot of the motivation for this podcast is there are amazing stories like yours that no one ever hears, right. That no one ever sees, that don't see the light of day. And it's just the more you dig into these things.
And honestly, my motivation every day is those are the guys I work for, right? Ultimately, my job is to protect those guys. I had somebody ask me, why do you do what you do? I said, I protect people who place themselves in harm's way for people they don't even know.
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker: Like you're willing to run into, you know, to a burning building or take on an assailant to protect your family. That's a different thing than doing it to protect somebody else's family.
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker: When you've never even met them and you may not even meet them afterwards, right? It is, you know, it's unfortunate how from your perspective, talk to me about armor and the relationship between the police officers in armor.
Ed Hinchey: It's interesting that even today, even after the Zylon debacle and everything that Eddie had to pay the price for, and then we've had the response. We have the NIJ having a much more vigorous standard to test to. I had a save last week. I called him for the first time, talked to him. He's home from the hospital.
Armor changes the game. If you're only hit on armor, your average stay in the hospital is 2 hours. You're home. You know, they go, they check you out. They make sure you're okay. You have what we call back, face signatures. So the round gets stopped on the armor. You've got kinetic energy turning heat. There's friction against your body that happens incredibly fast. You get – You're treated for a burn behind the armor. So nines, forties. In the hospital, you get to the higher calibers or shotguns hitting soft armor. You can crack ribs, you can collapse lungs. You can get that kind of thing. You've got the gyaradosite cases. You've got the Jason brown cases. So you've got some stuff out there that is a game changer. Yeah.
Jon Becker: All of which, I mean, I will take. I will take burn and broken ribs over shotgun slug through the chest.
Ed Hinchey: All day long.
Jon Becker: Yeah, all day long. That is a…
Ed Hinchey: You know, you're still coming home.
Jon Becker: Yeah, yeah.
Ed Hinchey: Okay.
Jon Becker: Maybe it's the next day.
Ed Hinchey: Right. I'll take that. But I called to save, and I said, hey, were you wearing level two or three a and his answer was the same as mine. When I first had to call the NIJ and look at Eddie's vest and answer what that label meant. He goes, I had what the department issued me. I have no idea what it is. I don't know what it is.
He goes, I will tell you, it was really comfortable. Turned out to be an SX02. He said, it's a really, really comfortable vest. I said, well, you're in our house performance vest. You're in a good place. I said, we're going to get you a brand new one. Do you like what you're wearing? He goes, I won't wear anything else. And that's another regular thing. I hear. I want the same vest back.
Jon Becker: Oh, yeah.
Ed Hinchey: Yeah. That saved my life. That's what I want. He trusts it now, and so that part of it's. But the feedback we get, they're so incredibly honest. They are our best t and e group, because they'll tell you, hey, that vest saved my life.
But, man, this carrier rubbed me here. It was too high up. I know you may be trying to give me more coverage, but I couldn't move in that. I had to really tack it down. I had to change some things up. And we have an incredible, incredibly wonderful R&D department. Guys like David Pittman who, can you give him a call and say, hey, is there something new? Because. Absolutely. And sometimes it's a little sizing issue. The officer gained some weight. He's out of the academy now.
Jon Becker: He's eating McDonald's. It's fitting four days a week, twice as gym.
Ed Hinchey: You went from morning and evening pt to 8 hours in a patrol car with literally a bag of Wendy's next to you. And that's changed the game a little bit of then you find out that it's not really a carrier issue. It's actually a fit issue based on the officer's body composition has changed.
Jon Becker: It's one of the things that has always frustrated me, and I've had exactly the same experiences we've had people call holsters. What kind of gun do you have? It's black. I'm not sure. One of the things that has always frustrated me is that we as an industry have done a bad job of educating our consumers.
Consumer and law enforcement as an industry has done a terrible job of educating police officers about armor, about how it works, why it works. You know, you and I have done classes together for groups to kind of explain, like, this is how your armor works, and this is what happens, and this is why it happens, and this is why you need to care. Right?
And it's like, it's funny because you'll see guys that will spend 14, 16 hours picking out wheels for their car or which gym equipment they're going to buy or what cell phone they're going to buy. And then you ask them, what kind of arm are they going? That's kind of bluish.
Ed Hinchey: Yeah. And that's something they dawn every single time they go to work for a minimum 8 hours a day, it's going to be against your body. And it may be the one difference between you coming home and not coming home, and you give no thought to it whatsoever.
Jon Becker: And the thing is, you're also placing your safety into the hands of the industry. And there are certainly very reputable companies in the industry, like Safariland, who are doing the testing, who have fantastic ballistic engineers who really care about the end user.
Ed Hinchey: We have our own lab.
Jon Becker: There are also the opposite. And I think part of what I would love to see happen is at least give them the ability. The article that I wrote for ntoa was entitled caveat mtor. Right. Buyer beware.
Ed Hinchey: Exactly.
Jon Becker: And it's, you just realize, like, we've got to do a better job of educating cops in the academy. What it is, how it works, why you need to care.
Ed Hinchey: Behind the armor class that you helped me build originally, I'm showing some pictures of Todd Mackler, my boss, and, you know, he says, you need to sit down with Ron McCarthy. I said, I'll sit down with Ron McCarthy anytime. And I show Ron the pictures that I have from saves. And he said, are you teaching this to every person that you can show it to? And I said, not at the moment. He said, well, you failed, but let's get to work on it.
Jon Becker: I'm disappointed in you.
Ed Hinchey: You can redeem yourself, but let's get to work here. And I've had those moments. Oh, yeah. That's why you love Ron McCarthy, man. He put it right out there, man. And so we began to build the behind the armor class. And the first group I taught it to was actually a group of cadets at the Michigan State Police. And I taught it, and the cadre staff there stopped me, and they're like, you need to do it again.
To our cadre, I was like, okay, like, we've got something here. And so we did that. I've taught that class all over the world now, but I now also teach medics, doctors, guys that run with SWAT teams, because they've never seen the pictures. They may be incredible trauma surgeons, but unless they were also military, you're not going to get the gunshot wounds or if they work in Detroit or somewhere like that.
So I just worked with a group of doctors up at Massachusetts State police that run with their tactical teams to teach the behind the armor class. These are what the wounds look like. Yeah, this is. And these saves share it all with us. We're working with Dr. Cindy Burr, who's on a DOJ grant, to go ahead and study backface and what happens to the trauma on the body, because the only litmus test we have at this point was the group of goats during the Vietnam war that Neil Perkins, our founder, helped design to figure out what's an acceptable backface.
Jon Becker: Yeah. And, I mean, you know, it's interesting because, like, I've worked with numerous agencies, with competitors, armor, where they've come to us and they've said, we had a shooting and the vest failed. One in particular comes to mind where they said, the vest failed, the officer's badly injured, and we're going to sue him.
And I said, well, okay, can I see the vest? Like, what? Can you. Oh, yeah, you can come see the vest. Open the vest, said, okay, show me where it failed. Oh, you know, he's big, he's got a hole in his skin, and, you know, the bullet went through him. Okay, where's the bullet? Like, well, they didn't find it. It's. Okay. Well, is there an exit wound? No. Well, where do you think the bullet is? I mean, I know where the bullet is, but where do you think the bullet is?
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker: We think it must have, like, gone through his skin and come back out the same hole. Or we're going to cut the carrier open and it's going to be in the carrier. And you owe this manufacturer an apology. It was not one of my favorite manufacturers, if I'm being honest. It was one of those like, oh, God, here we go. Right? But it's like, yeah, I think you need to send them a thank you card because the bullet's in. Like they didn't even understand and hadn't educated themselves, having had a shooting and a save, that it was a save.
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker:
And it just feels like there's gotta be a better way for us to train people.
Ed Hinchey: There's gotta be. There's gotta be an industry wide educational push on armor. I would love to see that. Make them truly understand what its capabilities are. You know, we probably can't pick up a severe edge shot at an angle going towards the outward edge. If it's coming towards the inwards, you've got a little better chance. Does a perimeter stitch help or hurt? Let's take a look at the package itself. What's its composition? Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't.
Again, those are things that go to guys like Frank Smith, Dave Pittman, guys that really are on the interior design of that package. Oh, gosh! On hard armor, he's genius. Absolutely positive. We get into it. We haven't even really touched hard armor. And what it's done to save one good shield, save can save five guys. You got a stack behind there, and it takes multiple hits. You've saved five guys with the technology in that shield we took.
In Raton, New Mexico, a twelve gauge shotgun hit from about five and a half feet away on a viewport. Our viewports are supported because guys like Mark Cardett decide they have to be. Does the NIJ test them that way? Do they look for that? No. Do we look for that internally?
Absolutely. And we brought guys home on that because we over. We built to not just what the minimum spec, minimum standard was. We built to address what could happen in the field. And a lot of information is what we've gleaned from saves prior. So we are paying it forward. Those saves have made us build better armor. And now that's what's saving the next guy.
Jon Becker: So let's talk about what happens after a shooting, the aftermath, and the effect on the officer that's been shot.
Ed Hinchey: And this is where I feel that I need to do a much better job. I'm actually in a position now where I know what happens. So many people are unprepared of what their family is about to go through. I truly didn't understand. Even though I'd been through it with Eddie Limbacher and his family, the light had never clicked on. Hey, I should prep my family in case that happens to me. That was a failing on my part.
So I'm doing everything I can right now to let folks know from the training part four. When you're doing the academy class, you need to sit that officer down and explain to him that you're not the only one going through this critical incident. Your family is going to get a knock on the door or a phone call.
And now they're going through the critical incident. They're going to leave your presence in the hospital and they're going to be in the hallways and the waiting rooms and they're going to hear people talk. They are going to go to their work. They're going to go to their schools. They're going to go to CCD, and they're going to hear things or be told things. They're going to force your family to question your actions. If your family asks you a question, you've got to give them an honest answer.
You know, when my little girl looked up at me and I mean, again, eight years old, old soul, eight years old. And she says, daddy, what happened to the other guy? And I've got to tell her I killed him, you know, that's, that's one of those moments. It's pivotal and it's got to be handled right, but it doesn't, it's not over. You don't close the chapter, wake up the next day and everything's back to normal. It is an ongoing process. And you watch the evolution of your children because you've changed that evolution. You've redirected it because you chose this as a career. And this was the outcome of a critical incident.
So they truly, I think they've, the ones I see survive it really well, were prepared beforehand. They knew it could happen. They had trained as hard as they could to handle it professionally and they had talked to their families about, you know what I do for a living. We may have to have a hard talk one day because I'm going to come home from work and I – Things went truly critical, went fatally critical.
Jon Becker: Well, it strikes me, too, that one recurring theme is social media and community reaction.
Ed Hinchey: Social media is truly the viper in the room for law enforcement. You can have the best trainers in the world tell you you did the absolute best job on the planet. You go home and you open up that social media feed and you start looking at the comments and you find strangers, usually absolute lumps in the basement of their mother's houses, firing off. I wish he would have died. We could have gotten rid of another one.
Why is this monster still in our community? How is he not in jail? And you're laying there with a wound vac in your body, hoping you'll be able to walk again. And now you've got people wishing you dead, wishing your family ill, threatening, threatening your families, you know, your family having to be protected as they get driven back and forth to the hospital. Social media is an absolute viper. It can ruin your psyche if you let it.
Jon Becker: Well, we were, you know, you and I were with save last night, and that was the big comment was, you know, I made the mistake of going in and looking at social media. You know, all I could see was, you know, oh, he should have died.
Ed Hinchey: Yeah, we had one of those heroes and absolute heroes. The incident is known. They did everything they could have done, and yet, and they sacrificed their bodies and almost died. And what's eating their lunch? The one young hero said, he goes, I'll scroll through 100 comments going, great job. Prayers are with you, officer. You know, thank you for being there for us. And I get to the one comment with, I hope you're dead and I'm not going to sleep the rest of the night.
Now, you know, that's, that's atrocious. It's a failing in our society. It's a failing to give social media that much credit. And we've got to be better. We've got to understand that's not the litmus test of did we do the job right or wrong?
Jon Becker: Well, and I think, I think it's, it is one of those things where when you have this kind of an event, you need to stay away from it.
Ed Hinchey: Absolutely.
Jon Becker: Resist the siren's call to go and see how everybody, you know, because a thousand people saying, hey, this is great, is not going to offset the one guy that says, I hope he died.
Ed Hinchey: Right, right. Cause your, your blood, just cause you know what you've been through, you realize you are mortal. The mortality is there. It's. You're conscious of it now. You may have been, you know, hey, I'm out there. I'm a warrior. I'm going to get this all done. I know I'm coming home. But all of a sudden, it's mortal. And you realize somebody else could be tucking in your family.
Jon Becker: And that's how all of a sudden, that resonates that quarter inch that it misses the femoral artery with is what separates you from.
Ed Hinchey: Thank goodness I had my armor. You're 14 times more likely to survive a critical event if you're wearing your armor. And yet I'll see officers out there with no armor on.
Jon Becker: Yeah, I mean, I think that that bears repeating. If you are wearing body armor.
Ed Hinchey: Right.
Jon Becker: You are 14 times more likely to survive.
Ed Hinchey: Right. And that's. That's not just your. Your assailant deciding he's gonna end your life with a gun. That's the DUI crossing the centerline. We just lost two Pennsylvania state troopers who were helping an individual in a car by a DUI running them over on the street. You know, you're 14 times more likely to survive that DUI. Cross on a centerline, hitting your patrol vehicle. If you've got your armor on, it doesn't have to be a shooting. You know, most of the ones we count and look at and compute are.
Jon Becker: So talk to me about the actual shooting and what you have seen from a pattern of who survives a gunfight.
Ed Hinchey: Again, as we discussed earlier, I've gotten to work so many of these cases. I actually have gone in on cases where officers took hits on the armor but also off the armor and didn't survive. And I've looked at that offer armor to see what it did. Right. And, you know, had he only taken the hit on the armor, the officer lives.
So it's more than just our saves. You know, it's officers that have made the ultimate sacrifice and their duty gear or their armor still played a part in that. The Boston terrorist bombing from the marathon, the officer at the MIT who was on the perimeter protecting students and was executed so they could get to his gun, they couldn't figure out how to get the gun out of the holster.
So even though that officer made the ultimate sacrifice to protect his community and the students in the school, the absolute, ultimate sacrifice, the holster stayed in the fight, and they weren't able to use it to visit more violence upon the community. You take a look at all those sides of things, and it goes back to training, selection, making sure the officer has the right gear when it's there.
And mindset the officers who truly come out of it solid and better even are the officers who check all the boxes. Their selection process was they were the right guy to begin with, the right female officer to begin with, the right individual. They then were given the training that they needed above and beyond minimum compliance standards. They were given a selection of the exactly the right gears they could perform optimally in every role they needed. Run fast, climb fences, perform CPR, sit in a car, direct traffic, you name it.
But that's the same gear that picks up a twelve gauge 1 oz slot shotgun slug to the chest and that officer continues to stay in the fight. And I think that's where we really, really need to look at it, is there is no time out in a critical incident. Unfortunately, we're seeing some of the selection process fail us or training fail us. And officers get shot and they don't take an action from that point forward.
Jon Becker: So they just get shot and fall down.
Ed Hinchey: They're basically calling a timeout and that's not how it works. Those are some of the officers we lose. They don't engage to survive the critical incident. You've got to have the mindset beforehand. And when, when somebody tries to take my life or the life of somebody I'm sworn to protect, I'm going to flip the switch, I'm going to visit the violence that's necessary upon them to end the threat.
You've got to have that mind. You have to have thought about it before the incident or you're not going to have it when you need it. It's got to be in your toolbox. You've got to survive the incident, but you've also got to survive afterwards, the aftermath of the incident. You've got to stay off social media, you've got to get the help. You've got to talk to your officers, your team, your trainers, because you need to know in your heart and mind that you did everything you could not to have to take a life.
But once you have that, you did it by the book. And you need to hear that from people you respect and people that have the knowledge to tell you, yes, you did the right thing and you could have done nothing else. And that has to also be shared with your family. So it's not really just about surviving the critical incident itself. That's primary, but you've got to survive after the incident as well. You've got to be prepared for the aftermath.
Jon Becker: I can't think of a better place to end than that. Ed, thank you so much for doing this with me. I really appreciate everything!
Ed Hinchey: Jon, I can't thank you enough for having us here, giving us a platform to get this out there!
Jon Becker: Thanks!
