Justin Dodge exemplifies determination in motion.
“I actually feel blessed because I got to walk for the second time,” he told me. “I got to relearn how to walk.”
And he walks confidently on a prosthetic limb that he has just had for a few weeks.
“I’m at a point where I’m comfortable just walking normal,” Dodge said while walking around Denver’s Washington Park in shorts on a breezy February afternoon. “Eventually, I’d like to get it to where if I had pants on you would have no idea whether I was an amputee or not. I know I’m getting close, but at 22 days, I’m not there yet.
His pace is remarkable — not only in stride, but in how far the sergeant and SWAT officer for the Denver Police Department has come since his world turned upside down 8 months ago.
“There was never a time for me where I was like, ‘I can’t do this’,” he told CBS Colorado’s Kelly Werthmann. “There was never a time when I thought, ‘This is over.'”
That mental grit was put to the ultimate test on June 15, 2023. While working parade security during the Denver Nuggets championship celebration downtown, Dodge was painfully pinned beneath an 80,000-pound fire truck. A horrifying accident that would lead to eight surgeries and amputation of his left leg.
“Even with the truck on top of me … I was already conditioning my mind to be like, ‘You’ve got this,'” he said. “I actually sat up and took off my kit and I handed it to one of my teammates and I told him, ‘Take care of this because I’m going to be back.'”
To get back, Dodge pushed forward.
“I got hit on the 15th and on July 1 I was back in the gym,” he said. “I was in a wheelchair, I had people help transfer me to machines, and I had a wound vac. I literally had hoses coming out of me.”
