Phoenix Police Officer Chase McCance is back at his precinct for the first time in a long time. He is back to receive a plaque from his squad with the license plate and keys to the patrol car he was driving the morning of January 1st, when a wrong-way driver crashed into him on duty, nearly taking his life.
“I don’t remember most of the first couple days in the hospital,” Officer McCance said. “But from hearing everybody talk, there was a good five, six hour period right at the beginning that I was bleeding internally. They didn’t know what was going on. A nd at the end of the day, my wife signed a piece of paper saying ‘go in, cut him open, and find what’s wrong, and save him.'”
Officer McCance spent the following weeks in the hospital—healing fractures in his face, and broken bones all over his body. All of this happened during a global pandemic, preventing his young son and pregnant wife from visiting him.
“My first physical therapy session at the hospital, I think it was like day two or three, my whole goal was to sit six inches forward in a chair,” Officer McCance explained. “So, go from sitting back in a chair to sitting forward, and it was excruciating. It was the hardest thing I thought I’d ever done physically in my life.”
In early February, doctors released Officer McCance, but the healing was far from over. Officer McCance has continued intensive therapy every single day so that he could walk back into his old precinct on this day, and receive the reminder of the trials, but also the triumphs, of these past several months.
“I’ve seen so many different things go badly, and this is something that’s gone well, and it needs to be celebrated,” Lt. William Jou said. “He is a miracle that he is here with us.”
Lt. Jou, who oversees this squad, said that during his rehabilitation, Officer McCance asked to see his patrol car to help piece together parts of the story he does not remember. That visit inspired the plaque with pieces of the car.
“He wants to remember it because I think it inspires him to keep going, and him being that way inspires all of us to do what we do,” Lt. Jou said.
Officer McCance has come back to work on light duty with an assignment in the department’s Crime Gun Intelligence Unit. He says he’ll be back on the streets, full duty, no later than this fall.
“It’s a privilege for us to go out there, and be with people on the hardest days of their life,” Officer McCance said. “So after going through what has been the hardest time of my life, I really look forward to coming back, and getting out, and being able to help the community again.”