Patrick Apoian

Patrick Apoian spent 17 years in Atlanta law enforcement and was forced to retire after a car ran him over.

Brad knew him from the gym and from SALTYmf naming his daughter a player of the week, and had no idea he had been a detective until Patrick started telling him stories. He came on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast and Brad asked him for three of them: the worst thing he ever saw, the strangest, and the one that turned out well. He opened with the strangest, from the first call of a morning watch shift in Virginia Highland, and it is not printable here.

His method was respect, handed out the same way to everybody. He says it made no difference whether he was talking to an executive at Coca-Cola or a crackhead on the street, and he got it back many times over. Men he knew were dealing had his cell number. They knew better than to call him when they were in trouble, but they would call from the street to tell him where the stuff from that house had ended up. Once, while he was fighting a suspect, a man who had never in his life helped a cop grabbed the guy from behind, body slammed him, then walked off like he had nothing to do with it. He coaches now, mostly girls lacrosse, and tells the kids the scoreboard means nothing to him.

On July 21, 2011, working a security job in Midtown, he answered a robbery lookout at a barbershop. The suspect shoved past him, got into a Honda, threw it in reverse and drove over him. The tire tore his foot partly off at the heel and rolled up his shin and his chest, breaking his pelvis in three places along with his L4, his L5, his ribs and his right ankle. Lying in the road he would not let them cut his 45 dollar duty belt off, and arched his back so they could slide it out instead. He called his wife, who was making chicken parmesan, to say he was not coming home, then asked to speak to his seven year old son. The hospital found he was allergic to opioids, so he got through three and a half years of therapy and 14 procedures with no painkillers.

Years before that he found a five year old who had run from her foster placement, got her lunch, and had to take her back to a house where children were being kept for the check at the end of the month. He went home, sat on the edge of his sleeping son's bed and told his wife they were adopting a kid from foster care. They started the process that night. He runs a mold remediation company called Pure One Services now, and tweets as Detective Pat.