Days after the Nuggets won the NBA Championship, the unthinkable happened to Sgt. Justin Dodge. He was crushed by a fire truck holding MVP Nikola Jokic and the Larry O’Brien Trophy during the team’s victory parade in Mile High City.
Sgt. Justin Dodge, a 27-year veteran of the Denver Police Department, has been a member of their tactical unit for 19 years.
But his career as Dodge knew it was altered forever last year, in the wake of the Denver Nuggets' NBA victory.
“Anytime one of the major sports teams wins something, we are definitely elevated. It's all hands on deck for the police department. We even bring in agencies from outside just because we don't have the numbers to support that large of a crowd,” he tells Inside Edition Digital.
“There was massive celebrations, everything was fantastic, the city was just out there celebrating. And then right at the end, we actually had a mass casualty event happen where we had eight people shot in a parking lot that I was standing 50 yards from when the shooting went down," he says. "We had three more people shot that night, so we ended up having 11 people shot during the celebration night. So that was a little ominous."
It would not be the only violence associated with the basketball team's victory.
Days after the Nuggets won the NBA Championship, Dodge was crushed by a fire truck during the team’s victory parade in Mile High City.
About 40 fire trucks, each carrying different players and people involved in the basketball team’s organization, were a part of the parade. All the revelers wanted to see the last truck in the procession, as it carried basketball star Jamal Murray, MVP Nikola Jokic and the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
But the truck carrying Jokic somehow got separated from the pack of others.
“As the truck got separated, there was barricades up, the crowd was extremely celebratory, and people started crossing those barricades and once people started crossing those barricades…there was an estimated million people on that parade route. So we just got [overwhelmed] and there was eight Metro [police] guys that was assigned to be basically a reaction force inside of the parade route,” Dodge recalls.
The crowds continued to swell until eventually, the truck was surrounded.
“There was very few of us to go basically rescue that truck and try to get all of the people that were on top of the truck back to safety and make sure that everybody around that truck were safe too,” he says. “We're walking the truck at a snail's pace and we're literally pulling people out from under the tires as they're trying to just push their way to the truck. There's times when we were pinned against the truck just because the crowds were so massive and we would just be inching this thing a quarter of a mile, an hour, half mile an hour.”
The fire truck slowly crawled for seven blocks before it had to make a tight turn. Dodge says that he and the rest of the team were not aware that the front tires on the truck would come out almost three feet as it made a turn.
“When it was going in a straight line and we were pinned against the truck, we were OK. Then it starts turning, I'm at the front of the truck because I'm a sergeant, I'm a supervisor, I'm trying to coordinate with people inside the truck. I'm not realizing that the truck is turning and that tire of that 80,000-pound beast is coming out three feet away from the frame and it catches my foot,” he says.
Dodge was pinned under the fire truck immediately.
“I realized, I'm caught, I'm trapped,” he says. “There was enough time for me to process that I'm losing my leg. And as it's rolling over me, I can feel the injuries as it's happening, and I can feel all of the bones in my foot getting crushed. And then having been involved in Brazilian jiu-jitsu for 30 years, having been on many, many, many scenes where people have had significant traumatic injuries with 28 years as a police officer, I knew if I stay standing and this snaps my tibia and fibula, then there's a significant chance that it's going to hit those arteries. And if it hits those arteries, there's a chance that I'm going to die in the street.”
The 51-year-old cop's decades of hard-earned experience and training left him focused on remaining calm despite the excruciating pain he was enduring. He also focused on thinking about what needed to happen next.
“I actually had enough time to be formulating a plan basically of how I keep this thing from snapping my tibia and fibula. And the trajectory that the wheel was going, it was rolling in a way that it was going to start rolling over my knee," he says. "And I knew if it goes over my knee, that's where that femoral hasn't branched yet, and it's going to catch that major artery. And if it continues to roll up into my quad and God forbid my hip, I will die on national TV in the largest event that's going on in the nation that day. And those things are actually going through my mind as this thing is rolling over me. There's one point where I could feel this tight sensation and then I felt my foot get ripped off."
And in spite of all he was experiencing, Dodge says now he was “blessed that day.”
"The way that the truck was moving, all the experience that I've had, I've been in 2,500 to 4,000 high risk operations," he says. "I can't tell you how many times we've been in critical incidents where you teach yourself to slow down, you teach yourself to not panic.”
While remaining as calm as possible, and in the matter of “split seconds," Dodge "was able to move and position myself in a way that it only took the lower part of my leg.”
As he worked to position himself in the best possible way, fellow officers pounded on the truck and worked to get in front of it to get the driver's attention. After the driver realized what was happening, the truck stopped.
Still, Dodge knew his leg was gone. He applied a tourniquet on his leg and eventually another of his team members came and applied another. Time was still of the essence.
“But now we have this conundrum because we have an ambulance that's only three blocks away, but there's 25,000 to 50,000 people in between the ambulance and in between me,” he says.
While fellow police officers tried to rush him to safety as fast as they could, Dodge made a vow to himself that he was going to return to action.
“Immediately when I got hit, my brain went to, ‘OK, my leg is gone. I've lost my leg, but this is not my last operation.’ I was already thinking, ‘This is not how this ends. This story does not end like this,’” he says. “I took my belt off and handed it to one of my guys, and then we have quick releases on our vests. So I took the quick release off, I took my [tactical] vest off and I handed it to one of my guys, and made mention of, ‘Keep this safe because I'm coming back. This is not my last op.’”
Dodge's life was dramatically altered but he was grateful to be alive.
“There's this twisted silver lining that within hours, certainly within the first couple of days, I had no less than a thousand people obviously giving their best wishes, sending their prayers. But almost every single text, every single response that I would get said, ‘If anybody can do this, it's you.’ Which shows me that I was living my life as an example and living my life showing people that I'm already ready for adversity,” he says.
The officer promised to return to his unit and ended up staging one of the most epic comebacks. Six months after losing his leg, in January 2024, Dodge got his prosthetic leg. Just a five months after that, in May, he returned to duty.
Thanks to the “pre-habbing” he says he has done to his body over the years, Dodge kept at his strict workout regimen and nutrition he had before the accident. While rehabbing to return to the force, he kept his body in supreme shape.
“I had eight surgeries and in between those surgeries I was at the gym. I would have healthcare providers or family drop me off at the gym, put me in a wheelchair. I had machines hooked up to me and I would wheel into the gym and whatever equipment that I could use, I would use that equipment and I would transfer and, like I said, I would've tubes hanging out of me, but I was back at the gym because instead of taking three weeks in between those surgeries and just doing nothing, it was like, ‘All right, at least maintain a baseline. So once we get that green light, I'm still at that baseline now I can go,’” he says.
Steven Hess, the director of performance for the Nuggets basketball organization, reached out to him with the offer to train Dodge for the rest of his life. The two have since become close friends.
And so it felt like no time had gone by when Dodge slipped back into the tactical vest he shed the day of the accident.
“I remember the first time I put it on and I'm standing there, I had my kit back on, and it was like, ‘OK, here we go. Next base. I've gotten to this part, now let's start relearning how to do everything I was doing before,’” he says.
“I did my first [SWAT] operation on May 15,” he says. “In the back of my mind, I did kind of set out this little goal that if the injury happened on June 15, June 14 would be a year, I wanted to come back and be operational by June 13, which would be a day before the year. That was kind of like this little goal I had in my head. And all of a sudden, it's May 15 and I'm back running my first op, well before I thought I was going to. And I remember putting the gear on, obviously we had done our briefings, we knew what the plan was, we were going to go up there and we were going to execute a search warrant. And as it was happening, I was right back in the game.”
In addition to a clear vision to work toward, Dodge credits the family who stuck by his side for helping him make his comeback. Dodge comes from a law enforcement family. His grandfather and father were in law enforcement, as is his wife, who is the division chief of the Denver Police Department.
“It's like in my DNA to be out there saving people and to be helping the community. So that's always been a huge purpose in my life,” he says.
“Even when I got hurt, one of the biggest things I wanted to do was not get back to the street to be, ‘Wow, check this SWAT dude out.’ It was to be able to do simple tasks like going to get groceries or cleaning up after we eat and being self-sufficient because family picked up so much of that for the nine months that I was in a wheelchair,” he says. “It was phenomenal the help that I received from them and the love that I got, but I wanted to be able to give back so badly.”
He says that his daughters planned to go to Europe just after his accident and while they were thinking of cancelling their three-week vacation, from his hospital bed, the proud dad assured them it was good to go.
“They can come down, they can see that I'm alive and [I said], ‘you need to go on your vacation, because dad's okay, dad's in the hospital, there's nothing you can do here, but I don't want you guys to miss out on that opportunity to sit and watch me in the hospital,’” he recalls. “So we were very cognizant of keeping the kids mentally safe and letting them just progress with their lives as normal and trying to make this new normal as easy as possible for them.”
Even in his recovery, he never wanted to feel sorry for himself. He says that he refused any time of help or handicap accessorizing his home. There was even a moment when he became emotional just getting himself up the stairs without crutches.
“I butt scooted up a flight of stairs and it took me almost 15 minutes to get up a flight of stairs, where before, in 15 minutes I could have sprinted up and down those stairs a hundred times," he says. "And I got to the top of the stairs at 15 minutes exhausted, and I laid down and I started just crying. I couldn't control myself. And my kids and my wife sat above me and just watched me cry. And they just let me be, I think somebody was rubbing my shoulder. And it was not, ‘Why me?’ But it was, ‘You got a long way to go.' It was, ‘But you got this.’ And after I cried for a little bit, I kind of got that out, got into bed, and it was like, ‘OK, tomorrow we're going to do that in 14:45. The next day we're going to do it in 14:30.’ So instead of looking at it and being like, ‘This is insurmountable,’ it was like, ‘OK, that was difficult. That was brutal. This isn't where we expected to be, but let's go let, let's do this.’”
Despite the significance of overcoming the obstacles he has faced, Dodge remains humble.
“I'm not proud of myself because I'm so purpose-driven that all of this, this is just the way it is,” he says.
In addition to his work on the force, Dodge has also undertaken a new role: motivational speaker. And, he's got a motto for everyone: “Crush the Hard.” He has founded the organization Heavy Victory, where he gives motivational speeches and shows others how to overcome challenges.
“Everybody has difficulties in life. None of us are getting out of this unscathed. It's not going to happen. So obviously, my injury was a crush injury, so that's that crush the hard. But when you find yourself in a spot that is difficult, instead of just sitting back and being like, ‘I can't do this.’ No, you go up there and you crush that. You take that obstacle and you work your way through it,” he says. “Crush the hard. It was such a perfect thing for me, because I do difficult things all the time.”
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