#70: Catching Another Thief! [Podcast and Video]

Welcome to Episode #70 of the Fight for a Happy Life podcast, “Catching Another Thief.”

Remember back in Episode #50 when I told you the story about how my wife and I helped catch a thief? Well, it happened again!

I was a bit smarter this time, but still learned a HUGE lesson that I think everyone should hear.

If you have time, go back and listen to Episode #12: The Blonde-Haired Warrior, too. These two stories really make a mini-seminar in self-defense!

Once again, I recorded this podcast on video, so scroll down if you’d prefer to make eye contact.

Let’s get to it!

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Catching Another Thief!

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey there. Welcome to episode #70 of Fight for a Happy Life, the show that believes even a little martial arts makes life a whole lot better. Ando here, and once again, I’m recording today’s episode as an audio podcast and on video. I hope one of these two formats is easy for you. Either way, it’s gonna be a great show.

I’ve got a story to tell you today about bringing a real life bad guy to justice. My wife and I actually helped bring down a scumbag. I want to tell you that story and tell you what I learned. I got a lot to say about this, so let me grab a quick shot of coffee here and we’ll get right to it.

First off, the title of this episode is Catching Another Thief. That’s because you might recall the story I told in episode #50 about coming home and catching two punks breaking into my wife’s car and my car behind our building.

In that story, I ended up chasing them down. I squared up with one of them. We kept barking at each other until eventually we heard police sirens, and the guy bolted. I eventually had to ID him. The cops caught him, and they took him away.

As a little update on that story, I still, even though this was almost two years ago, I still have not received my flashlight back or the multi-tool that were taken out of my glove compartment. So in effect, I still have been robbed, just not by the punks, by the cops.

All right, so what happened this time?

This time, I went to the movies with my wife. And I should back up here one step to let you know that I had thrown out my back. So I was limping. And my wife had just come back from a snowboarding trip the day before, and she had tweaked her ankle. So she was also limping. It was kind of a pathetic scene.

So my wife and I are coming out of the movie theater. It’s about 9:30 at night. And we’re holding hands like a cute old couple. Anyway, we’re limping along, and it was a cold night, so my wife didn’t want to walk outside on street level to get back to our car. She said, Hey, why don’t we just stay to the underground level?

So we’re walking in the underground level of a parking garage. And that’s when we heard it. Someone started yelling, Stop that guy! He broke into my car! Stop that guy!

Sure enough, we looked over at the next lane. There were cars in between us. And this guy’s booking like he’s returning a kickoff at the Super Bowl. He’s got a backpack, and he’s hustling.

So in this moment– slow down here for a second. Having already been through this situation once before, I’m thinking, Okay, do I really want to chase this guy? This is a property crime, not a personal crime. In the other episode, it was my car. So there was a little ego involved. I was a little personally offended. And there was also the issue of self-esteem. I was worried that my wife might think I was a wimp if I didn’t go chase those punks.

But in this case, it’s not our stuff. It’s just stuff. So as I’m kind of watching this guy run by, I’m thinking, I‘m not sure if I’m going to…

Too late. My wife takes off. So it didn’t matter what I thought. My wife started taking off after the guy, and obviously now I’m in. 100% I’m in. All right.

So she takes off, and as a funny side note here, it turned out that her intention was not to catch the guy. I, of course, thought that’s what she was thinking. Her intention was just to kind of keep bringing attention to what was going on, to keep screaming, Hey, hey, hey! and just wave her arms and get attention. But I thought she was going to make a run for the guy.

So anyway, we both take off, and I start hustling. And because we’re in this underground lot, there’s really only one or two ways in or out of this place. And the way out was going to be right in front of me. This guy was going to have to cross in front of me to get to the exit.

So I’m tracking him. I’m ahead of my wife now. What the heck, I’m fast. So I get up to the front, and he stumbles. And by the way, that happened in the other story too. If you’re a thief, you might want to practice your sprinting with stuff, because apparently it’s hard to coordinate when you’re under stress.

So anyway, the guy is coming around the bend, and I’m lined up right with him. It’s going to be a perfect tackle. And the guy stumbles. So he skids out on his knee for a second, and then he starts scrambling to get up. So I catch him about halfway up, and I just slam into him with my elbows. BOOM I just blast into him.

The guy scrambles a little bit more, and I’m hovering over him. And as he’s getting up, I just slapped on a seatbelt, okay? So kind of a BJJ deal. One arm from behind over his shoulder and an underhook on the far arm on the other side. And I just start riding him a little bit.

And I’m trying to keep it cool, right? You have an opportunity here. You can turn it into a choke. You can start punching him in the face. But I’m not. I’m just gonna ride him for a second. I’m like, Hey, hey– get down, get down. That’s basically what I’m saying.

So as I’m riding him and putting some weight on him, I’m starting to buckle him down. I break him down to his knees. And then my wife jumps on the far side. So I’ve got the seatbelt and I grab his far hand. We break him down. And ultimately we get him down on his belly.

So now I’ve got the seatbelt. I’m sprawled out on one side. My wife kind of just put everything onto his far arm. So we have like a triple control on that far arm. I made it a point.

Here’s a lesson from the last episode as well– to always follow the hands. Watch the hands.

I don’t know if this guy’s got a knife or a gun. So I not only have the seatbelt, but I also have a hand control on that far hand and I’ve doubled up on my own hand, locked it in. So he’s not doing anything with that hand. My wife had an underhook on that same arm. So I felt safe enough to let go with my left hand and bring that over to my side of his body, where I could grab his other wrist, pin that to the ground. So he’s really not going anywhere.

Technically, since you’re probably a martial artist and you’re interested in this kind of thing, he was getting a little squirrely and kept trying to get up. So I did also step my knee over his close leg so that I could kind of pinch his leg and control what he was doing with his feet. We had both arms controlled, my weight on one side, my wife on the other. So he was really very well pinned.

Now, second lesson that I remembered from the first time…

In the other episode, when I chased that punk down, I was completely tunnel visioned on him. I totally forgot that he had had a partner with him. I lost track of where that guy had gone. And I was so locked into that guy that I joked that a parade could go by and I wouldn’t have noticed. And that’s true.

But this time it was totally the opposite. Because I had this guy very well controlled, I immediately started scanning the area, kept my head up, looking around, I don’t know, maybe for a partner. So I was very aware of what was going on around me while we were on the ground.

In terms of damage, what did I lose here? I lost a pair of reading glasses, those got smashed. And I ended up getting a bloody knee that soaked through my jeans because we were grinding on the ground a little bit there. I shouldn’t say we were grinding, I was trying to pin him down. And it ended up kind of scuffing up my knee.

Anyway, we’re holding him down. And to me, this is the interesting part of the story. It’s like a Twilight Zone. Because this is a public space, alright? This is going to be the big point of this podcast. This is a public space. We are in a public parking lot.

We ended up holding this guy, my wife and I, for at least 10 minutes. It was probably more like 11 or 12. But we ended up holding this guy down for a long time. And we’re not alone. I would say there were at least 30, maybe as many as 40 people who were around us while all of this was happening.

Now, here’s the weird part…

Nobody else helped us. Not even the guy who owned the car. Not even that guy. That guy had his daughter with him. We had just seen Captain Marvel, if you’re interested. And he had this maybe 13-year-old blonde-haired girl, looked like Captain Marvel. And she’s standing there with her dad and his friend, another male friend, two dudes. And they’re standing there, not too close, by the way, about 12 feet back. And my wife looks up and says, Help us hold him. Help us.

The guy who owns the car has his phone out. He says, Oh, I’m calling the police. I’m calling the police. That’s what he’s doing. His daughter’s just standing there. And his friend’s just watching. His friend with, I believe, purple suede shoes. I was on the ground, so I had a good shot of that.

Alright, so the actual victims, if you will, of this property crime are not helping us in any way. And my wife’s a woman, by the way. I don’t mean to be sexist or anything, but to me, if there is a struggle going on, a physical struggle, and a woman looks up and says, Help me, doesn’t any human being, especially if you’re a dude, say, Yeah, I’ll help you, especially if it’s my car or my friend’s car?

So this is the first level of: What the hell is going on? But it goes beyond that. In this group of 30 to 40 people, all of whom are not close to us, by the way– they all have decided to stay back like 20, 30 feet behind me, to the side of me, and across from me, all around– in that group, there are at least three uniformed, badged security officers. Not one of them, not one of them, helped us.

The other fellow who seemed to be an employee, he was like a valet. He was on the other side, I saw him as well. Also not helpful. Not only were they not helpful, at one point, one of the security guards– it was a female– came over into my head space. She leaned in, still about six feet away. She leans in and she says, You can’t touch him. You have to let him go.

I looked up at her and just like this, I said, Okay, when I let him go and he gets up to run, what are you gonna do? She just looked at me… she just faded back, didn’t talk to her again. So not only were these people not helpful, they were trying to dissuade us from doing what I still believe to be the right thing.

Again, I understand it’s a property crime, but it’s still ultimately a citizen’s arrest of a bad guy. So at the end of the day, it was a good thing. But no help from the security guards. No help from the victims.

And now let’s talk about the public. No help from the public. And again, you have a woman, my wife, 49-year-old woman, lying on the ground in nice clothes or out for the night, looking up to a bunch of dudes and some woman saying, Help me. Help me hold him for over 10 minutes. And no.

Now, there was one guy who after about three or four minutes, he was coming out of the gym, Jaren, I believe his name was– shout out to Jaren– he did come over. So not everybody is a schmutz or a putz or whatever word you want to make up. This guy did come over and knelt down behind me and helped just hold down one of the guy’s legs and at least just was a witness to all of this.

This is why I’m so frustrated. Now, I don’t want to get too crazy about this, but this is why I’m really frustrated. I totally understand that most people don’t want to get involved in anything. I get that. I’ve been that guy myself, particularly in my early life. If it’s a physical situation, that makes it even harder.

You see people scrambling on the ground or fighting, or it’s even a domestic situation where the people really seem to know each other. It’s like a family fight. And you just think, Hey, this is not on me. That’s on you. I get that.

I also get that even if you don’t think the situation is relevant to you, or is even that dangerous, I understand that when there is physicality and fighting and violence, that most people are not prepared for that in any way. And that has its own weight on their mind, like, Oh no, what’s going to happen? I could get hurt.

So not only don’t they want to stand up and do something, even if it was just speaking up, if it’s physical, there really is a reluctance to get involved because it’s just an unknown. So I understand that.

But in this case, again, the guy, the hard part was done. The work was over. We had already taken him down. He was already pinned. As an interesting side note, because there was so much time, you might be wondering, well, what was the bad guy doing? He didn’t just give up.

Physically, he was contained. But mentally, he started going through a whole cycle of nonsense. Much like the guy in the other story. At first, when I chased down the other punk in episode 50, that guy started off like, huff and puff, and looked like he was menacing and wanted to hit me. And then when he saw that strategy wasn’t working, then he went really soft. He’s like, Oh, we’re cool, man. We’re cool. And I said, No, we’re not cool.

In this case, the guy, over 10 minutes, I’ll make it quick, the guy started off just by saying, I got a five-year-old. Let me go, man. Let me go. I got a five-year-old.

My wife is really good at trash talk, too. She said, Hey, we got a five-year-old, and we’re not breaking into cars. We don’t have a five-year-old. But it was pretty good trash talk.

So after he tried to play the sympathy game, and that didn’t work, then he started getting, pretending he was the victim. He started saying, Somebody call the cops. They’re f***ing me up. They’re f***ing me up. And I just kept announcing, because again, I was looking at everybody, I was being very aware of my surroundings, I just kept saying, You’re fine, sir.

He said, Oh, you’re choking me. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I said, If you can talk, you can breathe. No one’s being hurt here. I just kept looking around and announcing what was going on. You’re the bad guy. We’re the good guys. You’re not being hurt. We’re waiting for the police.

By the way, when the police show up, and eventually they do, two SUVs pull in. I can’t remember. Three or four cops jump out. Even they weren’t in a hurry to help! They got out. The guy was adjusting his belt. They’re taking their time. They start talking to someone on the periphery.

Before they come over to us, two citizens laying on top of another guy, they’ve been called in for an obvious burglary or some type of crime, and they’re in no hurry to come over to where the actual guy is. This was also blowing my mind.

Anyway. So my wife and I are pinned on this guy. This guy keeps screaming all kinds of nonsense about how he’s the victim and he’s the one getting hurt, and we have our friend Jaren helping us bear witness to all of this. But I still can’t get over how most people not only didn’t want to get involved, they didn’t even want to come close to at least show support.

Again, the bar was so low for you to be a hero in this story, meaning you come down the escalator, you’re in the parking garage, you see there’s something going on, you see that the guy’s already pinned, you know the police have been called, and now you see this woman on the ground saying, Someone help me hold him.

All you have to do is come over and put your foot on the guy and you can take a selfie and go, Look, I stopped a bad guy today. It would have been that easy. Anybody could have come over, just put a hand on the guy. You could have just come over and knelt by us and taken a picture if you wanted to and say, Hey, I helped bring down a bad guy today.

But no, this 30 to 40 people, some uniformed security officers, and victims of a crime, and friend, all stayed as far back as possible just to watch, not to even talk. I don’t even think anyone got it on phone. I hope they did. I was looking for the video. Like, I want to see this because I can’t believe that nobody helped.

Let me get to the bigger point. The bigger point is this…

I still believe that most people are good. I truly believe that most people, if you ask them, Hey, in a situation like this, would you help? They would say, Absolutely. Of course I’d help. What are you talking about?

But I’m also doubling down on my belief that most people just are completely unprepared to take action when they need to. And this goes to the self-defense training. If you take a little bit of self-defense training, even a little martial arts, I believe that it’s easier for you to speak up when you need to, stand up when you need to, and put your fists up if you need to. It’s just that unfamiliarity that keeps people from doing what their heart wants them to do.

This conflict between the heart and the head is just so sad to me. Because again, I’m not saying that all the people that were down there were bad people. That’s really not my point. My point is that nice people don’t know what to do, or they’re afraid to do something.

Because our culture has been built up to not make noise, to not take action, to not make a fuss, to not get involved. What can we do about this?

This to me is the greatest problem there is. Because bad guys don’t have this problem. Bad guys have decided, I will take action. I will do what I want. I will make noise and make a disturbance and make people uncomfortable and get what I want one way or the other.

So how do we get Team Good Guys to be able to stand up to the bad guys? Because it doesn’t have to be everybody, mind you. We just need a few more to tip the scales a bit. Imagine that whole scene from the bad guy’s point of view…

He’s in a public space. He had a leather glove on. He was smashing out windows, grabbing stuff and putting it into his backpack and moving on. In his mind, he must have thought, I’m not afraid to do this. Even if there are people around, what are they going to do? They’re not going to do anything. They’re not going to chase me. They’re not going to tackle me. They’re not going to hold me. They’re not going to get involved.

So he feels completely free. Bad guys, I mean. They feel completely free to do whatever they want because experience has shown them that most people won’t do anything. Therefore, they win.

In this case, out of this 30 or 40 people, it happened that my wife signaled, like, Hey, I’m going to do something, which caused me to say, Okay, well, then I’ll do something. And that little bit of momentum tipped the scales just enough to grab this guy and put him down. And then that little action tipped the scales just enough to get Jaren to come over, and he helped us out. Not bad.

It was enough in that case, but terrible percentages here, right? If you have 40 people, and they all believe that they’re good people, and I believe in their heart, they are good people, but only three actually follow through on those good intentions.

You can see the problem here, right? Wouldn’t it be amazing– what if the story I told you was completely the opposite? What if the story was, hey, we were walking through this parking lot, and suddenly we heard, Hey, stop that guy. And as we turned around, there were already four people running towards us. And these people all got together, 30 or 40 people, and they made a human wall in front of the exit.

We all surrounded the bad guy and corralled him. And he never even got touched or hurt, but he knew it was over. So he put down the backpack and just put his hands up and said, OK, OK, you got me. And then the cops came and took him away.

Wouldn’t that be a great story? What if every bad guy had that fear in his heart? Not just maybe I’ll get caught on camera, but maybe somebody in the crowd will have a gun, maybe there will be some cop nearby.

What if every bad guy knew, Man, if I do anything, I know this whole crowd is going to turn against me, and it’s always going to be me versus Team Good Guys. Can you imagine a world like that? Where bad guys were that afraid to do something because they knew that all the good guys would absolutely stand up to them and take action? That’d be pretty impressive, huh?

What can we do here? How do we solve this problem? It’s easy to whine, but how do you solve this problem? I think it’s not so hard.

Number one, I’ve already said, is preparation. If everybody was training in some type of martial art, using their body, practicing standing up, practicing the feeling of violence, using their body violently, explosively, managing someone else’s body that’s being violent, receiving an impact– I’m not talking about getting hurt. I just mean going back to like when you were a kid and a little roughhousing or rolling around with your brother, your sister, your friends, was not such a big deal.

Sometime you grow up, when you grow up, you kind of lose that comfortability. You lose that sense of touch. Everything becomes like, Hey, back up, or Don’t touch me. And everything becomes paranoid. Everybody’s got their guard up. We all want our space.

Then if you need to take physical action, that just adds another dimension of weird to the whole situation, which just slows you down as the good guy. And it keeps you from doing what your heart wants you to do and what society needs you to do.

So, number one is preparation. And to help solve that, coincidentally, I just finished my free– totally free, I don’t want anything from you– self-defense course. Check out my free Self Defense Basics course. It’s 10 videos, 11 if you count the introduction. Two hours of just basic self-defense instruction. And if you’re listening to this or watching this right now, I beg you, get the link, share it with your family, your friends, anyone you consider to be a good guy.

It’s family-friendly, I try to make it entertaining and universal. I try to make sure you can practice some of these exercises at home, you don’t need a partner or fancy equipment. But I do believe that’s one big step. If all the good guys could just take this, even just that course– of course I hope they’ll go to a school and train a little more seriously, get a partner, join a club, work this stuff out regularly, that’d be even better– but if all they have is a link to that self-defense course, and that helps in some way, I will die a happy man. I promise you.

So number one, prepare. And if that self-defense course is something you feel comfortable sharing, thank you for doing that.

Number two, I would say another way we can help team good guys, is to be a good role model yourself. Presumably you take some type of martial art, and that’s how you found this podcast or found this video, which means you’re probably a little ahead of the game when it comes to your family or your friends in being prepared to do something.

I believe any training is better than no training. So be a good role model. Let people see you standing up for what’s right. Let people see you take action when necessary. Let them see how you don’t let bad guys have their way around you.

In most cases, it’s probably verbal. It’s setting boundaries. It’s letting people know what’s not okay with you. Every time you do that, you’re empowering other people to do the exact same thing. You have to believe that.

How do you feel when you see someone stand up for themselves or fight back? You know, you get that feeling in your heart like, Yeah, good for you, go get them. And that makes you feel a little braver about doing the exact same thing. We all learn from each other. This is such an important point.

We’re all teachers and we’re all students. When you’re in a group of people, you have 30 or 40 people standing around, if you see the scales tipping, the mob mentality can work in your favor. Hey, we’re all going to do something. We’re all going to help. And that momentum pulls good things out of good people.

If it tips the other way and no one’s doing anything, or only one or two people are doing something and it’s not clear now, Wait, who’s the good guy here? Who’s the bad guy here? Then good people are just frozen and the bad guys are moving that ball down the field. They’re still getting what they want.

So if you are someone who is preparing, you are in martial arts, you are getting bolder and stronger and clearer about your purpose in life. Well, let your friends see that. Let your family see that. Be the hero in your circles so that you can inspire everyone else around you to be a hero.

I’m not calling myself a hero, by the way. I’m speaking in general.

Third thing just off the top of my head, the other way you can maybe help, is at the very least, share those videos that you find, share those little memes and posters where you see someone in public doing the right thing. That might seem to talk about lowering the bar, but that’s a really simple way to publicly show.

You’re on Facebook, you’re on Instagram, and someone’s got a clip of some citizen jumping into the water to save someone in a river. Okay, someone’s making a human chain to pull some puppy out of a river. I’m obsessed with rivers right now because I’m parked to the LA River here. I’m in my car, by the way, to keep me in the parking lot mindset. But you know what I’m saying.

When you find these videos and these little clips going around, those should be viral. Team Good Guys should be sharing that information with everyone. So if you don’t get the chance very often to be heroic, but you see someone else being heroic, let everybody around you know that you think that’s cool. If someone’s standing up for themselves, go over there and say, Good for you. Let every good guy know that there are other good guys right there next to them.

I think that kind of peer pressure is very positive. Usually we think of peer pressure as something negative. Hey man, have a cigarette. Don’t you want to be cool like me? But peer pressure works the other way too. You can use mob mentality for positive change. Hey, we’re all going to go help this homeless guy. We’re all getting together. We’re going to donate some food and some clothing. We’re going to help get this guy a job.

Community coming together. Team Good Guys working for a common cause. Hey, we’re having a blood drive. Hey, we’re collecting food for Thanksgiving. You know what I’m talking about. You’re probably involved in these types of efforts. Keep that up. Keep championing the good guys. That’s how you can show the bad guys that they’re outnumbered.

All right, so I’m kind of coming to the end of this rant. There was one other thought here that I thought was kind of interesting, something I’m going to have to live with, a little bit of shame.

I mentioned in the other episode, episode 50, that I did feel compelled to take some of the action out of my own fear that my wife would think I was a wimp if I didn’t do something. I mean, Hey, what kind of husband am I if I let these punks break into our cars and run off down the street and I don’t punch this guy? I don’t tackle that guy? What kind of man am I? Old school thinking, right?

In this case, I thought, after this was all over, I was home free. I mean, she just saw me chase down this guy, get my mitts on him, put him on the ground, stay in control. And afterwards, I said to her, Geez, I’m not even sure I was going to chase him, but you took off. So, you know, I wanted to help.

And she said, Oh, I wasn’t going to tackle that guy. I just wanted to make noise. And I was like, Oh, my God. I said, Well, a second point. You know, I had the guy. So in the future, I appreciated the help, but you didn’t really have to jump in. I don’t want to put you in any danger. I had that under control.

And she said, Hey, the only reason I jumped in is because nobody else was helping and because you weren’t doing any moves. Do you know how long I’m going to have to live with that one? I wasn’t doing any moves.

Keep in mind, my wife doesn’t practice martial arts, and she actually doesn’t actually see me do this stuff very often either. She doesn’t come to my classes. If anything, she’s always saying, Why do you keep going? Don’t you know enough by now? So she doesn’t get that.

So in her mind, she was really expecting that I was going to go over there and do some kind of Hong Kong Phooey super Karate chop to the throat. Hi-yah! But that’s not what I was doing. What I was doing, I thought, was pretty cool.

Afterwards, I’m trying to talk her down. I’m like, Well, hang on. What do you mean I wasn’t doing any moves? I said–

Did I get hurt? No.

Did you get hurt? No.

Did anybody get hurt? No.

Did I hurt the guy? No.

Did he have a mark on him? No.

Is there any reason for him to sue us for being overly violent or aggressive? No.

Is there even any reason for us to be on a police report? No.

But he was contained and arrested, right? We did have him under control for 10 to 12 minutes, right?

That is the move. Get it? That’s the best move.

If you go around wearing a black belt and wearing a jacket that says, Super Cool Fighter, and you go around punching people in the face when you don’t have to, you might have some complications for that. You might have crossed that line from good guy to bad guy. You might have a little control issue on your soul.

Anyway, that’s just a little rant I thought you might find that amusing. I still think the best policy is to do the least amount you have to, to make the situation work for you.

All right, so let me wrap this up. I think I have one final thought here. My final thought.

I think the big lesson here is you’re on your own. You’re born alone, you die alone, and in between, you’re probably going to be fighting alone.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If you have friends who will help you, great. If you have family who will help you, great. If a stranger jumps in to help you, great. Just don’t count on it. Make your strategy dependent on yourself first, and then whatever help comes your way, say thank you.

On that same point, I have another episode of this podcast that you might be interested in. Episode #12. It’s called The Blonde-Haired Warrior. In that show, I told the story about one of my neighbors, a young lady who got attacked in her driveway by a would-be rapist. She had a roommate that heard the whole incident through the door of their apartment. It happened right outside the door.

Afterwards, when we asked, Why didn’t you do something? She said, I was too scared to open the door.

You’re on your own. Get it? But that doesn’t mean we can’t challenge ourselves to be a little bit braver. Challenge ourselves to prepare a little bit more to do something when we need to.

Remember this: it’s not enough to be a good person on the inside. It’s what you show on the outside that makes a difference. So be good and train to do good. That’s how we can all fight for a happy life for ourselves and for each other.

All right, that’s my rant for today. Now it’s your turn. Feel free to leave me a comment underneath the video or over on the website for this podcast at fightforahappylife.com.

Until next time, smiles up, my friend. Let that smile be your shield and your sword. Keep fighting for a happy life.