The following story is true and none of it is exaggeration. I will say two things before I begin it. The first is that it involves mental illness. That is not a warning so much as advice. I have often said that if you don’t have a mental illness, you can never understand the actions of those that do. I am not looking for understanding. The contest is “trauma” and nearly being killed by the police qualifies.

The other preface is that this is not the entire story of the summer of 2012. In May, I was on a psyche hold where I saw terrible crimes committed against the female patients. When I got out, I tried to report it to the police. I was sexually abused by a police officer for doing so. I kept trying to report it and was assaulted again by police and returned to the psychiatric hospital where the original crime occurred. I went from being a medicated manic depressive to having full blown trauma induced psychosis. Finally, the night before this event I narrowly avoided being the victim in a mass shooting. The combination led to a psychotic break:

My car breaks down and I have no money to replace it. They are after me. Who “they” are and what they want is unknown. All I know is that I need to stop them and they will continue to try to end my life in response.

I receive a call. It is a sign. They ask questions that only I know the answers to. When it ends, a ship blows its horn. My quest for absolution has begin. I must free myself from the possessions that I have clung to for so many years: The wooden boat that followed me from house to house since I was eight years old. I whip it into the garage and watch as childhood memories splinter and tear apart.

I open my garage door. My garage faces a bay with a total of six garages around it. I begin to throw my belongings into it. The laptop with my life’s work. My bong and pipes, (I won’t need drugs to fight evil), and the canvas with the substandard painting that I brushed in high school. I take a butcher knife and plunge it in the center.

When did the clouds gather? Drip-drop, drip-drop. I have one flip flop, where is the other? I step on glass from the broken bong. I walk with a limp rather than try to remove it. I look at the framed drawing of Superman in my kitchen. I bought it with a year’s worth of allowance from The Warner Brothers Store twenty years ago.

I punch it. Not with a straight punch like a boxer. I make a fist and hammer it forward, cracking the glass. I make a slapping motion and a shard goes into my wrist, nicking the tendon. I would never have full use of my right hand again.

I look at the gaping wound on my wrist, blood hemorrhaging out of it and down my forearm. If I was a millimeter to the right I would have hit the artery. I would have been dead before I had any concept of what death was. Instead of stopping my rampage, I go around my house bleeding on my possessions; the proof that my life was lived. All human relationships had ended. No one would help me; no one was there to try.

Whether I tried starting a fire or succeeded in doing so was never determined to my satisfaction. Of the charges that day, they did not include arson, so your guess is as good as mine. I walk to the garage and my neighbor asks what is going on. An elderly woman. I had met her only once. I told her to pour boiling hot water to get rid of the ants in her garage.

I told her that I am fighting the anti-Christ and need to destroy evil. She screams and runs away. When I am alone in my open garage I remove my clothes. They are not part of my quest. They are stained with blood. It is a scene from a horror movie. I am the star.

A car slows down and surveys the chaos I am creating. I approach the men in it, screaming and dripping blood in my hair and on my face. I tell them that I am being anointed by God to stop the evil I have seen. They drive away. Were they even really there?

My neighbor tries to close their garage. I throw a construction cone underneath and it goes back up. I see two men inside and I know they aren’t there. They were real once in the hospital/house of horrors, and they attacked me there, but they are not here. Not now.

I see golf clubs in a bag against the wall. I grabbed one. Two of my fingers are completely paralyzed and the wound is so deep that I can see the bone. I smash my neighbor’s car window. I laugh. This isn’t part of the quest. I don’t know why I am doing any of these things. Ten weeks ago I sold insurance. I’ve seen things that would drive anyone mad. I can’t purge the images, I can’t stop the evil and those charged with protecting me battered me instead. I smash another window.

I don’t feel the metal darts from the taser go in. But you can bet I felt the electricity coursing through my body. I calmly apologize for inconveniencing my neighbors and the police officer electrocuting me. I am still holding the golf club with my left hand. I put it down slowly. No sudden moves. The officer presses the button again.

The pain is staggering. I am on my hands and knees shouting “I surrender, I surrender!” Please stop doing that, it hurts!” The officer hits the button again and I am tased a third time. I lie down on my back and press my palms flat on the floor of my neighbor’s garage. I am naked. I am lying on my back motionlessly. There is a pool of blood coalescing under my right wrist. I am a threat to no one. The police officer feels differently. I am tased again. It is a crackling noise like the elongated click of a bug zapper. I spasm up and see every muscle in my torso constrict at once.

The officer walks into the garage, flips me on my back and puts his knee between my shoulder blades. He wrenches my arm backward with such force and at such an angle I am astonished he didn’t dislocate it. He shouts at me and I shout back, “I am not resisting arrest!” I make it clear that I respect the authority with which he has been entrusted.

They load me onto the ambulance. I see fire fighters rushing into my house via the garage. There is no smoke. If there is no smoke, was there a fire? I never saw the house again. It was the only place I ever felt safe. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.

I speak inarticulately to the EMT. They don’t strap me down. Instead they say they are inserting a catheter. They show it to me. They don’t tell me what purpose it serves or how it relates to my quest. I lose consciousness.

These events happened over eleven years ago. I was charged with Burglary (Home Invasion), a class 3 felony that would have gotten me, your friendly neighborhood insurance producer, seven years in prison. When it was determined that I was suffering an acute psychotic episode and the only person that was physically hurt was me, they dropped the charges with prejudice.

In court, the officer testified that he was “forced” to tase me four times. The only people to witness it was him and me and I was the naked psycho with a golf club, who had nearly sawed off his hand and had just lit his house on fire. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to determine whose word carried the day.

The only thing I can say in my own defense is that if I was so dangerous that he was justified to electrocute me four times, why wasn’t I put in restraints? They didn’t strap me to the gurney and I wasn’t handcuffed. I am six feet tall and because of the horror that I had seen I had starved myself nearly to death, reaching the unfathomable weight of 136 pounds. Based on that and how much blood I had lost, the real question is how I lived through the experience. I would think my heart would have stopped by the fourth time he hit that button.

I am not going to proselytize or attempt to start a movement to end police violence. There is now footage of police abusing minorities and people suffering from mental illness across the nightly news. My tale of woe isn’t going to spur you to action anymore than if you saw the body-cam video that I am sure that officer erased, if it existed at all.

I was naked, bleeding profusely, (as well as covered in blood), and wielding a golf club. No one questions the first two times he hit that button. If you were the officer involved would you have pressed it two more times? Would you torture a motionless and very skinny naked man? Probably not. The real question is if that man was in your garage destroying your car and you thought he was a threat to your family and you saw the police take vengeance for the terror you felt, would you say anything?

I don’t think you would. I don’t think anyone would.