On The Road To Recovery With "Survivor" Rachel Morgan, Paramus Badge 431

Rachel Morgan was lying in a hospital bed, nine days into her recovery from near-fatal gunshot wounds, when she flipped on the news to watch a segment about a blood drive the Paramus ambulance corps had held in her honor.

Her spirits were buoyed by footage of the more than 200 people who showed up to donate blood. It was the first bit of news she’d seen about her shooting.

But the segment concluded with a recap of the night the Paramus patrolwoman was shot after a brief chase down Route 17.

Without warning, his face appeared on the screen.

For the first time since he nearly took her life on a cold, snowy Parkway onramp late on Super Bowl Sunday, Rachel looked into the face of Michael Carmody.

“That night [of the shooting], me and him locked eyes for what was probably a millisecond but it felt like an eternity,” she said. “So to see him on TV and look in his face was creepy. I’ve since adjusted to it and have no problem looking him in the face anymore.

“I can’t let that face haunt me and I won’t. I lost some sleep that night. But then I woke up the next day and said ‘No way. I’ll look at him every 15 minutes if I have to, just to get used to it.’”

So sums up what people have come to say about the woman who wears Paramus police badge number 431.

Fearless. Driven. Funny and engaging. Quick with a joke, quicker with a smile, and tougher than Christmas traffic on 17.

In her first interview since her life collided with Carmody’s demons, Rachel Morgan chose not to reflect on what went wrong during an ordeal that, for her, has simply become “that night.”

Instead, and perhaps incredulously, she chose to recount all the “good luck” that likely saved her from being remembered by a black band over a badge.

Lucky in how Carmody’s car was tilted in the snow, which coupled with her 6-foot frame hampered his ability to fire anywhere but into the lower half of her body. Lucky in the fact that an ambulance happened to be close, and that it carried two EMTs she’d learned to trust because of their work at scenes.

Lucky in how fellow officer Ryan Hayo was not far away, and arrived at the scene poised and under control despite finding his friend bleeding and possibly in shock. Even lucky that she changed her profile picture on Facebook not long before “that night,” from a joke picture of her making wacky faces, to a photo she was okay with representing her on the evening news.

Talking to Rachel, it’s easy to forget how close she actually came to dying on “that night,” a night she wasn’t even scheduled to work.

An avid Giants fan, Rachel had switched shifts to work that Sunday because another officer was slated to be the guest of honor at a Super Bowl/birthday party.

“How do you make a guy miss his own birthday party,” Rachel joked. “And I’m a Giants fan, so Steelers-Packers I had no interest at all. … Plus I’m a big DUI arrestor. What better night to go out there and look for drunks?”

*****

Rachel’s path crossed with Carmody’s purely by happenstance. She was driving down Route 17 South when he drifted into her lane, nearly brushing against her patrol car.

“I ran the plate and took a look at him. I thought maybe he was on the phone,” she said. “People sometimes drift and stuff when they are on the phone, but he wasn’t on the phone. You could tell he obviously didn’t see me there. I was in his blind spot pretty much. He had no idea I was there.”

The plates came back as belonging to a different vehicle than the compact car Carmody was driving. But before Rachel could turn on the sirens, Carmody, who lived with his father in Westwood, spotted her.

“He looks over his shoulder, sees me and takes off. Never even had a chance to light them up. He was gone,” she said. “I tried to close the gap between the two of us. I gave it to headquarters, high rate of speed southbound. He brakes across the highway, tries to get onto the highway ramp, obviously loses it, spins out.”

Wearing her bulletproof vest as well as trauma plates that increase its ability to stop large caliber weapons, Rachel approached Carmody’s car. When he opened fire, however, none of the bullets struck her vest, she said.

Instead, the slugs from his gun – a 9mm German World War II-era handgun – tore into her abdominal area.

“The way the car was canted and as tall as I am, when I stepped up to the car my chest was almost roof high so when he pulled that’s all he had, that was straight for him, head on,” she said.

“The rest the Prosecutor’s Office is going to have to tell you,” she added.

Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli has not yet released the details of what happened next, and numerous questions remain. Some of those questions will likely be answered when authorities release the results of ballistics tests.

What is publicly known is that Carmody shot Rachel and then, wounded, shot himself in the head. Carmody, a tattooed and troubled 23-year-old who had several run-ins with the law, died on Feb. 9, three days after the shooting.

Rachel recalls being so overrun with adrenaline after she was shot and focused on Carmody, who lay nearby, that she didn’t even realize Hayo had arrived at the scene.

“I just remember feeling his hand on my shoulder and him being like “Rach, stop stop stop” because I’m still, basically, trying to handle the situation,” she said. “That feeling, that hand, was like nothing I can explain.”

An ambulance that happened to be on Midland Avenue raced to the Parkway onramp as Hayo tried to drag Rachel away from Carmody. Rachel says relief overcame her when she saw the ambulance doors open and two paramedics she knew race toward her.

“Two of the best medics out of Valley [Hospital] who you could ask for,” she said. “It’s like ‘Oh, thank God, familiar faces.’ You know who you want in your ambulance with you and I was blessed. … Lucky.”

Rachel said she kept her attention focused on the voice of one of the EMTs, a woman named Jodi, who was imploring her to “keep your eyes open, hold my hand, squeeze my hand” during the harrowing race to Hackensack.

“I was saying ‘breathe, breathe’ over and over, reminding myself to take a breath,” Rachel said.  

She heard the sirens of police cars as they blocked intersections along the route to the hospital, and knew that each time an intersection passed it meant they were getting closer. The more turns the ambulance made, the more likely she’d make it to the regional trauma center in time.

“If anyone can fix me, it’s them,” she recalled thinking.

*****

Rachel’s injuries were severe. One bullet went through her acetabulum, where the femur meets the pelvis and forms the hip joint. Another struck her in the abdomen. Yet another snaked inside her vest and ricocheted off one of her ribs.

“Kind of went in and deflected off a rib and came out and the bullet landed in the vest,” she said. “So they found that bullet in my vest when they took it off me, not realizing it had already gone in and out of me.”

Police officers from all over the area flooded the hospital to hold vigil for Rachel. So many officers showed up that medical center staff opened an empty wing for the contingent.

“Every single one of those guys all came from home,” she said. “They get a phone call in the middle of the night. ‘Rachel was shot.’ They are up. They left their families in the middle of the night to come sit and wait for me.”

As Rachel underwent several surgeries and remained in a coma and on a ventilator for several frightening days, police held vigil with her family. They waited, hour-by-hour, day-by-day, hoping for a glimmer of positive news.

Public officials stopped in to check on her progress, including Gov. Chris Christie, who arrived by helicopter the Wednesday after Rachel was shot. Rachel, however, remained in a coma and her visits were mostly limited to immediate family, so Christie met with her mother, Kathie.

Rachel regained consciousness the following day. Almost immediately, the carefree disposition for which she is known shone through. She broke the tension during a visit from Police Chief Christopher Brock by asking him to “take me with you.”

“My union and its leaders, Michael Cebulski and Thomas Schroeder, were amazing and I wish I could name every single one of the guys I work with and give them some type of award,” she said. “My hospital room, my rehab room, has never been short of cops, especially Paramus cops.”

“You always hear about this,” said her mother Kathie. “But until you experience this you have no idea. I should be the poster mother now for the Paramus Police Department.”

But just as her family and the Paramus police were her around-the-clock support structure, Dr. John Locurto, a trauma surgeon at Hackensack, was the man who kept her alive.

“He put humpty dumpty back together again,” she said. “I don’t know how he did it. It’s so hard to come up with a word that’s better than thank you. … What do you say to the person who saves your life? I just make him hug me every time I am in his office.”

After multiple surgeries and the worst week of her life, Rachel could finally allow herself to think about the future, think about getting back to her “dream job.”

But she knew then that her ordeal was far from over, just like she knows it now.

“I’m literally cut from top to bottom and I still have things holding me together and it’s not fun and it’s not pretty,” she said. “That’s one thing I’m going to contend with for probably ever, the scars.

“But I woke up. How can you not be happy that you woke up,” she said. “All the other little details that come with getting better, you deal with those one day at a time, but you don’t let anything overshadow the fact that you woke up.”

*****

Talk to any law enforcement official who went to see Rachel while she was in the hospital and the conversation will inevitably get around to her mother Kathie.

“The definite rock of the family,” Prosecutor Molinelli said one day after visiting with Kathie, who spent 40 years as a nurse at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair.

“My mother is a rock,” Rachel echoed. “You’ll never be able to get down on yourself around her, she’ll won’t let it happen.”

Rachel smiled, a wide smile that belies her injuries, as she relayed a story told to her by an officer who came to see her while she was on a ventilator. The officer told Rachel that he was standing next to Kathie and together they were looking helplessly at her lying in bed.

The officer began to cry, only to find himself being consoled and comforted by Rachel’s mother.

“I just needed to be there for her and me falling apart is not really too helpful to anybody,” Kathie said, conceding, “I have my private moments.”

Rachel grew up in Parsippany and attended Parsippany Hills High School, where she played numerous sports, including basketball and soccer. She even broke the school shot put record, and still possesses the ball from her record-setting throw.

She began her circuitous route to the Paramus Police shortly after 9/11, when she was working in the emergency room at Mountainside Hospital, the same hospital where her mother was a nurse. There, she befriended Glen Ridge police officers who were working the door to the ER.

The officers suggested she apply for an open dispatcher job in their department.

So Rachel had a choice. Nursing or police work. Stethoscope or gun.

She interviewed for the Glen Ridge dispatcher job, which she landed. She then took the civil service test and was hired as a sheriff’s officer in the Morris County Jail, where she worked for “a couple years” before realizing corrections work wasn’t for her.

So Rachel, who majored in criminal justice at Morris County Community College, took a per diem dispatcher job in Livingston, and then left for a full-time position dispatching in Manville, Somerset County.

Soon, however, she was accepted to the Essex County Police Academy via their alternate route program, and was hired by the NJIT police in Newark. She also applied to Paramus and, in 2008, she became badge number 431 when Police Chief Richard Cary swore her in.

Soon Rachel was patrolling the north end of Paramus with Hayo and another officer, Dan Cullen. The three quickly became close, eating at diners together and backing up each other on calls.

Hayo’s father, a former Paramus councilman, regularly had the officers over for dinner, and is a favorite at headquarters for the homemade chili he delivers. Rachel and Ryan, the former quarterback of the Paramus high school football team, became especially close.

“I trust him with my life,” she said. “I did before this day happened and, of course, even more so now. He pulled through for me.”

*****

Rachel quietly returned home from inpatient rehab on Friday and has begun a rigorous outpatient program.

The low-key return to the home she shares with Titan, her still-growing 100-pound Cane Corso, an Italian mastiff cherished for its ability as a guard dog, stood in stark contrast to the sendoff she received on Feb. 18 as she left the Hackensack hospital.

Rachel knew she was being moved to a rehab facility, but was kept in the dark about what was waiting for her outside. As she was wheeled toward the hospital lobby, which was bursting with well-wishers, she began to realize she wasn’t going to be slipping into an ambulance and driven away quietly.

A large procession had gathered outside the medical center, complete with a banner forming an archway between the extended ladders of two fire trucks. “Stronger Everyday!” it read.

“They just started clapping as I went through the lobby and then when I exited the doors to outside. … The bagpipes started and the clapping,” she said. “I was blown away. Blown away. For lack of a better term.

“I tried to take in as much as I could. I heard it and I was able to get a good look out the ambulance windows and they stopped for me … so I could see the big banner.”

The stream of visitors, calls and Facebook messages that started while she was hospitalized continued as she entered rehab.

Attorney General Paula Dow came to visit. So did former Chief Cary, Bergen County Executive Kathleen Donovan and State Police Superintendent Rick Fuentes.

The big Giants fan smiled broadly when she talked about the visit she received from running back Brandon Jacobs, who came to see her in rehab and signed a football.

But it was three officers who share an unenviable fraternity with Morgan whose visits and calls may have been the most important.

Gerald Veneziano, the Fairfield cop shot in the chest during a motor vehicle stop in Jan. 2010, visited and sat with Rachel, and the two still talk daily. Likewise, Ken Hogan, an Irvington officer shot four times by a drug suspect in 1994, came to see her, and the two remain in contact.

Brian Worrell, a Wayne police officer who was grazed in the head by a bullet during a gas station robbery last year, also contacted her.

“Nobody gets it like they do,” she said. “It’s not just the physical pain aspect that you have to go through, there’s a lot of mental.”

*****

Rachel had begun to settle into a grueling rehab schedule when she received word that Brock was having the “acting” removed from his Acting Chief title and would be sworn in on Feb. 22. She began a campaign almost immediately to try to secure a day pass so she could be present at the ceremony.

Brock had been there for her during her ordeal and had bonded with her mother, “one rock to another rock,” Rachel said.

“He is the epitome of chief,” she said. “He is who we all wanted. He is who we all look up to. I mean, we were very, very excited. … I was like ‘someone’s gotta break me outta here!’”

The ambulance corps volunteered to go pick her up and bring her to the ceremony. But then her surgeon gave her the okay to sit in a car, and the plan to surprise Brock was a go.

Rachel implored the few people who knew about the plan to keep her appearance under wraps. She said she was concerned about “stealing his thunder” and knew that if word got out that she would be in attendance, media would swarm the event and the focus would shift away from Brock.

The biggest challenge Rachel faced the night of the swearing-in came in the form of a staircase to the floor on which Brock was to take his oath of office.

“That staircase that night seemed forever,” she said. “I was like ‘you got to be kidding me.’ I knew if I was going I had to face that staircase. I would have done two of them to be there.”

Rachel and Kathie waited in an adjacent room until receiving the signal that Brock was about to speak. Then she walked into the room, much to the amazement of everyone in attendance – especially Brock.

“He did the worlds biggest double take,” she said. “He like glanced over and looked away and then when he looked back you actually heard him gasp. His eyes got so wide. It was perfect.”

Rachel rose from the wheelchair with the help of officers, and embraced Brock at the podium.

"It made a great night that much greater," Brock said.

*****

Rachel caught up on all the news reports about her shooting via a scrapbook put together by Kaitlin Cofone, an officer’s wife who is a department dispatcher.

The book starts with Brock’s letter to the community and contains numerous pictures and articles. It includes a roster of the department, and snippets of comments left by some of the more than 9,000 members of a Facebook page called “Thoughts & Prayers for Rachel Morgan."

Interspersed between the clippings and comments are words such as “survivor” and Rachel’s badge number.

Likewise, Rachel’s apartment is rife with mementos and inspirational gifts from friends, and from strangers.

Near the window sits a blue throw pillow, made by the Bergen County police academy class, which reads in three lines “Rachel Morgan 431 True Hero.”

There are boxes of get-well cards, written by nearly every child in Paramus schools. There is a large board signed by “Your Brothers and Sisters” in the Paramus police department.

Rachel has derived strength from these words, these gifts, the encouragements on Facebook. The thousands of strangers who have taken time to post heartening words or send her messages.

“I had over 700 Facebook messages and I actually responded to 500 of them personally,” she said. “I thanked everyone.”

Though faced with months of grueling physical therapy, Rachel remains determined to don her uniform once again in the locker room at headquarters and take to the highways of Paramus.

“There’s no question. It’s just a matter of when,” she said. “My personal goal is to be back in that building in September. If I make it great, if not it’ll be October, or November. I belong in that building.

And when she does return, she says she’ll be the same optimistic, determined person she has always been.

“And as far as I’m concerned he took enough away from me,” she said. “I’m not letting him take that too. You’re not going to take who I am. You took a month of my life and that’s all I am willing to give you. No, he’s not getting anything else.”