There was a boom, then the house shook. Daylan McLee thought for a minute it was a small earthquake until a relative came running inside to say there had been a car crash involving a police cruiser outside the apartment in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.

McLee ran outside and pulled an officer from the mangled patrol car as flames began to spread into the cabin. Police officials and others have credited McLee with saving the officer’s life after the Sunday evening crash. McLee said it wasn’t a complicated decision to help another human being. But even some of his close friends wondered if he hesitated because of his previous interactions with law enforcement officers.

McLee said, “No. There is value in every human life. We are all children of God and I can’t imagine just watching anyone burn. No matter what other people have done to me, I thought, ‘this guy deserves to make it home safely to his family.’”

McLee had filed a lawsuit in 2018 against four Pennsylvania State Police troopers for wrongful arrest after he spent a year in jail related to a 2016 fight outside a bar. He had rushed to the bar after his sister called saying she needed a ride home because a fight had broken out. When McLee arrived, he disarmed a man who was standing in the parking lot with a gun and threw the weapon aside.

At least one trooper fired shots at McLee as he fled. The trooper said McLee pointed a weapon at him twice, but security footage showed McLee disarming the man, discarding the gun quickly, and fleeing when shots were fired.

McLee, a Black man, spent a year in jail before a jury acquitted him on the charges after reviewing the video. That was a year away from his children, and a year away from his mother, who was ill at the time. She passed away last year.

But McLee stressed forgiveness, saying he couldn’t blame every police officer for bad interactions he had with any others:

We need to work on our humanity ... that’s the main problem of this world. We’re stuck on how to get up or to get even, and that is not how I was raised to be. You learn, you live, you move on and I was always taught to forgive big. You can’t base every day of your life off of one interaction you have with one individual. I don’t want to be called a hero. I just want to be known as an individual who is an upstanding man. And I hope (that trooper) sees this and knows he’s forgiven.

Source:

Claudia Lauer, “Man wronged in past by police saves officer from burning car,” Associated Press (6-22-20)