Retired trooper was shot in '71 Turnpike gun battle
Gary McWhorter is of the generation that just sucked it up.
Never mind the nightmares, the night sweats, the chilling sense something was about to go terribly wrong.
Forget the short-fuse anger, the long bouts of despair, the anxiety that came out of nowhere.
Don't worry about it. Have a few beers, knock down a couple of shots, then maybe a few more. Tell your wife to stop busting your chops. Nothing's wrong. You're okay.
But you're not. And you know it. You just don't know what to do. Because if you tell someone, you're weak. Pathetic. Talk to somebody? Forget about it. You're a cop. Cops don't talk to somebody.
"I buried it," said McWhorter, 72, who lives in Manalapan. "I didn't talk about it. I didn't allow my family to talk about it. I spent half my lifetime not talking about it."
But then he started. Maybe 42 years too late, but he started, and this week the state pension board will decide if the former state trooper should have his post-traumatic stress disorder covered by state insurance.
MORE: Recent Mark Di Ionno columns
On Nov. 28, 1971, Gary McWhorter pulled over a speeding 1965 Ford with South Carolina plates on the New Jersey Turnpike. A Georgia trooper had been shot and killed on I-95, and police up and down the highway were on alert.
It was about 8:30 a.m. when McWhorter hit his lights and siren. He had the three men inside exit the car. He checked their IDs, then looked inside the vehicle.
"That's when I saw the gun," he said.
The weapon was shoved under the front passenger seat and had the same kind of large pistol grip and short barrel he knew Southern cops used.
And that's when one of the men bolted back into the car and pulled a gun from underneath the driver's seat.
"I grabbed his wrist and we started wrestling for the gun," McWhorter said. "Twice, it was pointed right at my head."
Trooper George Ayers arrived on the scene and the gun went off the first time; the bullet went through his shoulder and into his chest.
The second time, "the guy turned his wrist right toward me," McWhorter said.
He was hit. When McWhorter came to, he was lying on the front seat of the car, his powder blue jacket soaked in his blood. The bullet had entered his chest, hit a rib, collapsed his left lung and nicked his heart.
The three men ran and broke into a school in Woodbridge. McWhorter said that as police converged on them, the suspects turned on each other. Ronnie Simmons, the man who shot McWhorter and Ayers, was killed by one of the two others.
"He wanted a shootout, but they wanted to surrender," McWhorter said. "They were surrounded."
It was later learned that the men were not involved in the Georgia trooper shooting. They were eventually released after a year in jail.
McWhorter, who was 27 when he was shot, was back on the job in four months. He never thought about quitting. He was sent to the quiet Colts Neck barracks, but after a week, requested to "go back on the Pike" and the dangers of that assignment.
A year later, a suspect tried to pull a gun on him at a rest stop, but McWhorter was quicker and the man surrendered. Then, on May 2, 1973, McWhorter had just been relieved by Trooper James Harper when Harper and Trooper Werner Foerster encountered JoAnne Chesimard and two other members of the Black Liberation Army on the turnpike in East Brunswick. A shootout ensued. Foerster was killed and Harper was wounded. McWhorter, called back to duty with the rest of the available troopers, apprehended one of the killers.
A year later, he faced down another gunman behind a motel in Bordentown. "That's the closest I came to shooting someone," he said. "But another trooper pulled up and the guy gave up."
All of this - nearly being killed, witnessing the death of a fellow trooper, even coming close to killing someone - left McWhorter wrestling with the mental monster now known as PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.
A divorce came in 1983. In 1988, he retired after 20 years on the job, to start his own private investigation business.
"I retired after 20. If I stayed 25, I would have gotten the medical benefits," he said.
"We're not asking for a lot," said attorney Steve Altman, who is helping McWhorter with his application for benefits. "We just hope they find that covering his PTSD is reasonable, considering what he gave to the job."
In 2009, McWhorter started an organization called "Troopers Assisting Troops" to help veterans of mostly the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
It was then that McWhorter came to understand his own PTSD, which has since been diagnosed by a clinical psychologist and a psychiatrist. He shared the medical reports for this column and they do, in fact, say he meets every criteria for the disorder.
"It was about the second or third year in (with the veterans help group) that I was sitting with one of the guys, just having a couple of drinks," McWhorter said. "The guy had done four tours and he started talking about his PTSD. I thought, 'I've got that, too.'
"So we just started talking about our experiences -- being shot, waking up angry, night sweats, all of it."
Still, it wasn't until 2013, at the insistence of his second wife, Dottie, that McWhorter decided it was time to get help. He's been in counseling ever since.
"This is still tough for me to talk about," he said. "It makes me really uncomfortable. But I think it's important.
"If one good thing comes of it, it's to let other police officers know it's okay to step forward and just talk about it. To get some help," he said. "I can't get back the years I lost feeling bad, but they don't have to lose them if they just open up."
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.