See....I can read you like a book
Now answer this question honestly...
I have a .40 caliber handgun in one hand and a taser in the other..
Given a choice....which would you rather I use against you....?
And no dancing!!!
Gun Control is Completely Useless.
- Thread starter Colpy
- Start date
Now answer this question honestly...
I have a .40 caliber handgun in one hand and a taser in the other..
Given a choice....which would you rather I use against you....?
And no dancing!!!
Of course I'd rather risk being shot by the taser, but THAT is not the issue here, the poster was trying to give the murderers credit because they killed the man with a taser and not a gun. The fact is that it is commonly known especially among the cops that tasers CAN be deadly.
That is exactly the issue..................! The danger of death by taser is a lot lower than with a gun
You have been arguing with Cannuck too long.......you keep using his M.O. when you are loosing....
You have been arguing with Cannuck too long.......you keep using his M.O. when you are loosing....
What's "loosing"? In Dziekanski's case the danger of death was exactly the same or even greater. The man is dead, which is the point I brought up to make my case about the cops being buffoons. How he is dead is immaterial, the cops did it and that was the only point I was trying to make. Tasers vs. guns is another discussion entirely.
Sign up for a course in logic, Sleepy.
Your logic is legendary Mohammed Said al-Sahhaf.....What's "loosing"? In Dziekanski's case the danger of death was exactly the same or even greater. The man is dead, which is the point I brought up to make my case about the cops being buffoons. How he is dead is immaterial, the cops did it and that was the only point I was trying to make. Tasers vs. guns is another discussion entirely.
Sign up for a course in logic, Sleepy.
to volunteer for an organization like boyscouts of canada, you can get a PRC from this website by the next day. For me, it took 4 hours.
Try submitting an application for a PAL, it will sit on someone's desk for 3 months before they even begin to look at it. Meanwhile, they perform a daily PRC check on ALL prohibited license holders.
Try submitting an application for a PAL, it will sit on someone's desk for 3 months before they even begin to look at it. Meanwhile, they perform a daily PRC check on ALL prohibited license holders.
looks like the link was taken down, just pm me if you want the link.
or perform this google search: https://www.google.ca/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=HEpzVZGlJObK8gft_YHQCA&gws_rd=ssl#q=canada+background+check
I have a feeling you should all find more common ground within the next thousand pages. Keep up the good work guys.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?t=95&v=J0vvPtdrTUc
She needs a little target practise, but otherwise, well done! And an excellent choice of weapon/calibre.
She needs a little target practise, but otherwise, well done! And an excellent choice of weapon/calibre.
Awful: Woman Murdered While Waiting For Gun License To Protect Herself From Ex-Boyfriend
We already know the gun laws in New Jersey are insane. To purchase a handgun, one needs to obtain a firearm identification card, which is a process that could take months. Well, that process left a woman dead Wednesday, stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend, who is now being pursued by the U.S. Marshals Service (via Courier Post):
Here’s part of the process for obtaining a firearm ID card:
These laws arguably cost Browne her life. She needed the firearm to protect herself immediately, and the police didn’t even get her fingerprints after two months. As Charles Cooke at National Review concluded in his piece over this awful incident, the loving, jovial, and law-abiding Browne was killed waiting to exercise her constitutional right to a handgun, while her convicted felon of an ex-boyfriend stabbed her, and is now roaming free somewhere evading law enforcement:
Is that justice? Is that sane? Is that how gun control is supposed to work? Obviously, gun control advocates don’t (hopefully they don’t) want innocent lives to be lost (even though they use them as campaign fodder), but this is usually the byproduct of their policies; the innocent, law-abiding suffer, while the criminals roam free, inflicting violence on the rest of us.
The Courier Post reported that Eitel plead guilty to a weapons charge in 2008 that stemmed from his 2006 indictment on aggravated assault. He was given a five-year sentence for that offense.
source: Awful: Woman Murdered While Waiting For Gun License To Protect Herself From Ex-Boyfriend - Matt Vespa
......................................
I personally feel Free Speach and the ability to protect oneself should not be licenses. She should have gone to a gun show and picked up a gun.. most places could care less if your licensed, as long as you have US ID and Social.
We already know the gun laws in New Jersey are insane. To purchase a handgun, one needs to obtain a firearm identification card, which is a process that could take months. Well, that process left a woman dead Wednesday, stabbed to death by her ex-boyfriend, who is now being pursued by the U.S. Marshals Service (via Courier Post):
When Carol Bowne felt the threat of domestic violence, the petite hairdresser took steps to protect herself.
The Berlin Township woman got a restraining order against a former boyfriend, installed security cameras and an alarm system to her home and began the months-long process of obtaining a handgun, friends said.
But it wasn't enough.
Bowne, 39, was stabbed to death in the driveway of her Patton Avenue home on Wednesday night.
Her former boyfriend, 45-year-old Michael Eitel, was charged with her murder. Eitel, a convicted felon, was a fugitive Thursday, being sought by a U.S. Marshals Service task force.
…
Berlin Township Police Chief Leonard Check said Bowne applied for a gun license on April 21, and that she had inquired Monday about her request.
The application process typically takes two months or more as police collect information on the applicant, including fingerprints and reference checks. "We did not get the fingerprint information yet," said Check.
…
Police went to the home around 10:15 p.m. Wednesday, when they found Bowne lying in the driveway with multiple stab wounds. Bowne was taken to Virtua Hospital in Berlin, where she was pronounced dead at 11:22 p.m.
The Berlin Township woman got a restraining order against a former boyfriend, installed security cameras and an alarm system to her home and began the months-long process of obtaining a handgun, friends said.
But it wasn't enough.
Bowne, 39, was stabbed to death in the driveway of her Patton Avenue home on Wednesday night.
Her former boyfriend, 45-year-old Michael Eitel, was charged with her murder. Eitel, a convicted felon, was a fugitive Thursday, being sought by a U.S. Marshals Service task force.
…
Berlin Township Police Chief Leonard Check said Bowne applied for a gun license on April 21, and that she had inquired Monday about her request.
The application process typically takes two months or more as police collect information on the applicant, including fingerprints and reference checks. "We did not get the fingerprint information yet," said Check.
…
Police went to the home around 10:15 p.m. Wednesday, when they found Bowne lying in the driveway with multiple stab wounds. Bowne was taken to Virtua Hospital in Berlin, where she was pronounced dead at 11:22 p.m.
Here’s part of the process for obtaining a firearm ID card:
(a) Every person applying for a firearms purchaser identification card or for a permit to purchase a handgun shall furnish such information and particulars as are set forth in the application form designated STS-33, in the case of an identification card, or STS 33A, in the case of a permit to purchase. Forms can be obtained from municipal police departments, State Police stations and licensed retail firearms dealers.
(b) The applicant shall waive any statutory or other right of confidentiality relating to institutional confinement.
(c) The applicant shall provide the names and addresses of two reputable citizens personally acquainted with him as references.
(d) The application shall be signed by the applicant and the completed application, together with two sets of the applicant's fingerprints and fees as established by N.J.A.C. 13:59 in accordance with N.J.S.A. 53:1-20.5 et seq. (P.L. 1985, c. 69), a consent for mental health records search form designated STS-1 and a nonrefundable application fee of $5.00 for a firearms identification card and $2.00 for a permit to purchase a handgun, shall be submitted to the chief of police of an organized full time police department in the municipality in which the applicant resides. If the municipality does not have an organized full time police department, application shall be made to the State Police station servicing the municipality in which the applicant resides, or to any State Police station in the case of a non-resident.
(e) The chief of police of an organized full time police department of the municipality where the applicant resides, or the Superintendent, when the applicant is a non-resident of this State or when the municipality does not have a full time department, shall accept and investigate applications for firearms purchaser identification cards and permits to purchase handguns.
(f) The fingerprints of any applicant shall be compared with any fingerprints maintained by the State Bureau of Identification and the Federal Bureau of Identification for the purpose of ascertaining the existence of any criminal record. The fingerprints shall be obtained and submitted for such comparison by the chief of police or the State Police, as the case may be.
(g) An applicant for a handgun purchase permit who possesses a valid firearms purchaser identification card, or who has previously obtained a handgun purchase permit from the same licensing authority for which he or she was previously fingerprinted, and who provides other reasonable satisfactory proof of his or her identity, in the discretion of the chief of police or Superintendent, need not be fingerprinted again. In such case, the chief of police or superintendent shall otherwise fully investigate the application in accordance with this subchapter.
(h) Applicants for a permit to purchase a handgun may apply for more than one permit per application. The number of permits requested, and each permit number shall be entered in the spaces provided on the application.
(i) The chief of police or the Superintendent, as the case may be, shall either approve or disapprove the applications. Permits and cards shall be issued by the chief of police or the Superintendent to persons who are found to be qualified and who are not subject to any of the disabilities set forth by this subchapter.
(b) The applicant shall waive any statutory or other right of confidentiality relating to institutional confinement.
(c) The applicant shall provide the names and addresses of two reputable citizens personally acquainted with him as references.
(d) The application shall be signed by the applicant and the completed application, together with two sets of the applicant's fingerprints and fees as established by N.J.A.C. 13:59 in accordance with N.J.S.A. 53:1-20.5 et seq. (P.L. 1985, c. 69), a consent for mental health records search form designated STS-1 and a nonrefundable application fee of $5.00 for a firearms identification card and $2.00 for a permit to purchase a handgun, shall be submitted to the chief of police of an organized full time police department in the municipality in which the applicant resides. If the municipality does not have an organized full time police department, application shall be made to the State Police station servicing the municipality in which the applicant resides, or to any State Police station in the case of a non-resident.
(e) The chief of police of an organized full time police department of the municipality where the applicant resides, or the Superintendent, when the applicant is a non-resident of this State or when the municipality does not have a full time department, shall accept and investigate applications for firearms purchaser identification cards and permits to purchase handguns.
(f) The fingerprints of any applicant shall be compared with any fingerprints maintained by the State Bureau of Identification and the Federal Bureau of Identification for the purpose of ascertaining the existence of any criminal record. The fingerprints shall be obtained and submitted for such comparison by the chief of police or the State Police, as the case may be.
(g) An applicant for a handgun purchase permit who possesses a valid firearms purchaser identification card, or who has previously obtained a handgun purchase permit from the same licensing authority for which he or she was previously fingerprinted, and who provides other reasonable satisfactory proof of his or her identity, in the discretion of the chief of police or Superintendent, need not be fingerprinted again. In such case, the chief of police or superintendent shall otherwise fully investigate the application in accordance with this subchapter.
(h) Applicants for a permit to purchase a handgun may apply for more than one permit per application. The number of permits requested, and each permit number shall be entered in the spaces provided on the application.
(i) The chief of police or the Superintendent, as the case may be, shall either approve or disapprove the applications. Permits and cards shall be issued by the chief of police or the Superintendent to persons who are found to be qualified and who are not subject to any of the disabilities set forth by this subchapter.
These laws arguably cost Browne her life. She needed the firearm to protect herself immediately, and the police didn’t even get her fingerprints after two months. As Charles Cooke at National Review concluded in his piece over this awful incident, the loving, jovial, and law-abiding Browne was killed waiting to exercise her constitutional right to a handgun, while her convicted felon of an ex-boyfriend stabbed her, and is now roaming free somewhere evading law enforcement:
There can be few clearer illustrations of the folly of draconian firearms regulations than this. The killer was a convicted felon who had previously been found guilty of weapons offenses and aggravated assault, and who is now on the run from federal authorities. The victim was a “bubbly, well-liked,” law-abiding woman who did not want to run afoul of the government even when she sensed that her life was in danger. If “government” is just another word for the things we do together, then, frankly, we failed — and damnably. All Carol Bowne asked was that she be permitted to exercise her right to protect herself in her own home; instead, she ended up bleeding to death in her driveway, as the paper-pushers and know-it-alls decided whether they would deign to indulge her request, and her killer sped away, without fear of retaliation or injury.
Is that justice? Is that sane? Is that how gun control is supposed to work? Obviously, gun control advocates don’t (hopefully they don’t) want innocent lives to be lost (even though they use them as campaign fodder), but this is usually the byproduct of their policies; the innocent, law-abiding suffer, while the criminals roam free, inflicting violence on the rest of us.
The Courier Post reported that Eitel plead guilty to a weapons charge in 2008 that stemmed from his 2006 indictment on aggravated assault. He was given a five-year sentence for that offense.
source: Awful: Woman Murdered While Waiting For Gun License To Protect Herself From Ex-Boyfriend - Matt Vespa
......................................
I personally feel Free Speach and the ability to protect oneself should not be licenses. She should have gone to a gun show and picked up a gun.. most places could care less if your licensed, as long as you have US ID and Social.
AR-15. These are a new line of hunting rifles which are restricted firearms ( treated like a handgun) in Canada.
Ruger Mini14. These are a line of tactical rifles which are non-restricted firearms ( treated like a hunting rifle) in Canada.
Other than the model of the firearm, what is the difference in these rifles?
Well....not much! They are all .223 center fire, semi-auto rifles.
Ironically, the hunting style rifles are restricted, and the scary/sinister style rifles are non-restricted.
I guess the anti-gun nut regulators in Canada haven't done their homework, yet. Perhaps the public needs to hold them more accountable for their stupidity.
Mostly democratic countries have higher gun ownership. The gubmints in those countries don't dare try to take away their citizens' liberty by force.
Lots of murders in S. America and Africa where there are very few guns. Wonder what their weapon of choice is!
............the President speaks for the nation, including the 50% of the nation that don't vote for him. And that 50% of the nation includes an awful lot of people who own an awful lot of guns, and will never do what this man did... I live here in Northern New Hampshire. I've got a lot of neighbors who have got more firepower in their homes than the average European Union army. And they've got no plans to kill anybody... To make it a political issue - in other words to take this murderer who is responsible for his actions and to tie him to a huge percentage of the general population - is an abomination. I mean, aside from the fact that it devalues the specific nature of this event and the victims, the specific real victims of this event, I think there's something just obscene in trying to attach millions of law abiding people to the act of this mass murderer.
The Politicization of Everything :: SteynOnline
The Politicization of Everything :: SteynOnline
Re: Gun Control is Completely Useless. ??
Jeanne Assam is Still Waiting | 5280
This article was a finalist for the 2013 City and Regional Magazine Award in the personality profile category.
A few seconds after the first rifle blasts outside New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Jeanne Assam hears the screams. The shots continue outside a set of double glass doors in the snowy parking lot where one person is already dead. The noise gets progressively louder. Glass in one of the doors explodes. Then another.
New Life serves more than 10,000 worshipers each week, and thousands of people are leaving the megachurch following Sunday service on December 9, 2007. Now, some of them are dodging bullets. A wave of panicked churchgoers bears down on Assam’s position near the center of the church—a tentlike colossus rising from the 42-acre campus. Assam, in her second month as a volunteer for the church security team, is more than 100 yards from the exploding doors. Between her and the doorway are multiple hallways and classrooms filling with terrified people. “Jeanne!” a security team member yells behind her. “He’s coming through the doors!”
Assam is 42, with blond hair and green eyes hidden behind mascaraed eyelashes. She wears a suit jacket and blue jeans. A cop by trade, Assam has found purpose these past months at this church. Quite literally, she believes it has saved her. She is newly born-again, zealous in her recently discovered faith. On this day, she planned to end a three-day fast and had already read her Bible before coming to work for the 11 a.m. service. Now, looking down the hallway, she pulls out the .9 millimeter Beretta tucked into the front of her jeans and begins sprinting through the crush of people running past her.
There are more blasts at the doors. More people. More screams. Then, suddenly, nothing. The corridor is empty. People take cover in rooms; some are hiding in bathroom stalls. In the distance, Assam sees a man opening one of the doors. He’s holding a weapon. The man moves slowly, deliberately. Assam can only think of one thing: I need to end this right now. She rushes toward a hallway to her right. She stands close to the wall, puts her Beretta at a low-ready position, and prays.
When she was young—a tomboy who preferred games of cowboys and Indians to ballet—Assam built a fort in her backyard. Four walls, no roof. She loved sitting in there. Just her, safe, looking up at the stars. In that fort, it was only her and God.
Matthew Murray, a thin, 24-year-old man, is wearing blue earplugs, a flak jacket, kneepads, black lace-up boots, and a backpack as he walks up the corridor. He’s holding a Bushmaster AR-style rifle. Murray also has two .9 millimeter handguns, and he’s carrying at least 1,000 rounds of ammunition. He fires his weapon down the hallway, again and again. He is the plague who’s come to wipe out those who have sinned against him.
From Assam’s hiding place, the rifle shots are deafening. She can hear the man mumbling between rounds. He fires again. Assam is calm and alert. She wants to shoot the gunman when he passes, but it seems too risky. There’s nowhere to run if he sees her first. God, please be with me, she thinks. Assam steps from behind the wall, gun stretched from her body. Murray is 20 yards away. “Police officer!” she yells. “Drop your weapon!”
The man jerks his rifle toward Assam. She fires five quick shots. Murray falls backward. Assam moves to the middle of the corridor and rushes forward. She’s a few dozen feet from Murray now, exposed in the middle of the hallway. “Drop your weapon, or I will kill you!” she yells. Murray sits up to face her. He’s still holding the rifle. Boom-boom-boom. Bullets rip past her and pepper a wall. While Murray shoots, Assam fires three times.
Through the haze of gun smoke, Assam sees the man struggling on the floor. He props his head against a wall. Her weapon is up, trained on the man. She sees his hands moving near his shoulder. He’s trying to pull the pin on a grenade. He’s going to kill everyone around here, Assam thinks. She instinctively steps back and fires two more shots.
As a kid in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Jeanne Assam went to church on Sundays. Mom went regularly, which meant Jeanne had to go. Her parents were well-known around the city, though they weren’t always home, and Jeanne was often left in other people’s care. When she was four, she was sexually abused for the first time. When she was 14, an elder at her church molested her. When he told her not to tell, she didn’t. This was a man of God, and she was just a child. Who would people believe? The abuse continued for years.
Eventually, she pushed that piece of her away. She separated that fragment of her past until she no longer recognized it as part of herself. Years later, before the shooting that would make her famous around the world, Assam went to a therapist. The doctor asked her to draw a timeline of her life on a whiteboard. When Assam finished, the doctor studied her work. The first 16 years of her life were blank.
She was a victim, but she’d never thought of herself that way. Even after she’d left home in 1985, gone to college in Nebraska and later in California, and discovered more abuse at the hands of men, she refused to see herself as weak. She was young and pretty and men were attracted to her. But when she was with men, she felt uncomfortable. It was never that way around women. When she was around women who flirted with her, she never felt like a sexual object. It felt right. The few encounters she had were never forced; the intimacy that grew from those relationships was natural, unlike anything she’d ever felt.
In 1989, Assam transferred to Hamline University, a liberal arts school in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She studied criminal justice and hoped to become a police officer. During her first year in Minnesota, she dated a cop with the Minneapolis Police Department, and she often went on ride-alongs with the woman. The action made an indelible impression on her. Each call was an uncertainty, its own prepackaged adrenaline rush, night after night. There was an immediacy about the justice*—how police could bring peace so quickly—and she loved to watch good cops work. The best were fit and athletic, daring and brave. She thought she was all of that. One night, she proved it: During a ride-along, Assam helped her girlfriend break up a fight between two men. One of the men had a knife, and Assam swiped it from him. After the men were arrested and in the back of the squad car, her girlfriend was upset. Assam wasn’t trained; it was a stupid move and she could have gotten killed. Assam didn’t care. She knew she was going to be a cop.
She graduated from Hamline in 1992. Assam attended the police academy and joined the Minneapolis Police Department in 1993. She was in her mid-20s when she was assigned to the Fourth Precinct, the city’s most dangerous ward. Assam couldn’t have been happier. In her uniform, she found purpose. Her shirtsleeves were perfectly creased; her black boots were spotless. Her badge, with number 0234 etched into it, was polished brass. It gleamed under the lights. Her badge was like the missing piece to her life’s puzzle. With it, she felt whole.
The dark blue plastic case is on a bookshelf in her apartment. It’s next to the stack of awards and plaques, just below the photo of President George W. Bush embracing her, in one corner of a room where her past is stored. Usually, she keeps it in the closet, but on a bright fall afternoon this year in Denver, Assam grabs the case and carries it to her family room. She gently places it on her coffee table, pops two clasps, and swings it open.
The Beretta is black and smells of gun lubricant. She removes it from its foam casing, takes out the 15-round magazine, and pulls back the slide to show that the chamber is empty. The gun is surprisingly large and surprisingly heavy and cold to the touch. Against her frame, the weapon looks immense. There are small chips at the bottom of the magazine, where thin lines of metal are rubbed free from the dark veneer. The gun itself is in perfect condition. She holds it in her right hand, points it at a wall, and pulls the trigger. Click.
It’s been years since she fired the gun. Mostly, the blue case stays in the closet. “That was a different chapter in my life,” she says, putting the weapon back into the foam. “There’s no use dwelling on it.”
And yet it seems as though Jeanne Assam is stuck in time. She’s in her mid-40s now, but she doesn’t look like she’s aged. Same jeans, same athletic build, same mascara, same blond hair styled the same way. In fact, if you didn’t notice the corner in her apartment, you’d think nothing monumental happened on that late fall day five years ago. Perhaps it’s easy to forget. The legend of Jeanne Assam, the overnight hero whose story was told in newspapers and on cable channels across the country, has faded from history. In the years since she stopped Matthew Murray’s murderous rampage—he killed four people at two churches over 12 hours and wounded four more—Assam’s own life has been laid bare in some of the most intrusive and embarrassing ways possible. In the process, she has battled depression, persistent unemployment, and her own constant questions.
Today, she lives alone. Her savings are nearly gone, and she makes do largely from money borrowed from a friend in Colorado Springs. Her moods vacillate between hopeful and desperate. Perhaps worst of all, she isn’t quite sure who she is anymore. “I’ve struggled,” she admits as she leans back on her couch in a cozy, second-story family room overlooking a grassy field. The television is set to a home-improvement show and her cat, Kleetus, is curled on her lap. “I’d never change what I did at New Life, but this can’t be it for me,” she continues. “I feel like I’ve been buried, but I’m not dead. I know there’s more.”
She’s felt buried a number of times in her life. When she arrived at New Life in the summer of 2007, she’d been dismissed from her job as a parole officer in Colorado Springs—a position she’d had for only six months—after, she says, her bosses told her she was habitually late and frequently unavailable. (Assam denied the claims; the Colorado Department of Corrections does not publicly discuss personnel matters.)
That was nearly a decade after she filed a discrimination claim in Minneapolis. She’d been considered among the best officers in her precinct, but when it came time for promotions or commendations, she was overlooked. Then, in 1997, she swore at a city bus driver after the man blocked her squad car during a call—hardly a fireable offense. When her superiors questioned her about the incident, she lied about it under oath. There was video that contradicted her. (Assam says she didn’t swear directly at the man.) She was put on leave, then dismissed, and her discrimination claim was expanded to include retaliatory discharge. She’d been retaliated against, she thought, because she spoke out. Three years later, in 2000, the department offered her a settlement—both Assam and her former attorney say it was well into six figures—which she rejected. The department built a case against Assam in court. After three days of deliberations, a jury rejected Assam’s claims.
The firing devastated her—“I went home and put my gun to my head, but I couldn’t do it,” she says—and she felt like the most important thing in the world had been ripped away. After she lost her police job, she found work, first in Minnesota, then in Colorado. Nothing seemed to fit.
Then she found New Life. Actually, she’d been there a few times before—in 2004, when then-senior pastor and New Life founder Ted Haggard was preaching. She’d been turned off by those sermons—“He hated women,” Assam says of Haggard—but by 2007, as she struggled through the final weeks of her parole officer job, a friend suggested she give the church another chance. Assam rejected the idea at first; she realized the scars from her past abuse hadn’t healed, and she wasn’t eager to have religion in her life. Plus, she was still dubious about the church. New Life had gone through its own identity crisis in the previous 18 months after Haggard had been caught in a gay-sex scandal with a masseur and was forced out. Anti-homosexual rhetoric now permeated the church, Assam thought, and she worried if anyone learned her secret, it might ruin her. But in May, emotionally destroyed and desperate for help, she finally relented. She’d give the church another chance.
When she arrived at New Life, it was for a Sunday service. She clung to the ideas of belonging, fellowship, and honor. And if she couldn’t live that life as a cop, maybe she could find it in a pew. She returned to church the next week, and then the next. Each time she came back, the message seemed to be written just for her. Redemption, salvation. There is something better in this life, she was told, and God will lead you there. She found a Bible and studied it. She began to pray. Assam asked God for help, for guidance, for assurance, for a sign things would get better. Her answer, she says, came on July 17, 2007. While she was praying, she felt an overwhelming sense of hope wash over her. She had never been more certain of anything in her life. She knew she’d been saved.
Her transformation was swift. By late summer, she found a job in a Christian ministry’s call center and made $11.54 an hour. She began going to New Life more regularly. Soon, she took a volunteer position on New Life’s security team. She was the only woman out of 12 volunteers, and it made her proud. They told her to carry a gun.
The more she listened to the messages at church, the more Assam knew she was on the precipice of something new and wonderful. The final step was to renounce who she was. In those first months at New Life, she couldn’t escape the message: Homosexuality was a sin, an abomination. Eventually, she believed it, too. By late summer, she stopped dating women. No longer a sinner in her church’s eyes, no longer lost, Assam could concentrate on becoming the person she was certain New Life wanted her to be. With God at her side, she thought, anything was possible.
She can still see it. In her mind, she’s in the hallway again: “I take seven steps out from behind cover,” Assam says. “This amazing, you know—this presence of God—this powerful presence shields me. I felt that. I felt like I was protected by God himself. It was powerful.” Even all these years after the shooting, it’s not the gunfire she remembers most vividly but the feeling she had when she faced Matthew Murray and realized she was safe, protected. She’s held onto the feeling as if her life depended on it. “I’d give anything to feel it again,” she says. “I’d give anything if God would just talk to me.”
A week after the shootings, her life had crumbled again. Her firing in Minneapolis was made public in a newspaper story a few days after the incident and included vague details of her brief tenure as a parole officer. Around the same time, the El Paso County coroner ruled Murray’s death a suicide. Murray had been injured by Assam’s shots, but it was a single self-inflicted shot from his .9 millimeter handgun that ended his life. How Murray died was likely of little importance to the scores of people who’d been saved by Assam’s actions, but the coroner’s report cut to the core of her faith and to the idea that God was with her in the hallway. “I know God used me to bring that man peace,” she says. “If he killed himself, Satan would have gotten him. I know [killing him] was the most merciful thing I could have done.” After what she’d endured with the newspaper story, she could be forgiven for feeling like people were trying to knock her down, trying to diminish her role in saving so many lives, trying to somehow attack her.
Then, in early 2008, a book agent who was working with Assam accidentally outed her to a New Life pastor. Assam says she was confronted about her homosexuality at church and was told not to write a book about the shooting or her life. It was clear to her that church officials were still stung by the Ted Haggard story. She says New Life officials began to treat her differently. Fellow congregants stopped talking to her; she no longer was given high-profile security details on Sundays. (New Life denies Assam’s claims, and a spokeswoman for the church referred to Assam as a “hero.”) Every time Assam left church, it was as if she’d had a hole burned into her heart.
The decision to leave New Life for good in June 2009 was difficult. She’d been marginalized among those she’d saved less than two years earlier, but she still clung to God and Jesus and to the idea that hope was right over the mountaintop. After she’d shot Murray, she imagined she had climbed the mountain, that she’d completed an assignment and would soon see the rewards. She realized she was nowhere near the end of her journey.
With New Life now in her past, her priorities were to find a new church and to write her book. (Assam would have to self-publish it; the agent that had outed Assam had dropped her as a client.) As she did research, she realized she was missing an important part of her story: Matthew Murray. Until then, the young man had remained a shadow in her mind. She’d briefly met his parents several months after the shooting—“They were such kind people,” Assam says—though the meeting did little to clear up questions in her mind. From Internet searches and police reports, she’d already begun to piece together a troubling outline. Assam learned Murray had been raised in a Christian home in Englewood, he’d lost a job, and he’d struggled through community college classes before ultimately dropping out a few months before his rampage. He was socially awkward and had trouble making friends. His tipping point actually may have come three years earlier, when Murray was kicked out of a missionary training program. He never recovered. After his death, authorities found a letter Murray wrote to God. “What have I done so wrong?” he asked. “What is wrong with me anyways? Am I really such a bad person?… I wish I knew the truth.... Am I too lost to be saved?”
On August 18, 2009, nearly two years after the shootings, Assam drove from Colorado Springs to Ronald Murray’s office in Lone Tree. She’d set up an appointment with the neurologist and his wife, Loretta. In the suburban office, Assam found the couple to be loving and understanding. There was no animosity. Loretta sat next to Assam and showed photos of her son: There was Matthew in a high chair. There was Matthew at the Flintstones theme park in South Dakota, the same place Assam often visited as a child. The boy in those photos was always smiling. She learned he’d run competitively—something Assam had done in school—and was adept at fixing computers. Matthew put together a plan for a computer-repair business, Ronald told Assam. It was perfect. It looked as if Matthew’s life would change in the new year.
Sitting with Murray’s parents—looking at photos, listening to stories—a clearer image of Murray emerged. The moment was both intense and difficult to comprehend. “He became a human being,” Assam says of Murray. “And I was the one who shot him.”
Six months after the visit, she published her book, God, the Gunman & Me, which sold 700 copies. She moved to an apartment in Centennial. She attended a new gay-friendly church and applied for jobs at local police departments. With each rejection, she sank further into depression. Regardless of what she’d done at New Life, she was sure her work history haunted her.
Discouraged and lonely, she was drinking by herself at a restaurant in October 2010 when she decided she’d had enough. Assam looked up the address to a gay bar in downtown Denver and drove there. When she walked inside, she immediately felt welcomed. It was as if she’d removed a stifling mask. “I could finally be the person I really am,” she says. “I was just Jeanne.”
While she was relieved to reclaim a part of herself, her homosexuality didn’t define who she was. Her work did. This past summer, just before she moved to Denver, her application for a police job was rejected again. She was done being a cop.
Assam walked to her kitchen and grabbed a pair of scissors and a trash bag. She went to her office and opened her closet door. In front of her, hung neatly on hangers, were the pieces of her police past: jackets, T-shirts, sweatshirts, badges. The jackets were the first to go. She cut up the sleeves and the patches. She pulled her metal nametags from the breast pockets. She shredded the T-shirts. She cut up the sweaters. Five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes passed. The pain was blinding. Item by item, years of frustration piled up in the trash bag.
When the final sweatshirt was in ribbons, only her police badges remained. She grabbed them, held them in her hands, and then put them away. Jeanne Assam could destroy her memories, but she could never part with the thing that had once made her feel whole again.
Sunday morning, early fall. Assam walks through the sanctuary doors at the nondenominational Mile Hi Church in Lakewood. It’s a massive structure; hundreds of people fill dozens of pews that face two oversized screens on each side of a warmly lit, polished stage. There’s some music and reflection, and then more music. A singer belts out Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” while folks stand and sing and sway. In the last row, Assam remains seated.
Dr. Roger W. Teel, Mile Hi’s senior minister, gazes out toward the worshipers. Gray-haired with an almost permanent, easy smile, he’s dressed in a suit jacket and pressed slacks. The screens on the wall flash his image, there is a call to prayer, and the congregation goes silent.
This morning, the sermon is about change—how each season is a metaphor for stages in life. “Seasons of the soul,” the minister calls them. Winter is a time of quiet, he says; spring, a moment for initiating change; summer, a time of fulfillment, of moving on. And then there is fall. Changing leaves shrivel, then fall to the ground. Autumn begins the process of letting go, Teel says, to “clean out the soul’s garage.” From her seat, Assam nods. It’s as if the minister is speaking to her. “I just went through that release,” she whispers.
Teel talks some more, and for the next 15 minutes, Assam listens. Then there’s more music and more singing and more swaying. The collection basket comes around, and Assam drops a couple of dollars into it. “Everyone holds hands after this, and I’m not too touchy-feely,” she says. “Let’s go.”
But she doesn’t get far. A few minutes later, she’s in a line with 50-some people, all of whom are waiting to see Teel. “He’s doing some deep healing,” Assam says of the minister. She wants him to know she feels welcomed here. Assam says she’s closer to becoming the woman she knows is deep inside her. It’s the same woman who stared down a killer and revealed her true self—confident, calm, and most important to her, obedient to God’s will. For now, she is certain about who she is not. A few months ago, someone on the staff learned Assam was attending the church and asked if she wanted to join the security team. She declined politely.
The line shrinks quickly and Teel spots Assam. He wraps her in a hug. “Jeanne, it’s so great to see you!” he says. They exchange greetings for a few moments, then Assam steps back. “I just wanted to tell you,” she says, “how great this church has been for me.”
The man smiles. “I’m so glad to hear that,” Teel says. He asks if she’s planning to attend the “Beyond Limits” class on Tuesday, which is designed to help people lead happy and effective lives.
“I’ll see you then,” she tells him.
Teel reaches out both arms and wraps her in another hug. Assam says goodbye, and then walks through the church doors into the sunlight.
Jeanne Assam is Still Waiting | 5280
This article was a finalist for the 2013 City and Regional Magazine Award in the personality profile category.
A few seconds after the first rifle blasts outside New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Jeanne Assam hears the screams. The shots continue outside a set of double glass doors in the snowy parking lot where one person is already dead. The noise gets progressively louder. Glass in one of the doors explodes. Then another.
New Life serves more than 10,000 worshipers each week, and thousands of people are leaving the megachurch following Sunday service on December 9, 2007. Now, some of them are dodging bullets. A wave of panicked churchgoers bears down on Assam’s position near the center of the church—a tentlike colossus rising from the 42-acre campus. Assam, in her second month as a volunteer for the church security team, is more than 100 yards from the exploding doors. Between her and the doorway are multiple hallways and classrooms filling with terrified people. “Jeanne!” a security team member yells behind her. “He’s coming through the doors!”
Assam is 42, with blond hair and green eyes hidden behind mascaraed eyelashes. She wears a suit jacket and blue jeans. A cop by trade, Assam has found purpose these past months at this church. Quite literally, she believes it has saved her. She is newly born-again, zealous in her recently discovered faith. On this day, she planned to end a three-day fast and had already read her Bible before coming to work for the 11 a.m. service. Now, looking down the hallway, she pulls out the .9 millimeter Beretta tucked into the front of her jeans and begins sprinting through the crush of people running past her.
There are more blasts at the doors. More people. More screams. Then, suddenly, nothing. The corridor is empty. People take cover in rooms; some are hiding in bathroom stalls. In the distance, Assam sees a man opening one of the doors. He’s holding a weapon. The man moves slowly, deliberately. Assam can only think of one thing: I need to end this right now. She rushes toward a hallway to her right. She stands close to the wall, puts her Beretta at a low-ready position, and prays.
When she was young—a tomboy who preferred games of cowboys and Indians to ballet—Assam built a fort in her backyard. Four walls, no roof. She loved sitting in there. Just her, safe, looking up at the stars. In that fort, it was only her and God.
Matthew Murray, a thin, 24-year-old man, is wearing blue earplugs, a flak jacket, kneepads, black lace-up boots, and a backpack as he walks up the corridor. He’s holding a Bushmaster AR-style rifle. Murray also has two .9 millimeter handguns, and he’s carrying at least 1,000 rounds of ammunition. He fires his weapon down the hallway, again and again. He is the plague who’s come to wipe out those who have sinned against him.
From Assam’s hiding place, the rifle shots are deafening. She can hear the man mumbling between rounds. He fires again. Assam is calm and alert. She wants to shoot the gunman when he passes, but it seems too risky. There’s nowhere to run if he sees her first. God, please be with me, she thinks. Assam steps from behind the wall, gun stretched from her body. Murray is 20 yards away. “Police officer!” she yells. “Drop your weapon!”
The man jerks his rifle toward Assam. She fires five quick shots. Murray falls backward. Assam moves to the middle of the corridor and rushes forward. She’s a few dozen feet from Murray now, exposed in the middle of the hallway. “Drop your weapon, or I will kill you!” she yells. Murray sits up to face her. He’s still holding the rifle. Boom-boom-boom. Bullets rip past her and pepper a wall. While Murray shoots, Assam fires three times.
Through the haze of gun smoke, Assam sees the man struggling on the floor. He props his head against a wall. Her weapon is up, trained on the man. She sees his hands moving near his shoulder. He’s trying to pull the pin on a grenade. He’s going to kill everyone around here, Assam thinks. She instinctively steps back and fires two more shots.
As a kid in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Jeanne Assam went to church on Sundays. Mom went regularly, which meant Jeanne had to go. Her parents were well-known around the city, though they weren’t always home, and Jeanne was often left in other people’s care. When she was four, she was sexually abused for the first time. When she was 14, an elder at her church molested her. When he told her not to tell, she didn’t. This was a man of God, and she was just a child. Who would people believe? The abuse continued for years.
Eventually, she pushed that piece of her away. She separated that fragment of her past until she no longer recognized it as part of herself. Years later, before the shooting that would make her famous around the world, Assam went to a therapist. The doctor asked her to draw a timeline of her life on a whiteboard. When Assam finished, the doctor studied her work. The first 16 years of her life were blank.
She was a victim, but she’d never thought of herself that way. Even after she’d left home in 1985, gone to college in Nebraska and later in California, and discovered more abuse at the hands of men, she refused to see herself as weak. She was young and pretty and men were attracted to her. But when she was with men, she felt uncomfortable. It was never that way around women. When she was around women who flirted with her, she never felt like a sexual object. It felt right. The few encounters she had were never forced; the intimacy that grew from those relationships was natural, unlike anything she’d ever felt.
In 1989, Assam transferred to Hamline University, a liberal arts school in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She studied criminal justice and hoped to become a police officer. During her first year in Minnesota, she dated a cop with the Minneapolis Police Department, and she often went on ride-alongs with the woman. The action made an indelible impression on her. Each call was an uncertainty, its own prepackaged adrenaline rush, night after night. There was an immediacy about the justice*—how police could bring peace so quickly—and she loved to watch good cops work. The best were fit and athletic, daring and brave. She thought she was all of that. One night, she proved it: During a ride-along, Assam helped her girlfriend break up a fight between two men. One of the men had a knife, and Assam swiped it from him. After the men were arrested and in the back of the squad car, her girlfriend was upset. Assam wasn’t trained; it was a stupid move and she could have gotten killed. Assam didn’t care. She knew she was going to be a cop.
She graduated from Hamline in 1992. Assam attended the police academy and joined the Minneapolis Police Department in 1993. She was in her mid-20s when she was assigned to the Fourth Precinct, the city’s most dangerous ward. Assam couldn’t have been happier. In her uniform, she found purpose. Her shirtsleeves were perfectly creased; her black boots were spotless. Her badge, with number 0234 etched into it, was polished brass. It gleamed under the lights. Her badge was like the missing piece to her life’s puzzle. With it, she felt whole.
The dark blue plastic case is on a bookshelf in her apartment. It’s next to the stack of awards and plaques, just below the photo of President George W. Bush embracing her, in one corner of a room where her past is stored. Usually, she keeps it in the closet, but on a bright fall afternoon this year in Denver, Assam grabs the case and carries it to her family room. She gently places it on her coffee table, pops two clasps, and swings it open.
The Beretta is black and smells of gun lubricant. She removes it from its foam casing, takes out the 15-round magazine, and pulls back the slide to show that the chamber is empty. The gun is surprisingly large and surprisingly heavy and cold to the touch. Against her frame, the weapon looks immense. There are small chips at the bottom of the magazine, where thin lines of metal are rubbed free from the dark veneer. The gun itself is in perfect condition. She holds it in her right hand, points it at a wall, and pulls the trigger. Click.
It’s been years since she fired the gun. Mostly, the blue case stays in the closet. “That was a different chapter in my life,” she says, putting the weapon back into the foam. “There’s no use dwelling on it.”
And yet it seems as though Jeanne Assam is stuck in time. She’s in her mid-40s now, but she doesn’t look like she’s aged. Same jeans, same athletic build, same mascara, same blond hair styled the same way. In fact, if you didn’t notice the corner in her apartment, you’d think nothing monumental happened on that late fall day five years ago. Perhaps it’s easy to forget. The legend of Jeanne Assam, the overnight hero whose story was told in newspapers and on cable channels across the country, has faded from history. In the years since she stopped Matthew Murray’s murderous rampage—he killed four people at two churches over 12 hours and wounded four more—Assam’s own life has been laid bare in some of the most intrusive and embarrassing ways possible. In the process, she has battled depression, persistent unemployment, and her own constant questions.
Today, she lives alone. Her savings are nearly gone, and she makes do largely from money borrowed from a friend in Colorado Springs. Her moods vacillate between hopeful and desperate. Perhaps worst of all, she isn’t quite sure who she is anymore. “I’ve struggled,” she admits as she leans back on her couch in a cozy, second-story family room overlooking a grassy field. The television is set to a home-improvement show and her cat, Kleetus, is curled on her lap. “I’d never change what I did at New Life, but this can’t be it for me,” she continues. “I feel like I’ve been buried, but I’m not dead. I know there’s more.”
She’s felt buried a number of times in her life. When she arrived at New Life in the summer of 2007, she’d been dismissed from her job as a parole officer in Colorado Springs—a position she’d had for only six months—after, she says, her bosses told her she was habitually late and frequently unavailable. (Assam denied the claims; the Colorado Department of Corrections does not publicly discuss personnel matters.)
That was nearly a decade after she filed a discrimination claim in Minneapolis. She’d been considered among the best officers in her precinct, but when it came time for promotions or commendations, she was overlooked. Then, in 1997, she swore at a city bus driver after the man blocked her squad car during a call—hardly a fireable offense. When her superiors questioned her about the incident, she lied about it under oath. There was video that contradicted her. (Assam says she didn’t swear directly at the man.) She was put on leave, then dismissed, and her discrimination claim was expanded to include retaliatory discharge. She’d been retaliated against, she thought, because she spoke out. Three years later, in 2000, the department offered her a settlement—both Assam and her former attorney say it was well into six figures—which she rejected. The department built a case against Assam in court. After three days of deliberations, a jury rejected Assam’s claims.
The firing devastated her—“I went home and put my gun to my head, but I couldn’t do it,” she says—and she felt like the most important thing in the world had been ripped away. After she lost her police job, she found work, first in Minnesota, then in Colorado. Nothing seemed to fit.
Then she found New Life. Actually, she’d been there a few times before—in 2004, when then-senior pastor and New Life founder Ted Haggard was preaching. She’d been turned off by those sermons—“He hated women,” Assam says of Haggard—but by 2007, as she struggled through the final weeks of her parole officer job, a friend suggested she give the church another chance. Assam rejected the idea at first; she realized the scars from her past abuse hadn’t healed, and she wasn’t eager to have religion in her life. Plus, she was still dubious about the church. New Life had gone through its own identity crisis in the previous 18 months after Haggard had been caught in a gay-sex scandal with a masseur and was forced out. Anti-homosexual rhetoric now permeated the church, Assam thought, and she worried if anyone learned her secret, it might ruin her. But in May, emotionally destroyed and desperate for help, she finally relented. She’d give the church another chance.
When she arrived at New Life, it was for a Sunday service. She clung to the ideas of belonging, fellowship, and honor. And if she couldn’t live that life as a cop, maybe she could find it in a pew. She returned to church the next week, and then the next. Each time she came back, the message seemed to be written just for her. Redemption, salvation. There is something better in this life, she was told, and God will lead you there. She found a Bible and studied it. She began to pray. Assam asked God for help, for guidance, for assurance, for a sign things would get better. Her answer, she says, came on July 17, 2007. While she was praying, she felt an overwhelming sense of hope wash over her. She had never been more certain of anything in her life. She knew she’d been saved.
Her transformation was swift. By late summer, she found a job in a Christian ministry’s call center and made $11.54 an hour. She began going to New Life more regularly. Soon, she took a volunteer position on New Life’s security team. She was the only woman out of 12 volunteers, and it made her proud. They told her to carry a gun.
The more she listened to the messages at church, the more Assam knew she was on the precipice of something new and wonderful. The final step was to renounce who she was. In those first months at New Life, she couldn’t escape the message: Homosexuality was a sin, an abomination. Eventually, she believed it, too. By late summer, she stopped dating women. No longer a sinner in her church’s eyes, no longer lost, Assam could concentrate on becoming the person she was certain New Life wanted her to be. With God at her side, she thought, anything was possible.
She can still see it. In her mind, she’s in the hallway again: “I take seven steps out from behind cover,” Assam says. “This amazing, you know—this presence of God—this powerful presence shields me. I felt that. I felt like I was protected by God himself. It was powerful.” Even all these years after the shooting, it’s not the gunfire she remembers most vividly but the feeling she had when she faced Matthew Murray and realized she was safe, protected. She’s held onto the feeling as if her life depended on it. “I’d give anything to feel it again,” she says. “I’d give anything if God would just talk to me.”
A week after the shootings, her life had crumbled again. Her firing in Minneapolis was made public in a newspaper story a few days after the incident and included vague details of her brief tenure as a parole officer. Around the same time, the El Paso County coroner ruled Murray’s death a suicide. Murray had been injured by Assam’s shots, but it was a single self-inflicted shot from his .9 millimeter handgun that ended his life. How Murray died was likely of little importance to the scores of people who’d been saved by Assam’s actions, but the coroner’s report cut to the core of her faith and to the idea that God was with her in the hallway. “I know God used me to bring that man peace,” she says. “If he killed himself, Satan would have gotten him. I know [killing him] was the most merciful thing I could have done.” After what she’d endured with the newspaper story, she could be forgiven for feeling like people were trying to knock her down, trying to diminish her role in saving so many lives, trying to somehow attack her.
Then, in early 2008, a book agent who was working with Assam accidentally outed her to a New Life pastor. Assam says she was confronted about her homosexuality at church and was told not to write a book about the shooting or her life. It was clear to her that church officials were still stung by the Ted Haggard story. She says New Life officials began to treat her differently. Fellow congregants stopped talking to her; she no longer was given high-profile security details on Sundays. (New Life denies Assam’s claims, and a spokeswoman for the church referred to Assam as a “hero.”) Every time Assam left church, it was as if she’d had a hole burned into her heart.
The decision to leave New Life for good in June 2009 was difficult. She’d been marginalized among those she’d saved less than two years earlier, but she still clung to God and Jesus and to the idea that hope was right over the mountaintop. After she’d shot Murray, she imagined she had climbed the mountain, that she’d completed an assignment and would soon see the rewards. She realized she was nowhere near the end of her journey.
With New Life now in her past, her priorities were to find a new church and to write her book. (Assam would have to self-publish it; the agent that had outed Assam had dropped her as a client.) As she did research, she realized she was missing an important part of her story: Matthew Murray. Until then, the young man had remained a shadow in her mind. She’d briefly met his parents several months after the shooting—“They were such kind people,” Assam says—though the meeting did little to clear up questions in her mind. From Internet searches and police reports, she’d already begun to piece together a troubling outline. Assam learned Murray had been raised in a Christian home in Englewood, he’d lost a job, and he’d struggled through community college classes before ultimately dropping out a few months before his rampage. He was socially awkward and had trouble making friends. His tipping point actually may have come three years earlier, when Murray was kicked out of a missionary training program. He never recovered. After his death, authorities found a letter Murray wrote to God. “What have I done so wrong?” he asked. “What is wrong with me anyways? Am I really such a bad person?… I wish I knew the truth.... Am I too lost to be saved?”
On August 18, 2009, nearly two years after the shootings, Assam drove from Colorado Springs to Ronald Murray’s office in Lone Tree. She’d set up an appointment with the neurologist and his wife, Loretta. In the suburban office, Assam found the couple to be loving and understanding. There was no animosity. Loretta sat next to Assam and showed photos of her son: There was Matthew in a high chair. There was Matthew at the Flintstones theme park in South Dakota, the same place Assam often visited as a child. The boy in those photos was always smiling. She learned he’d run competitively—something Assam had done in school—and was adept at fixing computers. Matthew put together a plan for a computer-repair business, Ronald told Assam. It was perfect. It looked as if Matthew’s life would change in the new year.
Sitting with Murray’s parents—looking at photos, listening to stories—a clearer image of Murray emerged. The moment was both intense and difficult to comprehend. “He became a human being,” Assam says of Murray. “And I was the one who shot him.”
Six months after the visit, she published her book, God, the Gunman & Me, which sold 700 copies. She moved to an apartment in Centennial. She attended a new gay-friendly church and applied for jobs at local police departments. With each rejection, she sank further into depression. Regardless of what she’d done at New Life, she was sure her work history haunted her.
Discouraged and lonely, she was drinking by herself at a restaurant in October 2010 when she decided she’d had enough. Assam looked up the address to a gay bar in downtown Denver and drove there. When she walked inside, she immediately felt welcomed. It was as if she’d removed a stifling mask. “I could finally be the person I really am,” she says. “I was just Jeanne.”
While she was relieved to reclaim a part of herself, her homosexuality didn’t define who she was. Her work did. This past summer, just before she moved to Denver, her application for a police job was rejected again. She was done being a cop.
Assam walked to her kitchen and grabbed a pair of scissors and a trash bag. She went to her office and opened her closet door. In front of her, hung neatly on hangers, were the pieces of her police past: jackets, T-shirts, sweatshirts, badges. The jackets were the first to go. She cut up the sleeves and the patches. She pulled her metal nametags from the breast pockets. She shredded the T-shirts. She cut up the sweaters. Five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes passed. The pain was blinding. Item by item, years of frustration piled up in the trash bag.
When the final sweatshirt was in ribbons, only her police badges remained. She grabbed them, held them in her hands, and then put them away. Jeanne Assam could destroy her memories, but she could never part with the thing that had once made her feel whole again.
Sunday morning, early fall. Assam walks through the sanctuary doors at the nondenominational Mile Hi Church in Lakewood. It’s a massive structure; hundreds of people fill dozens of pews that face two oversized screens on each side of a warmly lit, polished stage. There’s some music and reflection, and then more music. A singer belts out Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” while folks stand and sing and sway. In the last row, Assam remains seated.
Dr. Roger W. Teel, Mile Hi’s senior minister, gazes out toward the worshipers. Gray-haired with an almost permanent, easy smile, he’s dressed in a suit jacket and pressed slacks. The screens on the wall flash his image, there is a call to prayer, and the congregation goes silent.
This morning, the sermon is about change—how each season is a metaphor for stages in life. “Seasons of the soul,” the minister calls them. Winter is a time of quiet, he says; spring, a moment for initiating change; summer, a time of fulfillment, of moving on. And then there is fall. Changing leaves shrivel, then fall to the ground. Autumn begins the process of letting go, Teel says, to “clean out the soul’s garage.” From her seat, Assam nods. It’s as if the minister is speaking to her. “I just went through that release,” she whispers.
Teel talks some more, and for the next 15 minutes, Assam listens. Then there’s more music and more singing and more swaying. The collection basket comes around, and Assam drops a couple of dollars into it. “Everyone holds hands after this, and I’m not too touchy-feely,” she says. “Let’s go.”
But she doesn’t get far. A few minutes later, she’s in a line with 50-some people, all of whom are waiting to see Teel. “He’s doing some deep healing,” Assam says of the minister. She wants him to know she feels welcomed here. Assam says she’s closer to becoming the woman she knows is deep inside her. It’s the same woman who stared down a killer and revealed her true self—confident, calm, and most important to her, obedient to God’s will. For now, she is certain about who she is not. A few months ago, someone on the staff learned Assam was attending the church and asked if she wanted to join the security team. She declined politely.
The line shrinks quickly and Teel spots Assam. He wraps her in a hug. “Jeanne, it’s so great to see you!” he says. They exchange greetings for a few moments, then Assam steps back. “I just wanted to tell you,” she says, “how great this church has been for me.”
The man smiles. “I’m so glad to hear that,” Teel says. He asks if she’s planning to attend the “Beyond Limits” class on Tuesday, which is designed to help people lead happy and effective lives.
“I’ll see you then,” she tells him.
Teel reaches out both arms and wraps her in another hug. Assam says goodbye, and then walks through the church doors into the sunlight.