Chapter 3: John Doe
I don’t remember every detail of that night.
Trauma has a way of taking pieces of your memory.
What I do remember changed my life forever.
I remember leaving the bar.
I remember being dragged outside.
I remember being on the ground.
Then the kicks started.
Over and over again.
After that…
Nothing.
The next thing I remember was waking up in a hospital bed.
Every bone in my body seemed to hurt. I couldn’t talk. I could only see out of one eye.
As I looked around the room, my eyes stopped on the whiteboard hanging on the wall.
It said my name was…
John Doe.
I had no identification when someone found me lying behind the bar next to a dumpster.
The hospital staff didn’t know who I was.
For a while…
Neither did I.
I could hear doctors talking about me.
They were discussing whether they would have to amputate my leg.
I wanted to tell them I was still there.
I wanted to ask what had happened.
I wanted to tell them my name.
But I couldn’t speak.
I was trapped inside my own body.
The days passed slowly.
The pain was constant.
Little by little, my memory started returning.
I remembered refusing to hand over our last ten dollars.
I remembered being dragged outside.
I remembered being kicked.
Then everything went dark.
A doctor and a nurse later explained that they were going to try to save my leg by resetting the bones instead of amputating it.
My jaw had healed incorrectly and would have to be broken again so it could be set properly.
Because no one knew who I was, I was being treated as an indigent patient.
For days, I wasn’t Dave.
I wasn’t Grizzly Dave.
I wasn’t the future founder of RADV.
I was simply…
John Doe.
Reflection
No survivor ever expects to become a statistic.
No one wakes up thinking, “Today my life will change forever.”
Abuse doesn’t care who you are, what you do for a living, or whether you’re a man or a woman.
It only cares about control.
If you’re reading this today and wondering whether anyone understands what it feels like to wake up wondering how your life became this…
I do.
And I want you to know that even though I couldn’t see it then, that hospital bed wasn’t the end of my story.
It was the place where the next chapter began.
Next Saturday, I’ll tell you what happened after the surgeries…when I finally learned that losing my identity wasn’t the only thing I had lost.
— Dave “Grizzly Dave” Beatty
Founder, Riders Against Domestic Violence (RADV)