A New Mexico state trooper keys his radio on an overpass and reports gunfire. A few seconds later he says the two words nobody at dispatch wants to hear. I’m hit. He had pulled into a gas station to fill his tank less than seven minutes earlier.
The twist is not that he was shot. It is what he did next, and what the first people to reach him did with him. A man with a bullet in his neck ran his own scene. He gave directions, made a joke about his wife, and asked someone to go stand in the road.
You are going to see how it happened, in order, and then you are going to see why none of it was luck.
THE SETUP
The tape is bodycam and dashcam from the New Mexico State Police, cut together by the source channel with radio traffic and a witness interview. It runs the morning of February 11, 2022, in Edgewood, a small town on the interstate just east of Albuquerque.
A trooper stops at a gas station to refuel. A clerk meets him before he can get out of the car. A woman has been in the restroom a long time, the clerk found something in there, and she is now sitting in a gray Cadillac with a man. The trooper radios it in, asks for a second unit, and walks over.
What follows is a ramming, a chase, a shooting and a manhunt. None of that is the lesson.
The lesson is the frame at the top of this piece. Calm in the worst minute of your life is decided long before that minute arrives. Every person who did well on this tape had settled, years earlier, how they would act, and every person who did badly had settled that too.
I am going to show you the trooper, the clerk, the men who reached him first, and the witness. Then the man with the gun. Then seven things to settle for yourself before the weekend.
THE WALK-THROUGH
THE CLERK HANDED OFF THE PROBLEM
Start with the person nobody talks about. The clerk had a woman locked in a restroom and a man waiting in a car, and the clerk did none of the things people do in that spot. Nobody banged on the door or walked out to the Cadillac to have a word. The clerk simply found the one guy with a badge and handed him the whole thing.
That is the first good decision on the tape, and it was made by someone with no training at all.
The trooper made the second one. He is alone at a pump in the open, and he calls for a unit from Edgewood before he takes a step toward that car. When the Cadillac rams his cruiser and runs, he is already on the air.
Now listen to the chase. He has been rammed, he has no siren, and he is running lights only. Once the chase is on, he calls traffic light and his speed at about eighty, in the voice of a man reading a grocery list. He reports the damage, the tinted windows, the passengers, and nothing in the voice climbs.
Here is the transferable point, and it is not about driving. The man you might say something to at a gas pump this week is carrying a problem you cannot see from the outside. Hand it off. Let the person whose job it is carry it.
LEVEL VOICE BEFORE AND AFTER THE BULLET
Two moments on this tape, seven minutes apart, prove the same thing about the trooper.
The first is small. Early in the chase he calls himself eastbound, hears it, and corrects to westbound on the air, with an apology. A wrong direction sends every unit behind him the wrong way. He catches his own error at a hundred miles an hour because he is listening to himself while he talks.
The second is not small. He puts the Cadillac down on the overpass at Sedillo Hill, gets out, and takes fire. Already hit, he gives dispatch his status, a wound location, the suspects’ direction, and a note that he has trouble breathing.
Then he says the hardest thing on the tape. He is going to sit tight, and he is not going to pursue.
The people he chased are running away on foot, and he lets them go.
Both moments are the same habit. He reads himself out loud, in order, whether the subject is a compass heading or a bullet. That habit was not built on the overpass.
The decision point for you is the 911 call you will make some day with your heart pounding. It comes out in the voice you rehearsed, or it comes out as a man yelling an address nobody can write down.
WORRIED ABOUT MRNA IN YOUR WATER? HERE’S THE FIX…
THE FIRST MEN AND THE RED BAG
This is the centerpiece, and it is the reason the tape is worth twenty minutes of your life.
Men reach the trooper on the overpass. Nobody on the tape says who they are, and I am not going to guess. They sit him down, and someone asks for a medkit. The trooper answers from the ground, red bag, in the car, and a man goes and gets it.
Then listen to who runs the scene. The man with the hole in his neck. He tells them where to press, how the vest comes off, and to go easy on the velcro. Someone tells him he is not bleeding out, and he moves on to the next thing.
Next he asks one of the helpers to watch the traffic and stop cars coming through. The next car over that rise kills everyone standing there.
He is patient and helper at the same time, and the men around him fall into his rhythm.
Before long he has run his own list, breathing, chest, scapula, exit wound, and found no exit. He knows he is going to live, and he tells the men around him his wife is going to be pissed.
Right after that he says he is grateful for some training. He says it with the bullet still in him.
Here is the conclusion the episode leaves you to reach on your own, so I will say it once. The trooper survived that overpass because he had already decided, years earlier, exactly who he would be if he ever got shot.
A cop with a bullet in his neck was the calmest man on that bridge, and that is not luck.
Your decision point in this movement is not medical, and it does not require a class. The most useful man on that overpass may have been the one waving cars wide. You do not need training to be that man. You need to have decided you would be.
SEE IT BEFORE YOU LIVE IT
Subscribe free for every new Survival Dispatch TV breakdown
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FRAME
The manhunt is worth watching for one reason. It shows you what stress does to a witness.
After the shooting, a man who stood a hundred sixty feet away and saw all of it is asked what the suspects looked like. He was locked on the trooper. He can give a rough height, a gun in the male’s hand, and something red thrown in the air.
He puts his odds of picking the face from a photo at three out of ten. That is an honest witness, and it is what honest witnesses sound like. If you ever see something, stay and say it, and know that the details go early.
The break came from a gas station security camera and a phone call to a mother, and the next morning two agencies surrounded a house in McIntosh.
Now the other side of the frame. Near the end the source channel lays out the shooter’s history, and then the part that matters. Nine months on the run after cutting an ankle monitor, and a prior for shooting from a stolen SUV while fleeing police. Three absconds on probation, and a pistol in his hand at the pump.
He had decided what a police contact meant to him long before that morning. The trooper walked up on a bathroom complaint, and the perp was answering for his whole life.
Remember that math the next time you decide to say something to a stranger.
The outcome, as the source video states it. Alanna Martinez pled guilty to harboring a fugitive and got six months probation. Caleb Elledge pled guilty in federal court to being a felon in possession of a firearm and received nine years plus three years of supervised release.
New Mexico reopened the state charges against him, and those were pending when the source video was made. The trooper had the bullet removed from his back and made a full recovery.
WHAT DRIVERS DO WITH THIS
Seven things to take off this tape and settle before the weekend.
1. Hand the problem to the badge, not to the stranger. Next time something at a gas station looks wrong, tell the clerk or call it in from your car, and drive away before anyone reads your face. This one comes from the first movement.
2. Rehearse your 911 voice before you need it. Tonight, say your address, your cross street, and a description of your own car out loud at a walking pace, twice. This one comes from the second movement.
3. Know where your kit is, and tell someone. Put whatever kit you carry in one fixed spot in the car and tell your spouse and your kids the spot in three words: red bag, back seat. This one comes from the centerpiece.
4. Stop chasing. Nobody’s plate is worth your blood. If someone hits your car and runs, you get the plate and the direction, and you let him go. Decide that now, not in the moment.
5. Read your own body out loud. Practice the four-line check once this week: where it hurts, can I breathe, is it bleeding, can I move. Say it in that order.
6. The most useful job on a scene is often traffic. If you stop at a wreck, ask the person in charge one question, what do you need, and take the answer, even when it is waving cars off. This one comes from the centerpiece.
7. If you saw it, you stay and you say it. Before you leave any scene you witnessed, say three things to the first officer: where you were, what you saw, and your phone number. This one comes from the last movement.
SEE IT BEFORE YOU LIVE IT
Subscribe free for every new Survival Dispatch TV breakdown
CLOSE
The calm you carry into the worst minute of your life is decided long before that minute arrives. A trooper on an overpass proved it with a bullet in him, and the men who reached him first proved it standing in the road.
If this piece made you go find the bag in your car and tell your wife where it sits, good. Pray you never need it, and be ready anyway.
The full episode is on Survival Dispatch TV today.
Subscribe at survivaldispatch.tv for every breakdown and the written companion that goes with it.
Source footage Midwest Safety HERE.
See it before you live it.
Godspeed y’all,
Chris Heaven & JJ Carrell
GET EVERYTHING. MISS NOTHING.
No more choosing between publications.
One membership gives you full access to Survival Dispatch News, Survival Dispatch TV, and Survival Dispatch Remnant, along with every premium article, podcast, video, and subscriber-only post we publish.
Whether you come for breaking threat analysis, practical situational awareness, or immersive post-collapse storytelling, it’s all included in one subscription.
The series builds week over week, and Guardians get every installment as it lands.
One Membership. Every Premium Publication.
