Last January, St. Louis Police officer Colin Ledbetter was shot in the line of duty while going after a murder suspect. The 25-year-old was hit below his bulletproof vest, causing him to lose a large amount of blood — and he nearly died.
His family and doctors say it’s a miracle that he survived. Now, months later, he says his recovery is going well, though he’s still feeling impacts from the shooting.
“It’s been physically not that bad, but mentally, I have some memory issues,” he told KMOX’s Carol Daniel. “From my understanding I lost all of my blood.”
He said that blood loss is mostly responsible for his subsequent memory loss. He told KMOX that he doesn’t remember anything from the night he was shot.
Colin Ledbetter’s mom, Lisha Ledbetter, also talked with KMOX.
“[It was] one of the worst days of my life,” she told Daniel. “When he started as a police officer, it was always the scare of, ‘What happens if.’ And if you get that call, it’s even more devastating. It was the longest drive ever to get to him to find out what had happened.”
Lisha Ledbetter is a teacher and was with her students when she got the call about her son. She said the media had already gotten word of the story, and her husband called her school to tell her, not wanting her to hear about it from the news first.
She said the doctors told them that when Colin Ledbetter reached the hospital he was not alive. When his parents arrived, he was in surgery and alive in the operating room. It wasn’t until the next day that they knew he would live, but given that he’d been dead for 12-15 minutes, they weren’t sure what his brain function would be like.
Colin Ledbetter’s memory kicked in again around four days before he left the hospital. He said not having those memories was originally very frustrating.
“I was constantly asking about what originally happened, what I was doing in the hospital,” he said. “Since then, I’ve kind of come to terms with it — that I may get the memory back, I may never get the memory back. It’s definitely a piece of me that, if I did get it back, I would welcome it back.”
Now that it’s been a few months, he’s able to return to his job as a police officer. He said he’s grateful to be back in his community. He added that there’s a lot people don’t know about being a police officer in St. Louis.
“There are sometimes that, us police officers, we go home and cry,” he said. “I wish the community could see that, in the lights that we’re not just out here with a badge and a gun, we’re out here to make a difference for them.”
Listen to the full interview: