How 911 At Ease International Saved This Police Officer’s Career

This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on the show, including yours. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com.

They're some of our favorites. Today we have the story of police officer Charles Scott, brought to us by 911 At Ease International. 911 At Ease International provides first responders and their families access to free and confidential trauma informed counseling. Officer Charles Scott grew up in the Central Valley of California, and from a young age he knew he wanted to be in law enforcement. Here's Charles with his story. So that's always a question they start with in the academy is why do you want to do this? And I was always one that didn't have an answer because it was just always something I've wanted to do.

My mom has a essay I wrote in first or second grade. What do you want to be when you grow up? And it was always a police officer. So I mean at this point where you get to drive fast, carry a gun, and they pay you to fight with people, sign me up. So that's why I did it. It was it seemed like it was better than working in a bank or corporate office.

And yeah, it's been an amazing ride for sure. I didn't have any any experience with fire or police. Looking back, I sure wish I had because there's so many opportunities in law enforcement. All I thought all I knew was what you saw in cops.

So that's what I wanted to do. But no, my dad grew up, we grew up, he was construction superintendent for construction company. My mom was a stay at home mom with us boys.

So yeah, it was more of a just a working family, no law enforcement experience at all. I don't really know where it comes from. You know, I'm a firm believer that you can't create leaders. Leaders are born with a calling. And sure, you can do training and you can enhance your leadership skills.

But I think, you know, true leaders are someone that God calls into leadership. And even at a young age, I would always find myself being the class president, being the captain of the sports teams. It's hard to look back when someone says, wow, you've done all these amazing things. And you look back and like, I'm just living my life. You know, you don't under you don't appreciate it as anything.

But that's just what I do. Charles married his high school sweetheart. And they have now been married 25 years. And although he was offered an athletic scholarship to college, he decided to get into law enforcement as soon as he could. Seeing what's on TV with just the cops, you put in the application and I went through the academy.

I think my my first oral interview that I had, I wore jeans and a collared shirt and thought that that was good. So there's a lot of learning curve as far as that whole process. You really start being evaluated from the time you submit an application. So it's, you know, the interviews, the background checks, the personal history statement, then you have the chief's interview. So it's just it's a lot. And being from a small country town in the in the mountains, it definitely was a learning experience for someone trying to figure this out.

I was only 21 when I started this, so didn't have a whole lot of life experience. But I figured, oh, we'll figure it out on the way. After the hiring process, Charles started his career in the Central Valley, where he got in his first officer involved shooting.

Yeah. So I was at Chowchilla Police Department, which is in Madera County, the Central Valley. And we got a 911 transfer from CHP saying that there was someone outside that wanted to kill themselves. So they sent myself and another partner out to it.

It was really close. We actually walked from the police department to where she was supposed to be located. We turn a corner and she's laying on her back, kind of I call it in a birthing position with her knees up. And she's pointing a gun at us between her legs, kind of down towards us. My partner and I start to separate.

I start moving away from him because I want to create distance between the two of us to make her decide what she wants to do. As I started moving away from my partner, I saw her kind of tracking me with the gun. And that's when I started firing. I fired four shots. My partner fired two shots. I actually shot the gun, which we found out afterwards. I actually shot the gun out of her hand. I shot her in the pocket, but she still wasn't responding like you think they should when they were getting shot.

So I thought I was missing. And that was the only time I really told myself, you know, slow down, take a deep breath, find your sights because you're missing. And then I shot her and I saw kind of a red spot on her clothes and then it kind of started to grow. And I knew that I had shot her because that was the blood coming out. She called 911 herself. And it was at that time, 911s always went to CHP and then CHP would transfer them to our department.

We didn't know this until after they reviewed. And even the dispatcher missed it. She actually said, I'm going to kill myself and I'm going to take as many cops with me as I can. We didn't know that until later when they reviewed the audio and our dispatcher even missed it. So, yeah, she called for herself.

It was a suicide by cop is what she was trying to do. The whole incident was really surreal. I mean, you we had Smith and Wesson guns. We actually had to decock them once they were cocked. You had to manually do it. I don't remember doing that. I don't remember putting my gun back in my holster. So there's some things that you just respond so quickly to your training.

You don't even realize you do it. I remember thinking to myself as I'm watching her track me with her gun, telling myself, you better do it before she does. And that's what really prompted me and motivated me to to fire that first round. It was empowering once I started firing because then I felt like I was back in control. I was dictating the situation. I was no longer responding to a threat.

I was now trying to eliminate the threat and everything kind of slowed down. And you're listening to police officer Charles Scott tell his story. He knew in the first or second grade he wanted to be a cop. We also learned about his first encounter with someone who was armed and who was intent on killing cops. Suicide by cop. It's known, by the way, in the business.

And this was exactly what he was faced with as a young cop. And when we come back, police officer Charles Scott's story continues here on our American stories. Here at our American stories, we bring you inspiring stories of history, sports, business, faith and love stories from a great and beautiful country that need to be told.

But we can't do it without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love our stories in America like we do, please go to our American stories dot com and click the donate button.

Give a little give a lot. Help us keep the great American stories coming. That's our American stories dot com. And we continue with our American stories. And we've been listening to Officer Charles Scott share stories from his time in law enforcement. We left off after Charles had gotten in his first officer involved shooting with a woman was attempting suicide by cop.

Let's return to Charles. She survived. Thankfully, I actually got to talk to her about two months later. She she was doing really well.

She actually thanked us, oddly as that sounds. But I went through some counseling with the department. Really didn't affect me. My wife, when I came home after the investigation, the initial investigation, she asked, you know, how are you? You just shot someone.

I said, well, I've shot a thousand people in my mind trying to prepare myself for it. So there were really wasn't a whole lot of emotion attached to it. And really, at first, that's what kind of freaked me out was that I wasn't freaked out about it. But talking to the doctor kind of laid it out a little bit for me, went back to work. I actually I got to to witness with her. I actually prayed with her on the street.

And I think that played a lot in my recovery and how I was able to to go back so quickly. I really didn't have any lasting effects because I think I kind of got to close that chapter with her. She didn't die. And she said, you know, I haven't had a drink of alcohol since that day.

And she said, I don't intend to ever again. So she was fortunate that I wasn't a better shot, I guess. But it all worked out. And I think that played a big part in my healing, was knowing that she didn't die. And there was a purpose for it, maybe. So there wasn't really any residual effect because of that shooting. And after that shooting is when my wife and I decided that if we were going to be doing this kind of line of work, we should be doing it in an area that we're raising our boys in a good environment where we enjoy it.

Who doesn't enjoy the Central Coast? So that's what kind of generated our desire to kind of find an agency back over here and landed at Lompoc Police Department. I had three boys at the time. Noah was about 12 when we moved over here, maybe a little younger. And then Jordan's our middle son.

So he'd be about 10, maybe 11. And then our baby in the family was probably seven or eight, Zachary at the time. So we come over and, you know, we're living at the coast. We're homeschooling our boys.

So we're going to the ocean and the beach on Tuesday at 10 o'clock in the morning, really living our best life. I was succeeding, doing really well at the department. I was a lateral, so I had a lot more experience than some of the newer guys. So that immediately gave me some credibility at the department. I'd been in a shooting.

No one at the department had been in a shooting. So, again, that lends to some credibility to my abilities. So, yeah, we were doing really well. We started fostering, started trying to help kids in the foster care community, ended up adopting. Now we've ended up adopting three little ones through the foster care.

We were living as perfect of a life as I ever wanted or ever hoped for. Charles and his family were enjoying their life on the coast until their whole world got turned upside down when they got terrible news about one of their children. Noah was 14 at the time. He started losing some weight. He started getting really pale and we could start seeing some physical changes in him.

He had recently bought himself Fitbit watch and he started trying to walk a little bit more, run a little bit more. So we thought maybe he was just losing some of the baby fat because he was starting to work out a little bit more. One day he walks down the stairs into the living room and my middle son, Jordan, says, Noah, you look like a ghost.

Even your your lips are white. So my wife took him to his pediatrician. And after some tests, probably about two months in July of 2016, we were told that Noah had A L L leukemia.

That's acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a type of cancer of the blood and bone marrow that affects white blood cells and is the most common childhood cancer. It was difficult to hear, obviously, when you you spend your life protecting people and fixing problems to hear that your son has cancer and that there's nothing that you can do to fix it was difficult. It obviously we have such a close family with my side of the family, as well as my wife Kristen's side of the family. We're so close with all my siblings and our parents that it really affected the entire family. Knowing that Noah was having to go through this and really that July of 2016 is when we started this 16 month in my life that I wouldn't wish on on anyone.

I wouldn't wish on my my worst enemy. I went from having the picture perfect life, picture perfect kids successful in my job to literally in my life like a snow globe being turned completely upside down in the matter of 18 months matter of actually 16 months. We went from my son being diagnosed with leukemia four months after that diagnosis. I'm in my first officer involved shooting at Lompoc Police Department where a guy charges at me with a knife and I have to shoot and kill him. That's in November of 2016.

June 30 of 2017. My son Noah passes away from leukemia. I go back to work soon after his funeral and 363 days from my first officer involved shooting I'm involved in a second officer involved shooting, where we had to shoot and kill a subject who had just killed his ex girlfriend's new boyfriend.

So, and literally 16 months. I went from the perfect life to my son being diagnosed being in an officer involved shooting my son dying, and then being in another officer involved shooting. It was a time filled with unmeasurable stress. When anyone goes through difficult times they need support. And thankfully Charles community rallied around his family in amazing ways. I can't speak highly more highly enough about the Central Coast and specifically long poke when my son guy diagnosed at one time my chief put a ribbon on every one of our law enforcement vehicles for the department in support of Noah. They would do fundraisers, they did a fundraiser at a pizza factory in town, and there was a five hour wait for pizzas, because the community turned out so strong and supportive Noah, they literally painted and put ribbons and balloons down the entire Main Street in long poke for orange and black which are the leukemia colors for the kind of cancer he had the support was tremendous. When we know was diagnosed and then obviously because we were so out there in the community. When I was involved in the shooting. My name got released and the community was amazing and supporting my family during that losing Noah, the community was as devastated as we were.

I'll never forget, two days after he passed, I had to take our younger kids to the mall in Santa Maria to get some clothes for the funeral. And as I'm riding the escalator going down this woman looks at me and she immediately starts crying. And I've never seen this woman in her in my life.

And she when I get down to the bottom of the escalator. She hugs me and says I'm so sorry I was really praying for Noah, and to this day I have no idea who she was, but she recognized me and came up and she was heartbroken over the loss of Noah, so the community was just amazing in supporting Noah and my family during the this difficult time losing a child is it's indescribable they don't have a word for it. And I know why because every part of you hurts, and to have to deal with not only that, but going through two officer involved shootings within a year. It was a very difficult time for my family and I. And you're listening to police officer Charles Scott story. And what a 16 month time period that was for him his family. And as you could hear the community itself which rallied to his support and help not just for his family, but his extended family.

For generations and more. The story of Charles Scott continues here on our American story. And we return to our American stories into the story of Charles Scott.

He's a police officer in Lompoc, California, and that's coastal California, north of Los Angeles. We left off after Charles and had the most difficult year of his life. Within 16 months his son got sick and passed away, and he'd experienced two officer involved shootings.

Let's return to Charles Scott. So looking back at that 16 months after the first shooting, I went to speak with our doctor that was basically contracted with our agency. I really I felt okay about that I didn't have a whole lot of baggage, because of that, I mean it was difficult I took someone's life so it was difficult, but slowly that it just started kind of adding up and piling up, you know, my son was diagnosed we were dealing with my son's treatment that I have my first shooting, and then my son passed away. Nobody really knows what to tell say to you, you know, if you haven't had a child die.

You can say what what you can but nobody really knows what what you're going through. So then the second shooting and I'll never forget this kind of will illustrate just how dark of a place I was in when the second shooting when he started shooting at my sergeant, I remember getting out of my car and thinking to myself. Today I'm going to see Noah, and that was my son's name that passed away. And there was no fear, there was no sadness. I didn't even think about my wife or my other kids, it was just I missed Noah, so much that that's what I was excited about. And after it was all said and done, and I wasn't hurt or wasn't killed. I remember being so angry at that guy, not for me having to kill him, but because he couldn't kill me. Because that's how dark, it was for me as I just missed my son, so much that I was mad. And that's when I really identified that I was in a dark spot.

I have a loving wife, I have at that time I had four other kids that needed me as a dad, but it was so dark that all I cared about was seeing my son again. After that shooting, they sent me and they recommended that I speak to the doctor again. He wasn't real responsive, he was from LA and it was always changing his schedule and it just didn't work really well.

The last session I had with him, we had to do it over phone. And that's when he tells me, well, I think you need to really think about what you're passionate about because I don't ever see you going back into law enforcement. Which was like a dagger in my heart because that's all I really knew, that's all I was really good at. And now this doctor is telling me in the darkest time of my life that he's going to take something else away from me. I went and I spoke to my chief in desperation and said, this is not working, he wants to retire me. And at that time I wasn't even 40 years old yet.

And I said, I don't know anything else. My chief and my captain, who has now been promoted to my current chief, they were good enough to say, you know, if you know somebody or if you know a program that you need to reach out to, do it and we'll make sure that it gets covered, paid for, whatever it may be. And that's when Mike McGrew, co-founder, CEO and executive director of 911 Addies International came into the picture. Mike McGrew had reached out to me, I don't know how he knew our story. Mike retired from Santa Barbara PD as a sergeant and Santa Barbara PD was amazing when my son was sick in Santa Barbara. They would bring us food, they would have us call them if we needed anything and they would come and bring stuff over while they were on duty. So they just really took care of my son and my family, my wife.

My wife would spend sometimes 60 days straight at the hospital with Noah and Santa Barbara PD made it a point to come by and check on us. So I'm assuming that that's how Mike found out about me and our story. I was in such a dark place, I didn't even really register how I first made contact with Mike or the Addies program.

But Mike had suggested the Addies program and told me a little bit about it and I reached out to them, went and spoke to Dr. Barb. Barbara, she was great. I spent probably two, maybe three months going down there and seeing her at least once a week. She was amazing. Mike would come in and we would cry together, we would pray together. He was just a huge support and the Addies program was just, it was so easy. It was easy to use, it was easy to access. It was definitely a life vest or a light turned on in a very dark spot in my life.

911 Addies International was exactly what Charles needed to return to the career he loved so much. My goal was to get well enough to return to the streets and be a police officer. I didn't know what that looked like. Remember, I was going in having already been told by a medical professional that I needed to retire. So I wasn't trying to find someone just to say, yeah, go back to work, we'll clear you.

Because that's not what they do. I had to be safe enough, I had to be secure enough, I had to be established in my heart that I could do the job again. And that's what the Addies program did, is that it allowed me to work through what I was dealing with, to be able to have the confidence to return to the streets. It's been five years or four years since my son passed away. We're coming up on November, it'll be five years, the shooting, the first shooting. And I'm successful in my job.

I'm on the sergeant's list, I've returned to work and this is something that I was told I would never be able to do again. We've since adopted another daughter and my wife and I are strong and have a strong foundation. I have a great relationship with my kids. I don't have an alcohol abuse problem.

I don't even drink. And those are all pitfalls when someone goes through critical incidents, that they do some self-harm stuff. And through the Addies program, I was given the tools to avoid such activity and to not be so self-destructive. He now has the desire to help other young officers deal with their own mental health problems. The culture of law enforcement is changing so much that there's so much stress put on officers and it seems like it's changing every day. I've only been doing it for almost 16 years and I never thought I would get to the point where I would say, you know, when I was a young officer, but unfortunately we're there. So these critical incidences are going to happen and I tell the young guys that I have a chance to mentor with, I tell them that if you've created a 30-year career and you've been promoted every time, you've got all the specialties, you've got all the awards, you've got all the accolades that you could ever have as a professional law enforcement. But when you pull into the driveway, your wife or your kids say to themselves, crap, dad's home, then you have failed in this career.

Because when it's all over, the only thing that you're going to have is your family and you owe it to yourself and you owe it to them to take care of your mental health. There is such a stigma about mental health and law enforcement. I cannot say enough good things about the At Ease program. I know without a doubt if I were to get in another critical incident that my first outreach would be to someone at the At Ease program.

And a great job as always by faith on the production of the piece. And a special thanks to Officer Charles Scott. With opening up, it's hard for cops and first responders to talk about themselves and their problems.

They're too busy taking care of others. And that there's a place like 911 At Ease International there to help all the first responders. And again, the confidentiality is the key. And you can learn more about 911 At Ease International by going to 911aei.org.

I love what he said about them and allowed me to get the confidence to go back to work, to go back to the streets, to the job I loved. Charles Scott's story here on Our American Stories. This is Our American Stories. And our next story, well, we love this kind of story. It comes to us from the Toy and Action Figure Museum in Paul's Valley, Oklahoma. That's right. This is our American Stories.

And our next story, well, we love this kind of story. It comes to us from the Toy and Action Figure Museum in Paul's Valley, Oklahoma. That's right. The Toy and Action Figure Museum. Its founder, Kevin Stark, says it's the first museum to be entirely dedicated to action figures. Take it away, Kevin.

My name is Kevin Stark. I am the curator and executive director of the Toy and Action Figure Museum and also the founder of the museum. I got started. Gosh, I started collecting toys a long time ago, back in 1986.

The girlfriend I had at the time drug me to an antique flea market and I didn't really want to go spend the afternoon looking at antiques. But they had all these cool toys and they were cheap. And so I came out with an armload of toys and I said, wow, that was fun.

When are we going back? She said, well, it happens every month. And I was like, oh, cool. So I started collecting toys and I amassed this huge collection. But even as a kid, I had convinced my parents to let me clean out our basement so that that could be my private play area. And I shared a room with two brothers. So when my brothers found out that my parents thought that was a great idea, you know, they were a little upset with me over it. But my dad said, hey, he came up with the idea and he cleaned it up.

So, you know, get lost. And I had gotten a job when I was like 10 years old in order for me to be able to go and buy my own toys. So I actually been collecting, you know, really since I was 10.

But I've just always been attracted to toys, always enjoyed them and liked them. And then when I'm, you know, when it became my business to actually design them, all the better. In 1990, I got a call to design toys.

It was actually a guy I went to school with. And he calls and says, how would you like to design toys for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? And I was like, you wouldn't believe what I'm sitting around right now.

So I'd already been collecting for four or five years. He didn't know I was a collector. You know, I didn't know he was a designer. And so we just got together and he said, can you be in L.A. on Monday morning at 9 a.m. for a flight to L.A.?

And I was like, you bet I can. He had been working for small toy companies and every time the toy companies got bought out, he lost his job. So he decided to start his own company that would do design work, but mostly write copy for the action figures and toys and create the accessories that go in them.

And that's a lot of what we did. We would create sewer maps for the turtles, a lot of the extra things, you know, that went in with the toys. We worked for a lot of different toy companies that don't have an in-house design team. Big, huge companies like Mattel and Hasbro and Kenner. And so a company would come to us and say, we need this designed or we need, like in the case of Toon Sylvania that we did for Spielberg and Toy Island, was like, we need you to design this line based on a cartoon series. And so that's what we did. We would look at the characters and come up with different ways that they could make toys.

Everything from plush toys to wind-ups to action figures to playsets. And of course, we would come up with it. You then had to send the drawings over to the company.

They would say yea or nay or they'd make changes here and there. A lot of times we didn't have a lot of time to do it. The deadlines a lot of times were really quick and really short. One toy line in particular, the mummy we did for the Universal Studios movie, we had, I think, two weeks to design and get some sculpts done before the New York Toy Fair. They kind of went for a long time, no, we're not going to do toys, not going to do toys. And then two or three weeks before, they said, oh, we're going to do toys.

Can you guys knock this out? So we were working 24 hours a day, taking little catnaps on my couch in my office and getting up and doing more drawings. So sometimes it's very fast work and other times you have lots of time.

So it just varied with the project. I point out to people that come here, there are a lot of doll museums and there are a lot of toy museums, but we are really basically an action figure museum. Our focus is the design and sculpting and art of action figures. So even though we have toys too, most of them relate somehow to action figures, you know, in the way of play sets or vehicles or things like that.

So that's what makes us different. And we have over 13,000 action figures in the collection. Most of the collection, 90% of what you see in the museum is from my private collection, but we do get some things donated. You know, a funny thing is people say, oh, you must do eBay a lot. I never do eBay. I mean, very rarely have I ever picked anything up on eBay. I personally prefer to go out and see the things I'm purchasing. I like to hold it in my hand and say is this what I want and purchase it like that.

That's just what I prefer because to me I like the hunt. Really, I go on what I call toy safari. We got a call from a lady in Arkansas one time, and I didn't talk to her, but one of our board members did. And so he calls me up and he says, you want to go on a road trip? And I was like, what are we talking about? Well, this lady said she had this toy collection. She just wanted to donate to the museum. And I said, well, what are we talking about?

He said, well, he didn't really know. He said he tried to get her to send pictures, and she didn't really know how to do that on her phone, so she only sent like three or four pictures that were of these little tiny figures on shelves. So we just hop in my Toyota 4Runner and drive all the way to Arkansas. Well, she had so much stuff that we piled it all in my car, drove back to Paul's Valley, Oklahoma, rented a huge U-Haul truck, and went back, still filled that up and my car again because we had no idea what we were getting into. It was her husband's collection, and he had passed away and wanted this stuff donated to the museum. And we were like, are you sure you want to do this? Because, you know, we told her she could sell this stuff on eBay or whatever. And she said, no. She said, I'm actually a very minimalist person.

I just want all this stuff out of here. And it was funny because the whole house was packed with toys, and she here was telling me she liked to live very, you know, spartanly. My wife and I went to a garage sale one time here in Paul's Valley, and the family, it was just, you know, the couple, they had a daughter, and we were mostly going to the garage sale for my wife. You know, she was checking stuff out. Well, they had all these cool boy toys. I'm talking about great stuff that was worth a lot of money, and I was just putting everything in my arms trying to, you know, pick it all up. And my wife was clear across the way visiting with somebody, and I was like, come here, come here.

I said, we need to get this stuff. Well, it turned out that the father always wanted a little boy, and he got a little girl. So he was just buying her boy toys too, you know, and I think because he liked them. So I just picked up a lot of really great stuff for next to nothing for garage sale prices and was very happy to get them, and they're all in the museum right now. Some of my favorite exhibits in the museum deal with my favorite character, which is Batman. In fact, we have a whole bat cave devoted to just Batman, so there are a lot of figures there. And we created a World War II display, which we had both the European campaign and the Pacific campaign all done in 12-inch tall action figures. But we built buildings and everything in order to create a diorama of these action figures and recreated the World War II scenes. Well, the older generation of people who would come in here, they loved that because they could relate to that and a lot of old World War II veterans. And in fact, we had one guy come in who these figures we used are not G.I.

Joe's specifically. Some of them are from other companies that are very much accurate figures from World War II. Anyway, this one figure has a shoulder patch on it, which was a paratrooper outfit, paratrooper unit. Well, that guy, that was his unit, okay? He couldn't believe that we had an action figure of his unit in World War II.

He was just blown away, and we had a great time talking about it. Most everyone finds something that they can relate to and that they're amazed at. We have people who come in and think, why do I want to be in here?

I'm only here because my husband's here or whatever. And then they see stuff they had as a kid. And really, we're less about toys and more about nostalgia, more about your childhood. People come in here, they almost always leave happy, you know? So that's always a great thing. And you've been listening to Kevin Stark, and he is the founder of the Toy and Action Figure Museum in Paul's Valley, Oklahoma. His story, the story of a museum of a man's making, is right here on Our American Story.