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Speaker 1: This is a story about a North Georgia man named Jason Dean who is mistakenly shot by deer hunter with a high powered rifle.
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Speaker 2: This is about the unusual.
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Speaker 1: Circumstances that surrounded this situation, and it’s not normal at all.
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Speaker 2: It’s almost unbelievable.
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Speaker 1: The cast of people that tell this story are special. I think there’s something here for all of us, and I really doubt that you’re going.
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Speaker 2: To want to miss this one.
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Speaker 1: And be sure to check out the bear Grease YouTube channel where you’ll find bear nukomb doing all kinds of stuff from building bows to flint napping, to turkey hunting, to cooking carp with mom to training mules.
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Speaker 2: It’s a good time. Check it out bear Grease YouTube channel.
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Speaker 1: My name is Clay nukemb and this is the bear Grease podcast where we’ll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we’ll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land.
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Speaker 2: Brought to you by to Covi’s Boots.
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Speaker 1: I’m a cowboy boot man and I’ve been wearing to Covis for years. They’re the most comfortable boot I’ve ever put on good boots for good times.
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Speaker 3: When you showed up and you saw him, Yes, what were your initial thoughts.
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Speaker 4: That I was going to have a dead patient on my hand, that he was shot so bad and that was so far out. I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to get him out.
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Speaker 5: Of the woods.
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Speaker 4: My partner went around some looked at me, and he held his arms up, and when he did, blood was stripping off his elbows, And at that point in time, I.
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Speaker 3: Was, what does that mean?
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Speaker 5: Just massive loss of blood.
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Speaker 4: Massive loss of blood, tremendous loss of blood. You know, we don’t only have so many leaders in our body, and he was losing that and losing that rapidly. I think Jason thought he was going to die too. It was the work probably the worst gunshot wound that I’ve ever worked that survived.
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Speaker 1: That was Josh Spilmmaker with paramedic John Clemens, who was on the scene.
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Speaker 6: Those of you who.
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Speaker 1: Hunted with a rifle, can you imagine being shot in the chest with a high powered rifle.
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Speaker 2: Shooting a hunting cartridge? How could he survive?
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Speaker 7: I guess later I have found out the kind of the explanation of what I’ve had was considered out of the body experience and might just still at that time felt like I’m not gonna make it. And I had a grandmother, that’s her home place right down there. I missed my grandmother hawk with my mother’s mom had just passed a few months before this happened, and it was just as hard to explain. I think a lot of time people think you’ve really probably lost your mind, or I don’t really know what people believe or think.
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Speaker 5: But it was just absolute real.
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Speaker 7: And it’s not changed any It’s the same.
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Speaker 5: Today as it was then.
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Speaker 7: But it was like I had came to a river at early morning, like the sunrise, how the thing will raise off the water, and I was on this side it was just total calm, peaceful. On the other side of the river, my grandmother was there with her hand out.
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Speaker 5: The bath.
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Speaker 7: At that time, my dad gets there and I can just remember my dad. It was just blood curling scream this. He didn’t say anything when Dad screamed. From that point I opened my eyes, I looked at Dad, and once I knew he was there, he gave me a reason I felt like to fight.
00:04:05
Speaker 1: That’s Jason Dean of highwe Georgia, He was shot by guests at their deer camp who was using a two seventy rifle on December twenty sixth, nineteen ninety. Based upon his injuries, he shouldn’t be alive. The Dean family has a rich history in North Georgia with the outdoors. This is his brother, Ricky, and to understand the context of Jason getting shot, we need to beat this guy because he was there and we need to learn about their father.
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Speaker 6: So my name is Ricky Dean. I grew up in southern Appalachian Mountains of Northeast Georgia, White County, near Helen, and my dad and mom came from very hard times growing up. And his first deer that he killed was in nineteen sixty nine. I was four years old and he killed it with a borrowed gun that was his uncle’s. Thirty thirty is a good eight point and I just grew up watching him in joy hunting. So when he finally bought his first gun, he bought a Remington seven hundred eighty L two seventy in about seventy one was the first rifle that my dad owned.
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Speaker 2: Him Sell Larry Dean was a loving father.
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Speaker 1: He’s since passed away, but these guys doed on him to this day, and he was very good at getting his boys into the outdoors, and he plays a unique role in this story. The heyday of the two seventies popularity was from the nineteen fifties through the nineteen seventies. I mean people still use them today, but back then the cartridge was people really wanted to shoot it. And this family has used them since then. But the bottom line is that these brothers just loved to go hunting with their dad. Now, let’s hear more from Jason.
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Speaker 7: I’m Jason Dean. I’m native here of the North Georgia Mountains and as a young child, all my life we’ve enjoyed honey and just a big part of our life with my dad. He’d always kind of make it a point to try to make us be able to go and take us as young men. And through my life he rented a property down about two hours south before we live. More deer population there. Back going back thirty five years with this story, and there just wasn’t a lot in the mountains here where we live, but down there they were more deer and just a big part of our life. Some of the best memories of my childhood were at the old deer camp.
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Speaker 5: There.
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Speaker 7: We just camp there, had just a lot of good times. We would, you know’d have a deer and we’d cook it and just enjoy it. This fellowship just really some of the better memories of any child could have in my opinion, and in fact, I love to go so much. When I was probably eight years old, Dad there was going to just be just a men’s weekend, so the children couldn’t go. And I knew he was going, but he had to go work that morning. He had like a seventy six jeep Renegade and that’s what he always rove to go to hunting camp. So I got up that morning he had done left for work. I go outside and I just get into jeep, just sitting there, and my mom come, I said, what are you doing? I said, I’m waiting on Dad getting uncle. He’s not leaving without me. So sure enough he gets home. Mom tells Dad, Jason’s been out there for six hours sitting there. He an’t got out, won’t get out, And so my dad gave in, just like always said, okay, said Jason, he can go. So I got to go for the men’s weekend too, so I just didn’t want him to leave without me, you know, and wanted to go.
00:08:05
Speaker 1: Many of us can connect with the stories that showed the value of family hunting camps. Or maybe it wasn’t hunting camps for you, maybe it was something else. But wherever family gathers up and does stuff together, there’s value and woven into these camps and American families that love hunting is teaching on gun safety. It’s just part of the culture. And this was a big priority for the Deans.
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Speaker 2: Here’s Ricky and my dad.
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Speaker 6: He would always, you know, back then we had to have the hunter safety course and we had to have you know, of course Dad started out, you know, you never ever. I can think of several circumstances. I worked at a gas station in Helen through high school and the battery salesman came and he had a double barrel sixteen gage shotgun and I wanted it so bad, so I bought it, and my dad and I go into what we call Ly’s Cove. That was another area there that we always hunted, had huge hickorys in it, and we were sitting up on top of the on the side of the ridge almost top looking at the tops of the hickory. Squirrels in there like crazy. And I was sitting beside my dad and had that shotgun laying with the barrels facing away from him. We were just sitting there and it goes off, and he said, you take that back, and if that guy won’t give you your money back, you let me know. But he’s taking that shotgun back. It just went off sitting in my lap. But if you’re always careful about gun safety, a lot of things you know that you just learn from the beginning of You know, you don’t shoot at anything you’re not certain of. You don’t you never have a loaded gun, you know around people, always make sure it’s on safety, typical gun safety. We were always just fine with it. Jason was too. Even at a young age. We all hunted around home. We could walk out from the house and go hunting, and we did and by ourselves at young ages we would just go hunting.
00:10:23
Speaker 1: Stories of guns going off by themselves are always troubling. And the problem with gun safety is that you can control your own actions to some degree, but you cannot control the actions of others. So here Ricky will start to tell the story that we’re all going to try to understand how could this have happened.
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Speaker 6: So in nineteen ninety we were going to go that. It was December twenty sixth, the day after Christmas. We’d had Christmas at home. I had a young family at that time. I was twenty five, Jason had turned seventeen, and we drove down that morning to our deer camp that we’d been in now ten years, and we were going to just go down there and have some good time together. After Christmas. We had a little bit of time off from work until after New Year’s so I drove separate and my dad and Jason, he had a seventy eight GMC Jimmy, and they drove down to the cabin together and I followed them in my truck drive down there. So we get down there maybe around lunch. It was two hour drive, two and a half hours from where we lived to get down there, and it was beautiful day. It was warm for December twenty sixth. It was two of my uncles, my dad’s. It was all family. There was nobody in our club that wasn’t family. So that day, the day after Christmas, nineteen ninety, we’re out there and one of my dad’s cousins, Dave Reese, who we thought a lot of He had another camp over the road. They had their own camp over there. Dave came over and it was me and Jason and Dave talking like sitting on the tailgate of the truck after lunch, a beautiful day, and Dave had been telling stories and had me and Jason we were just laughing hooting at him. He told us that he had been hunting a few days before and he had on those camouflage coveralls that zip up, and he said he had nature called for a certain experience. He was trying to get out of his coveralls for that one, and nature called again for another experience, and he sold his coveralls with both before he could get them off. I’ll never forget. We were just laughing, having the best time. Dave was thirty five at that time, and he had never, to the best of my knowledge, had never hunted on our camp. We had about seven hundred and forty acres lease that my dad had carried the majority of the least expenses, and Dave had his own camp, and I don’t think David ever hunted over there. And we had had such a good day Dave said, wasn’t. I don’t remember anybody else being it wasn’t of a lot of people there that day, and he said, if it’s okay with y’all, said I think I’m just gonna hunt with y’all today, and we said fine. You know, he’s thirty five hunted all his life. So Dad said, okay, that’d be great, you know, for you to hunt over here with us today.
00:14:06
Speaker 1: We’ve introduced several characters, and I bet you’re wondering who shot Jason. We’re about to find out if a person had access to all the hidden data points of things leading up to crisis, and we’re able to identify the starting point of where things started to go wrong. It’s usually when an abnormality enters the equation. Dave had never hunted here in his life.
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Speaker 2: Here’s Jason during that era.
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Speaker 7: When it came time to go hunt, I hunted on a creek there. It was an oak bottom, and in that era, I had this illuminum climbing stand and I already had it on the tree where I was going to hunt that afternoon. And Dad he had a older like a K five blazer, and I drove it down because they hunted closer to Ken. This was kind of a far away from it.
00:15:03
Speaker 6: And Jason got in the Jimmy and was going to go down the road a little waist to the creek and walk up the creek and he had a tree stand. Well, Dave ended up going there was kind of like timber company, and then there was a fence and a field a pastor that was grass, and then Jason was hunting at the creek. It was wooded down at the edge of that field. Jason drove the Jemmy down to the creek to walk up to his stand, and Dave went up on the fence line to watch that field. But Jason and Dave didn’t know where each other were.
00:15:47
Speaker 7: So I went down there that day and parked and got out, and I remember hunting that day, just enjoying the day.
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Speaker 5: It was just a beautiful day.
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Speaker 7: And I don’t recall that I ever saw a deer that day at all, but I had to see a flock of turkeys and enjoyed watching those. And like I said, it was on an oak bottom, like on a creek, and I was in that stand, and then it got late that afternoon, and uh, you know, nowadays, you know I.
00:16:13
Speaker 5: Would probably stay at total blackout dark.
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Speaker 7: But it was just dusky, and I really I said, I need to get ahead and get out, and I needed to go to the restroom. I said, I’ll jump out here, and I walked up to the creek bank there, and.
00:16:28
Speaker 6: There was talk of maybe Jason had been using a grunk call, maybe David heard the rattling of the tree stand as he was coming down, But at any rate, Jason was coming down about six thirty and to back up before I go any further. I had made it back to the camp and me and my dad were sitting around the campfire, just me and him, and it as always. He asked if I’d heard any shots? Did you hear any shots? Anybody shoot? We need to go help with a deer, I said, n I said, I heard something that sounded like a twenty two magnum, But that’s the only shot I heard because this wasn’t a lot of people down there.
00:17:14
Speaker 7: So about that time, it’s like a distant noise I heard like a shot, but you know, it really hit me before I heard it, I guess you could say, but it didn’t sound like a big caliber. But when it hit me, the bullet went into the left of my shoulder, that dead center my back, and it went through up through my left lung and missed my heart by a bout.
00:17:37
Speaker 5: An ence came out here under.
00:17:38
Speaker 7: My arm, and I knew immediately I had been shot, and I thought though the impact later found out it had ruptured my spleen, and I really felt I had got shot in the stomach. It hit me so hard it buck on my knees. It almost knocked me down, but I did stand back up and I could fill the blood disgushing. I thought it was coming out, but it was internal. For whatever reason just came to my mind, you know, I thought a lot of times, the deer will go to the water whatever. And I was standing there at the stream and the creek bank there, so I just kind of sat down right.
00:18:19
Speaker 5: I was weak really pretty quick.
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Speaker 7: There’s no way that I could have physically got out of the woods. I was able to yell the first time pretty loudly. The second two not so much, as I was getting very weak really quickly. But I yelled, I’ve been shot. Somebody help me, please help me, the first pretty loud. And the man who shot me then with Dave, and he said he heard me and he just couldn’t believe that he had actually shot me. But anyway, when he heard me yell, he said, he said what had to be his shot was only shot that had been fired, so he but he still was kind of I think, disbelief that he actually had shot me when he heard me. I mean, he didn’t really realize that it was a person from he told me later.
00:19:08
Speaker 6: So what happened was David set up on the fence line. Jason was on the creek after the investigation from the police officers. They were one hundred and twenty yards apart. It was basically dark, and Dave apparently had been hearing Jason for something. But he was looking through his scope through the woods in the creek, across one hundred and twenty yards of open field down into the woods. He found motion and pulled the trigger. Well, the motion was an orange vest.
00:19:53
Speaker 2: Wow.
00:19:54
Speaker 1: Building this episode, I’ve listened to this over and over and it just makes me shudder. When you hold a gun in your hand, it should impart the fear of God into us as we hold an inadamatet object with no moral compass, no ability to make clear judgment or have reason. But this thing has a godlike power, the ability to instantly take life.
00:20:22
Speaker 7: Here’s Jason, So Dave, I remember, you know, I just sat down right there in that water, and that water’s kind of hit me up on my back.
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Speaker 5: Later, the doctor’s kind.
00:20:35
Speaker 7: Of said that that cold as it was that day and then that water, that it just could have helped me. They don’t, you know, have no explanation how come I survived, but said, my whole body just slowed down.
00:20:48
Speaker 5: But Dave, when he got to me.
00:20:52
Speaker 7: He said, I got to get you out of this water. So he gets me like under my arms and gets me up out of the stream, lady. And when he laid me flat on the ground, then I really started struggling because once I laid down that bullet ho at that went through the upper part of my lung, the bloods then I’m drowning, basically, the blood starts coming out my nose, my mouth.
00:21:16
Speaker 5: I can’t breathe.
00:21:17
Speaker 7: And he actually took off his cover offs and rolled them up like a pillow and put them behind my head and sat me up.
00:21:24
Speaker 5: That gave me a little relief.
00:21:25
Speaker 7: And then I, you know, was able to kind of breathe a little easier, but not you know, it’s still pretty serious.
00:21:34
Speaker 1: Pretty serious is an understatement. The hydrostatic shock alone of a bullet to the chest under any normal circumstance would be enough to kill anything within less.
00:21:44
Speaker 2: Than a minute.
00:21:46
Speaker 1: We’re going to slow down and hear this part of the story from Ricky too.
00:21:50
Speaker 6: The bullet had entered Chason’s back one inch to the left of his spine, came out under his left arm, so he screamed when it happened, so we were told, And Dave goes to him, and Jason is now standing in the creek. He had a Remington seven to forty three that was immaculate that my dad had given him that he hunted with. It was laying in the creek. Jason was in the creek, and Dave makes his way through the pastor and gets down there to him, and Dave is just distraught, and he tells Jason that he has to go get some help, and Jason says, well, I don’t want to die by myself. Don’t leave me. So Dave’s finally convinces Jason, I’ve got to try.
00:22:52
Speaker 7: And then the crazy thing about that area at Crawfordville, Georgia at that time may still be to this day. It’s one of the poorest counties in the state of Georgia, so they have don’t even have an ambulance service there. Even to this day, thirty five years later, they don’t have an ambulance. So the two neighboring counties there’s Washington which is wils County, and then there’s Greensboro, which would be Green County. They dispatch ambulances. But the way that happened was when Dave got to me, he got me up and then he got the cover OFLLS on me, and Dave told me, he said, Jason, he says, I gotta go to try to get help. And this is before cell phones, so you know, you can’t just call from right there. And Dave, I remember, I said, Dave, please, I said, I’m never gonna make it. I said, don’t leave me. I really don’t want to be here and die by myself. So he said, Jason, I gotta try. I gotta and I again, please, don’t leave me. Hea said, I gotta try. So he did.
00:24:04
Speaker 6: So he goes to the road, which is another seventy five yards dout the creek to get to the dirt road in the middle of the poorest county in the state of Georgia that doesn’t even have a high school, no phones, no nothing, And so happens the guy that had the episode around our campfire was crossing the creek.
00:24:31
Speaker 3: A who is the guy?
00:24:33
Speaker 6: He had been in Dave’s camp. I had met him once before at an experience that happened maybe in the early eighties when I was young. This guy was kind of rally and he had come to our camp with an automatic, fully automatic rifle. He was intoxicated and he was opening that fully automatic rifle in the air around our campfire, and my dad went to him and made it very clear that he was leaving. But this guy had straightened up some and he was a good guy, and he’s the one, and that’s why it is. So it’s just kind of strange that he was the one.
00:25:24
Speaker 1: Did you notice how cautious Ricky is to say something negative about this guy? And clearly this guy is kind of a troubled character. But I think that speaks to Jason’s character. He’s going to continue this story about this seemingly random guy, but is anything really random?
00:25:42
Speaker 5: And it just so happened.
00:25:44
Speaker 7: He gets there another man that I really didn’t know, but Dave did. It was late that afternoon. He may have been a little bit on the illegal side.
00:25:54
Speaker 5: He liked to ride the road look for deer. Late in the evening.
00:25:57
Speaker 7: He just came by and Dave said his name was Richard Williams. And Dave said, Richard said go. And this happened right on Interstate twenty at the time. It’s called a truck stop called Midway. It’s halfway between Atlanta and Augusta. It was right in the middle Midway truck stop. He told Richard to go get the payphone and call the ambulance and wait on them and bring them here. And he said, well where do I go? He said, just when you get them here, you just walk up the stream. We’re just up there a couple hundred yards right on the side of the street. You can’t miss us. But I’m going back to be with Jason.
00:26:35
Speaker 1: I think it’s ironic that the rough old fellow Richard Williams, with the reputation as an outlaw, was the one that came in so clutch and kind of held Jason’s life in his hands. Who knows how that would later impact his life.
00:26:49
Speaker 6: So he goes out to the truck stop to call the ambulance. Then he comes back. Dave went back to be with Jason, and then he comes to tell us that Jason has been shot. So we go over there and the ambulances the paramedics are working with Jason in the creek. Honestly, from that point as we went to Jason, it was it was just an unbelievable scene. It’s like it was like my mind couldn’t It’s like I was in a fog almost and my dad. I can’t imagine what it was like for him. Honestly, I just couldn’t imagine that he was even alive, you know, I thought he was gone. The thoughts of what a two seventy does to you. We’ve skinned a lot of deer. My dad hunted with a two seventy, my uncle hunted with a two seventy. Everybody there’s a lot of folks hunting with two seventies. We’d skin a lot of deer. Had been shot with a two seventy, and Jason had been shot in the back and he’s laying over there. But Jason, being who he is, lighthearted in every situation, at the point of death, he’s trying to make you laugh. He was conscious the whole time, but he didn’t think he was gonna make it. He didn’t, you know. He said he felt weak, He felt just extremely like, you know, lifeless almost because when the paramedics got there, there was a female paramedic that basically went straight to Jason, and there was another one. From what I understood and was told, he asked, Dave, is he still alive? Basically, you know, is it worth trying? And they said yeah, you know, yeah.
00:29:00
Speaker 1: The medics were led to the scene by Richard Williams, who’d made the call from the payphone.
00:29:05
Speaker 2: Here’s the lead medic.
00:29:07
Speaker 4: Okay, I’m John Clemens. I was a paramedic working the day that the accident happened. I was the first medic on the scene, so therefore everything.
00:29:18
Speaker 5: Fell on me.
00:29:20
Speaker 3: In What state was he in when you got there?
00:29:23
Speaker 4: He was almost unresponsive completely. You could hear him moaning and groaning, but on his back. He was laying on his back. Yeah, And of course we had to roll him over to examine the wounds and everything. And when whrolled him over, we saw the entrance wound and of course the exit wound was a little bit larger up under the arm and chest area packed it well with four before gauze, and that’s about the time his father showed up and kind of screamed, which I would do, blood curdling scream, and Jason actually came more around after his dad screamed, and his dad did ask me, was he gonna be okay? And I told a little white lie, I said yes, because I couldn’t take care of two patients at one time.
00:30:15
Speaker 1: You remember the out of body experience that Jason had that we played right at the first of this podcast. Since that time, some people have made analogies of the river he saw being the Jordan River from the Bible.
00:30:28
Speaker 2: I find that very interesting.
00:30:31
Speaker 4: When he got shot, he was he thought it was like the River Jordan. He could see a river and missed coming off of it and his dead grandmother reaching for him, and he heard his father scream and he said, I gotta get back to my dad. I can’t attest to the river Jordan or Grandma, but his dad did scream, and I believe that’s when he started coming around a little more. For me, I started moaning and moving, and uh, that might have been the initiative, you know what he needed, just to give him the initiative to come on, I can I can do this.
00:31:09
Speaker 7: So John, he said, I ought to ever forget. He said, Jason, when you get better, He didn’t have a doubt, when you get better, He said, my name is John Clemens. He said, you’re going to come. You’re going to find me because he said, this is going to hurt, but I simply do not have time to deaden it. And he took I. He’ll could tell you the name of the whatever that is, but it was just like a piece of PBC pipe of the best I can remember. And he stuck it through my left and through the skin, and I thought, well, that kind of hurt, wasn’t that bad. Well then he took the palm of his hand and he just pushed that thing through my rib cage. And when he did, all that blood it was building up around my heart and lungs and all it. You know, it comes out.
00:31:54
Speaker 1: John Clemens used a big needle to jam into the rib cage to drain off the blood that was filling up in Jason’s chest cavity. It was a gutsy and wild procedure, especially without anesthesia, but they just didn’t have time, and trauma time is everything. I think there’s something to learn from John’s front that Jason was gonna live. He really didn’t think that he would, but he vocalized to everyone that he was confident that Jason would live. In times in my life when I’ve been inside of some many crisis, I’ve noticed how powerful and encouraging word can be. Though it may seem small to the person that said it, they probably wouldn’t have even recognized its power. But our words have real power to encourage people and actually change a situation.
00:32:47
Speaker 4: So that being said, he grabbed the backboard to help us get a sign out suited the brother. There was a ballb war fence on the other side of this creek, so we basically had to slide him through that barbar of fence. So all this is taking up time. We have the golden hour, which in traumas you have an hour to get things done or usually you don’t have a good outcome at all. We got him, got him to the ambulance, and of course the first thing at you know you do is assess the situation and try to bandage the wound and start intravenious fluids. Well, with Jason, because he bled out so much, there were no veins to stick. At the time, we had a pair of pants. They’re called mass trousers, military anti shock trousers. They go on the lower extremities. So I pump those trousers up and two of my partners, Wanda Robinson and George Durand, were both trying to get ivys on him and cutting. And I was a little l airgun in my twenties, so I told him the slide over and let the master stick. And I rolled his head to the side and started a sixteen gage needle in his neck, which is the external jugler got it, rolled his head on the other side, which you really aren’t supposed to do, but I got to have the volume. So I stuck another sixteen gage on his right side, and the Good Lord is with me. It went in perfect, and so we started hanging ivy fluids. We’re about fifty five miles from the closest trauma center.
00:34:35
Speaker 2: Here’s Ricky.
00:34:36
Speaker 6: They said we have got to take him to Augusta. They had a trauma unit, and the paramedic told us that that’s the only chance he has. He has no chance other than Augusta Medical College of Georgia. I had a little eighty three S ten four drive pickup and it wasn’t much. That’s what I had, and I’d never been to Augusta, and I had no idea where they were going with Jason. So my dad rode in the ambulance with Jason. So we finally get out of there. It is probably four miles to get to Interstate I twenty. Once we get on I twenty, they were running as fast as that ambulance would run to Augusta. And I’m trying to stay on the bumper of that ambulance that I had no idea where we were going, and I was running that little truck as hard as I could to stay up with the ambulance.
00:35:39
Speaker 1: Here’s Jason’s recollections from inside the ambulance. Amazingly, he remained conscious the whole time. The only time that he slipped out of consciousness was in the creek.
00:35:50
Speaker 7: And I can remember him telling the driver and this time this was in nineteen ninety, so this wasn’t a diesel. It’s a little square ambulance, the little rescue wagon one. And then it is a four fifty four Chevrolet gas burner. And I can really to hold the driver, he said, put the crews on eighty five, and this was on Interstate twenty. He said, if they won’t move, move them, do not slow down. And my dad even said later he said, yeah, I thought there was times that he was going to move people. He’d get that close, but he never would lift. But John just shortly after that, he said, won’t this thing go any faster? And I can remember hearing as a young man, all love carburettors and four barrels, and he opened it up. It’s like he stuck his foot through.
00:36:34
Speaker 5: The firewall that anusid. I don’t know that they ever lifted.
00:36:37
Speaker 1: They are rolling fast out ID twenty, and Ricky’s on their bumper in that four wheel drive S ten that something weird happens.
00:36:46
Speaker 6: And so for this time, it’s eight o’clock at night, maybe seven point thirty, I don’t remember. We’re going down the interstate and the ambulance just kind of slows down and drifts off onto the shoulder of the road, and my only thought was that he had died, And I thought, why else would they be stopping on that side of I twenty going toward Augusta. So I pull over behind the ambulance and then all at once it just pulls back on the road and off we go again. The ambulance had quit.
00:37:30
Speaker 5: And I remember.
00:37:33
Speaker 7: John was very you know, be charged, and the ambuletce I could remember hearing like the little gravel coming up in an amaze. It’s slowing down. It was off the side of the road. And John he sticks his head up in front and he’s on the phone with the hospital the whole way or radio whatever they had at that time. It had been a radio, I’m sure, and he sticks his head up the drivery on what are you doing? And he says, John, quit the ambulets quit, and he says, oh, no, he knew we’re a few miles away. And my dad said at that time he knew it was really urgent that would get there. My dad’s very much Christian believer. And John had even said at the time that the strong that Dad shown was just unbelievable to him. But my dad said at that time, he said, he just broke down into just unbelievable prayer. Please, if Jason’s still holding on, just please let his handlets get us to where they may be.
00:38:38
Speaker 5: Can help him.
00:38:39
Speaker 7: And so that ambulance it just started right back up, just perfect. On the other two of the last two or three miles to the hospital.
00:38:51
Speaker 1: The ambulance broke down but miraculously started right back up.
00:38:57
Speaker 4: Everything that could go wrong went wrong, the fact he was so far in the woods, the fact they couldn’t get the ivs initially. Then we get there and the amuletce breaks down and for somehow it cranked right back up and we drove into the truma unit and it died permanently there the amblets did.
00:39:22
Speaker 7: And I can remember they go to open the doors and John there again, he’s in charge. Ricky was so upset by the amulets quitting and all this that he just shot right up behind the amlets, right on the back of it.
00:39:35
Speaker 5: John’son moved that truck. You know, we got to get.
00:39:38
Speaker 7: Him out, And so Ricky didn’t even go try to start his truck. With my brother in law at the time. He goes to move the truck, he said, won’t start, and said, what do you mean he wants to start? Well, lo and behold. Once they shut off the truck and the amblets, a tow truck had to get them both right there at the hospital.
00:39:57
Speaker 5: They never won another inch. That’s as far as the they made it.
00:40:01
Speaker 2: You heard that right.
00:40:02
Speaker 1: The ambulance and the four wheel drive S ten made it to the trauma center under the awning like in an emergency room. But both of those vehicles never drove again. They both had to be towed away from the emergency room entrance. You cannot make this stuff up. Here’s John.
00:40:24
Speaker 4: When we opened the back doors of the ambulance, what appeared to be his blood was pink water running out of the anaults. He received seven liters of ivy fluids from Crawferville, Georgia to Augusta, Georgia, which is fifty five miles.
00:40:39
Speaker 6: I just pulled right up in behind the ambulance in the emergency area of the hospital and get out and they opened the doors. It’s like, I don’t know, it’s kind of like pink fluid just basically running out of the back of the ambulance. The doctors were there and they took him straight to operating and my dad went with him. Well, the doctor said, things being as they are, if you have anything you need to say to your son, you probably should.
00:41:14
Speaker 7: And I can remember my dad. He came up behind me and I felt this I was done. I was as weak as I could be, but I’m seventeen, and I remember I reach up with my right hand got my dad’s hand, and I’d heard all of the talk, and I remember, with all the energy I had left, I just tried to squeeze my dad’s hand as hard as I possibly could. And I told him, I said, Dad, I said, I got plenty left. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be a winner either way. And my dad he collapsed there right there in the operating room floor, down on his knees, and the nurses and doctors had to help him up out of there.
00:41:55
Speaker 5: Well.
00:41:55
Speaker 6: They had taken us up to a and honestly, I think they were referred to it as a prayer room. And Dave was there at the hospital. He had gone as well. But when my dad came from the operating room to where we were, he wanted to have prayer and he was so pitiful, this sad, crying, and I’ll never forget him praying and praying for God to take him, to let Jason live, and beg in God to let Jason live. We were all in that room and it was isolated. It wasn’t a general waiting room. It was a family room. And the doctor came and told us that he was still alive and that the surgery had went as well as could be expected. That his spleen had been complet deletely ruptured from the impact and it was just pumping. It had pumped him completely out of blood and it had gone behind his left lung. There was some damage there, but it was basically the concussion of the bullet had ruptured his spleen was what I remember to be the main issue with him bleeding out, so he stayed in intensive care. Still wasn’t certain that he was going to live, but he was still alive on a ventilator on life support.
00:43:38
Speaker 1: Something that stands out to me in this story is the patriarchal power displayed through their father Larry. His scream brought Jason back to consciousness and gave him something to fight for. His heart felt prayer seemed to propel the ambulance the last few miles to the hospital, and his fervency and prayer during the surgery must have catalyze the spirit realm to action. I didn’t know Larry, I’ve never met the man, but I can tell you that wasn’t the first time that he’d petitioned God for his family. When Christus arrived, He’d built a life that was ready to negotiate with God. He knew exactly what to do. That is being a father. Thank God for a strong father that’s been doing the work his whole life. The efficacy of Larry’s fatherhood is also evidenced by the maturity of his seventeen year old son’s response to this.
00:44:38
Speaker 2: When he woke up.
00:44:39
Speaker 5: I wake up, you know four.
00:44:41
Speaker 7: I was on a ventilator for ten days, and I woke up a few days after that, and I can remember for a couple of days, I’m trying to show them with my hand that I wanted a pen to write, ask notes or whatever. And I still have those some a lot of the things I had wrote notes, I still have a But the very first thing that I had written I wanted to know how was Dave. Because the time that Dave and I had there in the woods, he was broken. I mean, it was as traumatic for him as it was for me, if not more so.
00:45:17
Speaker 5: Mentally.
00:45:19
Speaker 7: I don’t think that Dave really had ever been that much Christian or anything, and it really seemed to devastate him. He just and he actually had said, you know, I wish you could have been angry at me instead of kind to me, because I you know, he told me there at the beginning he never wanted to see another gun.
00:45:41
Speaker 5: He didn’t want to hunt. He didn’t want to there.
00:45:42
Speaker 7: And even at that time I told him, I says, you got to for me, because at that time I didn’t think I would make it.
00:45:48
Speaker 5: I said, do it for me.
00:45:50
Speaker 7: And he had a hard time understanding that. You know, but we all fall short and we just need forgiveness for whatever. I think that’s important.
00:46:03
Speaker 1: Jason mentioned to Josh that maybe all this happened in some way to prepare Dave for what was coming in his life.
00:46:11
Speaker 3: Whatever whatever happened with Dave.
00:46:15
Speaker 6: I had mentioned that he limped and he had a plate in his leg from a car wreck that he had had years before. During the time at the hospital, Dave was there and he was so sorrowful. The police officers came to the hospital in Augusta from Tallafarro County because they assumed it was going to be a murder, accidental hunting, whatever. Everybody assumed it was going to be murder, and they wanted to get started. They wanted my dad to press charges against Dave for shooting Jason, and I was walking down the hall with my dad and during that time, and he said all he wanted was for Jason to live, and if Jason lived, he would press no charges. And Dave was very distraught. He was very sorrowful for what he had done. And two years after that, the plate that was in Dave’s legs set up blood poisoning and he became sepsis blood infection, and they took him to the hospital and he didn’t recover. He died at thirty seven two years later.
00:47:42
Speaker 5: Wow. Wow, did them?
00:47:47
Speaker 3: Did Dave and Jason ever talk together?
00:47:49
Speaker 5: Always?
00:47:49
Speaker 6: Yeah. My dad and Jason have the purest hearts that you could ever imagine. And I think both realized that God had answered Dad’s prayer. Jason’s alive, and you don’t take that lightly. And Dave had made the statement that it would have been easier on him had Jason and Dad not been so nice to him, and I can see that because he wanted to, I think, be punished somehow, but he wasn’t. Dave was a friend through all of this. Going back thirty five years, through memory, going back to what it was like then, I still cannot fathom how Dave at thirty five, been hunting all his life, shot Jason. I can’t make that make sense. I can’t do it. We went back during the investigation, and I don’t remember the deputies may have asked me to take them, but we went back to where Dave was sitting against the fence and the grass, and there was you know, he had been smoking and had cigarette butts there. I mean, it’s beautiful place and just rolls off down to the creek. But he didn’t know Jason was down there.
00:49:21
Speaker 5: But how.
00:49:24
Speaker 6: At his experience and age did that can’t I just can’t make it make sense.
00:49:35
Speaker 1: It is hard to make it make sense. But Jason would miraculously only be in the hospital for fourteen days before he walked out. I’d say that it’s truly a miracle. Jason and EMT. John Clemens hadn’t seen each other in over thirty years, but just this spring they had a reunion.
00:49:59
Speaker 4: So couple of weeks ago, I was, of course, like everybody else, doing taxes and all these back problems move off of slow, and I heard somebody knock at the door, and I went there and there was nobody there. So came to the side door and there’s nobody here. And then when I went back, he was coming around. As soon as he came around. As soon as he came around my house, I knew his face, and we both at the same time, almost simultaneously said Jason. First thing out of his mouth was, you’re the guy that stuck that thing in my back. It’s kind of I couldn’t deaden it, you know, so yeah, he uh, he remembered that, and I apologized for hurting him already hurting, but it was a necessary evil.
00:50:45
Speaker 3: Was there any moment in there where you knew that there was intervention beyond human hands?
00:50:53
Speaker 6: Oh?
00:50:53
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, no doubt about it. When I was able to get that suckond ofvy, I knew that was a guardian angel, or that was Jesus or whoever he had somebody riding with him. Mother and John Clemens and Carol Palmer. We don’t realize how fragile life really is. You can be gone in a second, and then we really don’t know how lucky we are. Every day we wake up and see the sun, we’re lucky, you know. And every time you get behind that wheel in a car and you don’t get hit, you’re lucky. I don’t want to use that word blessed. Let’s use that word blessed. And I’ve had patience that were truly blessed, and I’ve had patience that everything weren’t perfect. Couldn’t ask I mean textbook, and they died, and that just wasn’t blessed that day or it was other day for the Good Lord to call him home. I leave that when it’s your day and the Good Lord calls you home, it doesn’t matter what you do or who does for you. It’s time for you to go home. And it wasn’t Jason’s time, and go home, Good Lord. That old lot more in mine for him, and I think the world of him.
00:52:22
Speaker 1: I can’t thank the Deans enough for sharing this story with us, which is packed with meaning and lessons. I’d like to thank Eric Dean, Ricky’s son, who gave us a tip on this story and connected us with his wonderful family. It’s going to be hard for me to forget this one. I can’t thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. I asked you share our podcast with a friend this week. Give us a review on iTunes. Man in a world where there’s so much media and so much going on means the world to us that you guys listen. Thanks for listening. To bear grease for this country life and for Backwards University. And keep the wild places wild because that’s where the bears live.
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