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John Flynn, a Criminal Justice Technology instructor at ���˲ؾ���Madison received a Purple Heart from the NC State Highway Patrol in Raleigh after he was shot on the job in 1976.

“The (Purple Heart) program just started last year,” Flynn said. “It’s been 42 years and if they would have waited much longer, they would have to have done it posthumously.”

At a reception in his honor at ���˲ؾ���Madison in December, Flynn told his story to a packed lobby in the Ramsey Building attended by faculty, staff, students and community members.

Flynn, a native of the area, moved to Wilmington to work with the Highway Patrol and then worked another 11 years with the Wilmington Police before coming back to the mountains with his wife. “I thought I was going to retire,” he said.

Flynn brought his credentials up to ���˲ؾ���and the Chair of the Criminal Justice department called him up and offered him a job. “And I said, ‘well, I'll try it one semester,’ and that was in 2006. I’m still doing it. I have a defect like that, I can't quit anything,” he said.

Maxine Brown recalled how her daughter was once a student of Flynn’s. “Thanks to teachers like John, my daughter got a full scholarship to Duke University. She took classes at Madison High and studied Criminal Justice. She is now a law student,” Brown said.

The following is the narrative given by Flynn at ���˲ؾ���Madison

Flynn was shot Wednesday evening, June 16, 1976. “I just got through with supper and I pulled out onto US-301 from my house. Two men named Chuckie Chavis and Lemuel Locklear were riding motorcycles and they were going too fast. I stopped and wrote them a warning ticket,” he said.

After that stop, Flynn started patrolling north on I-95 when he saw a friend at the truck weigh station scales, waving like he had something important to say. Flynn merged into the right lane behind a red car and in front of a green car. “Unbeknownst to me there was an escaped prisoner and his girlfriend following him.”

The driver of the red car pulled off at the US-301 exit. “I pull off right behind him with the intention to go back south and speak to my friend,” Flynn said. “Well, here comes Chuckie and Lemuel back across the bridge and he (the driver of the red car) pulls out in front of the motorcycles.”

Flynn decided to stop him for a safe moving violation. “I get up close behind the car, and it’s a ’74 red Monte Carlo and it’s got the license plate, FLY-734. Well, I was never suspicious up until that date. That was the first three letters of my last name and my call number backwards on his license plate."

Flynn approached the car while looking for the driver’s eyes in the mirror. “But I couldn’t see his eyes, and then the gun came out of the window. I tried to turn sideways to get out of the way and the bullets struck me right here in the hip. The reason I chuckle about it, it’s still there,” he said.

Flynn fell to the ground with an immobile left leg. “I got out my pistol, and I’m not bragging, but I could really shoot that thing. I fired back on the man and four of the bullets went through the back windshield. One struck him in the jaw. It just wasn’t his day to die; wasn’t mine either, I guess,” he said.

The man in the red car took off driving. Flynn crawled to his vehicle and got behind the door, and as he was reaching for his radio, he heard a car coming back. “And I think, ‘Oh Lord he's come back to finish me.’ So I start reloading the gun. In those days we just had six bullets and carried the extra ones on our belt. I got five in the gun, dropped another one, and I was on my knees behind the door when the car stopped right beside me. If it had been a red car I'd have shot the man, but it was a green car,” he said.

It turned out the man was 55 years old and had just graduated with his credentials in EMT. Flynn said he was waiting on that first call and he was sitting on his front porch when he heard the shooting and tires squealing.

“Well, he had to see it, you know, what this was about, so here he comes,” Flynn said. “He says, ‘what happened?’ and I said ‘I've been shot.’ He said, ‘oh’ and fainted, and rolled over and went in the ditch on the other side of the road.”

Flynn went back to his radio and called for help reporting a 10-33 traffic, meaning emergency needing immediate assistance.  “I called it in and he wasn't a bit more concerned or nothing so then I said, I've been shot. It was dead silence for 30-40 seconds, I thought, what in the world, you know? Has he fainted, too?”

Flynn found out later that the dispatcher immediately went to the window and yelled out to another trooper to go get everything in gear and get some help.

“This fella named Charles Garner, he was coming up the Interstate and off on to 301 and you could hear that 440 Plymouth really moaning. You know, if y’all ever seen the movie, Walking Tall, the first thing, those motors how they sounded. I could hear it coming like that. And I knew the curve below me was about a 90-degree curve.

And I saw him coming and I thought, ‘Lord have mercy’. When they come around the curve, I could see daylight under the left front wheel. But he held it, and here I’m on my knees now, in the road, and here he comes and he slides that Plymouth to a stop, and I believe he put in park at 10 mph or something like that.

“He jumps out of his car, with his .357. He sees that man (the EMT) over there, he sprints across the road grabs that man by the hair on his head before I can say anything, and I said, ‘Charles, Charles that's not him!’ He said ‘oh,’ and just dropped him and I can still hear that man's head clunk on the door frame. To this day, I've never seen that man outside his house again,” he said.

Garner takes Flynn to the hospital at a high rate of speed, when Flynn decides to pull his pants down and check the bullet wound.  “I thought you know, well I'm not gonna die right now.  Then the First Sergeant calls over and says, ‘Well. you better hurry on, he might be hemorrhaging inside.’  And I thought, ‘oh my god, I hadn't thought about hemorrhaging.’”

Flynn ended up staying in the hospital for four days and the perpetrator was caught. “He was an escaped convict, plus he was a serial rapist and I never had any contact with him for 17 more years. Then they called me to Clinton, North Carolina where he was accused of raping a grandmother and her 16-year-old granddaughter. And they were trying him for his life. He was a smooth type fella, and they used me as a character witness. When he saw me he went ballistic, and jumped up and called the judge an imbecile and this was a kangaroo court and all this stuff. And the judge said, ‘I'll hold you in contempt.’ The guy said, ‘Hold me in contempt? I'm facing 100 years in prison and you think I give a (blank) about contempt.’ The jurors had heard enough and they sentenced him to life, and he died in prison."

To this day, every year on June 16, Flynn feels a pain in his hip.