Ramnani: Hi, I am Dr. Sapna Ramnani, and you're listening to Share It With Me. I am the journalist living with a speech impairment, and that means my voice is a little more difficult to understand. But I didn’t want that to stop me from asking the questions that matter. In this podcast, I use an iVoice to help me bring those questions to life. The voice is synthetic, but the thoughts, the emotions, and the intent behind every question and comment are completely mine. You’ll hear that iVoice throughout the interview, but know that I’m here, guiding every moment of the conversation. Today’s guest is someone whose story will leave you breathless. Gary Pacelli is a retired narcotics detective who lived through life-threatening danger on the job, endured years of injuries, battled depression, and then found a new purpose, falling through the sky. What began as a near-fatal incident in law enforcement took Gary on an unimaginable journey: from being dragged across a highway in an undercover operation, to fighting for his life after a catastrophic skydiving accident that left him paralyzed, to literally standing up and reclaiming his life against all odds. This is not just a story about survival. It is about resilience, faith, and what it means to keep going when quitting seems easier. Gary has now completed over 100 skydives since his accident, proving that the human spirit is far stronger than we often believe. So get ready, you’re about to hear a raw, gripping, and deeply inspiring conversation with someone who embodies what it truly means to fight until the lights go out. Here’s my conversation with Gary Pacelli

Ramnani: Hi Gary, thank you so much for your time today.

Pacelli: It’s an honor to be here. I really appreciate you letting me tell my story. Thank you.

Ramnani: It is very nice to have you on the podcast. Why don’t you begin by telling me what happened?

Pacelli: I was on surveillance and I was ordered to pull a vehicle over. We were on a mobile surveillance with 10 units that day, so it was a big job. We had an informant who was traveling up from Virginia to New York City to buy a load of cocaine. We were following in and out of the city, back and forth over the George Washington Bridge in New Jersey. I was ordered to pull the vehicle over before he got to his hotel. I activated my emergency lights and pulled them over to the side of the highway. I walked up to his vehicle and asked him for his driver’s license. You have to understand, we were undercover, I was in shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt. I pulled my badge out from under my shirt and asked him again for his driver’s license. When he went to hand it to me with his right hand, he suddenly pulled it back. I reached in to grab it, which was a mistake, a big no-no. As I did, I realized his foot was on the brake and the car was still in drive. We locked eyes. He hooked my arm with his left arm, hit the gas, and started dragging me into the highway. I was running but I knew I couldn’t keep up. I could probably pull my arm free, but then I’d fall and get run over by the back tires. So I dove into his vehicle. I ended up on his lap basically, with my legs hanging out the door. I looked out the window and saw that he was crossing into the fast lane. He was going to crush me against the divider, just squash me like a bug, and then push me out of the car. I heard this voice in my head, loud like a roar: “Shoot him. Shoot him now.” Bang. Next thing I know, I’m rolling down the highway, tumbling. When things like this happen, time slows down in your mind. I remember saying to myself, “Am I ever going to stop?” I came to a stop. My weapon was still in my hand. I looked up, there was a tractor-trailer bearing down on me. At the last moment my partner showed up and yanked me out of the way. The truck passed me by inches. He dragged me to the side of the road: “Are you okay?” I said, “Yeah, go get him.” He jumped in his car and took off after the guy. I couldn’t believe the suspect kept going. I got up and walked to my vehicle, bleeding, scraped up, concussed, limping. But the adrenaline kept me going. I made it to my car, put it in drive, and tried to catch up to the pursuit. But I went on the upper level of the bridge while my partner went on the lower level. My partner ended up ramming the vehicle when the suspect wouldn’t stop. They ordered him out of the car. The door opened a little, then closed, opened again, then closed. They couldn’t see inside because the windows were covered with blood. Finally the door opened and the driver slumped out. He had lost so much blood he couldn’t undo his seatbelt. They saved his life, stopped the bleeding, got him to the hospital. I returned to the scene, handed my chief my weapon, and went to the hospital. I was released that night. After about a week, when the adrenaline wore off, my body locked up and twisted. I ended up having 11 operations: six shoulder surgeries, a shoulder replacement, my deltoid muscle reattached, two steel cages in my spine, and wrist surgery. I was retired after the second operation with honors. They gave me two of the highest medals in our department: the Combat Cross and the Legion of Honor. But as the years of surgeries went on, every 4–6 months for four and a half years, I lost touch with my teammates. I became depressed. I gained about 100 pounds. I lost myself in self-pity and pain pills. I kept making excuses: “I’m injured. What am I supposed to do? Everyone my age looks like this.” I didn’t even believe those excuses, but I said them anyway. One day I was looking at a picture of my family at my niece’s high school graduation. No matter how long I stared, I couldn’t recognize the person standing next to my wife. It was me. That hit me hard, like a sledgehammer to the chest. That day I went on a mission to get my life back. Over the next 2–3 years I got back in shape, lost 90 pounds, down from 265 to 175, and started feeling good again. I decided to fulfill a lifelong dream. I had done a skydive when I got out of recruit bootcamp in 1988 and loved it. I was going to get my license. In 2019 I finally did. By 2020 I’d done over 300 jumps. I wanted my tandem license, which requires 500 jumps. In 2021, with COVID everywhere, I went to North Carolina to get a head start on the season. I started wingsuiting, a type of skydiving in a squirrel suit where you fly. So, they grabbed binoculars and they looked up, and they sort of mimed my arms like that and went, so they knew I was in trouble. They jumped in a truck with the people from the Skydive Center and followed me. When I hit the ground, they were there within a minute. They were highly trained and went to work immediately. They stabilized me, got everything set up, and I was nodding in and out of consciousness. They got me across the street to where the helicopter was gonna pick me up, and they got me there without killing me, right? Because of my broken neck and everything.

Ramnani: That’s remarkable.

Pacelli: So as they're prepping me to get on the helicopter, I jokingly say to the flight paramedic, “Hey, when we get to altitude, you throw me out the door?” And he got mad, right? He’s like, “Not on my watch.” And I respect that. But from my point of view, I felt no different than a sack of meat because I had no hope. I thought my life was over. With the information I had at that moment, there was no happy ending here. They took me to the trauma hospital, it was farther away than the nearest hospital. We land, and as they’re pulling me off the helicopter, I see like 20 doctors, nurses, and technicians all lined up. I think to myself, “Something really bad must have happened, maybe a highway accident or a big pileup or something.” Then they pull me off the helicopter, and all of a sudden, they start working on me, cutting everything off, putting IVs in, using a portable X-ray machine as we’re running down the hallway. Because I’m not running anywhere right now, they’re all working on me. A nurse, an intake nurse, starts asking me questions. I said to her, “Did something bad happen? What happened?” She looked at me, smiled, and said, “You happened.” At that moment, I realized I was in really good hands, these people really cared. I just couldn’t figure out why, though. I thought, “I’m finished. I’m done. What can you do for me? Throw me in a corner. Leave me alone.” But they weren’t gonna have that. They X-rayed me four or five times and couldn’t understand how I didn’t have any broken bones or even a scratch on me. I mean, I broke my neck, but nothing else. They took me to the intensive care unit. They heavily medicated me, which was good, because I’d kept it together up to that point. But now, just lying there, my brain had nothing to occupy it. And your mind can either lift you up to greatness or drag you down to the lowest pit of hell. Mine, unfortunately, dragged me down. I had this heavy feeling of dread and doom, it was like a blanket. I could barely breathe because I couldn’t see a way out. I had no hope whatsoever. I’m not embarrassed to talk about it because it might help somebody. I say, “Hey, walk a mile in my shoes before you judge me.” I had to find a way to kill myself because I thought, “I can’t live like this, as a quadriplegic. I can’t move.” The nurse isn’t gonna come in and overdose me. So I sat there and thought about it. This is gonna sound ridiculous, but you have to understand the situation and where my mind was. I remembered seeing a movie years earlier, The Silence of the Lambs, where Hannibal Lecter convinced a guy to swallow his tongue and kill himself. I thought, “I can move my tongue, so I can do that.” So I sat there for half an hour trying to swallow my tongue, and I couldn’t do it. The only thing I did was make my tongue hurt, one of the few things I could actually feel. I don’t even know if it’s possible, it’s probably Hollywood magic, but I tried. Then my mind went to another place. I said to myself, “Alright, when I get out of here, I’ll get a motorized wheelchair and drive in front of a bus or a train.” Because that’s where your brain goes. Then the doctor came in. He said from the X-ray, he saw that my discs, five and six, had crumbled. He said that was a good thing, because had they stayed intact, they probably would’ve severed my spinal cord. But he couldn’t tell by the X-ray if it was severed, so I needed an MRI, and then, right into surgery. That’s what happened. I woke up back in the ICU. The doctor came in and said, “Okay, surgery was a success. But your spinal cord is damaged, it’s severely bruised and swollen. I don’t know what your recovery will look like. Some people walk, some people don’t. I don’t know why, it’s all luck. We’ll keep you in ICU and monitor it.” So for the next four days, every time I was awake, I tried to move something. On the fourth day, I felt like my big toe was moving. I called the nurse and said, “Hey, I think I’m moving my big toe on the right foot.” She looked, said she didn’t see it, ripped off my sock, grabbed it, and yelled because she could feel it. She went and got the doctor. He came in, grabbed my toe, and smiled. That’s all I needed to see. Over the next couple of days, I got my left toe, my right index finger, my left index finger. The doctor came back and said, “Everything we did was a success. If you’d gone two more hours without that surgery, you’d definitely be paralyzed from the neck down. I don’t know if you’ll walk, it’s all luck. But if you stay positive and work hard, it’s up to you.” So I started thinking. Everything that went wrong was countered by something that went right. It was like a giant puzzle, and if one piece hadn’t fit, I’d be dead or paralyzed. I thought, “If I truly believe God saved me, then I have to believe He wouldn’t abandon me now, when I’m at my most challenging part.” I had a little spark of hope, and a little spark of hope goes a long way. People have done great things with just that. From that moment on, I stayed positive. I knew I was walking out of that hospital. I didn’t know how, but I wouldn’t let anyone tell me otherwise. Therapy was amazing. They taught me that the only thing holding me back was my mind. If I could control my mind, I could do anything. Everything was going great, until one day, they took me back to my room for lunch. I asked them to dial my wife because I still couldn’t use my fingers. She’s a third-grade teacher. It was during COVID, so she was teaching from home. She had just dismissed her class for lunch, and one of our dogs walked in, and died. She told me this, and I had to hang up. It wiped me out. I felt trapped in that hospital, in the body I broke. I felt responsible. I thought, “I’m done. I quit. I’m gonna tell my wife to put me in a nursing home, close the door, and leave me. I can’t do this anymore.” But as I sat there staring at the wall, I remembered that I used to be a drill instructor at the police academy. My job was to get recruits to their breaking point, to teach them to reach deep and find the will to survive, to never give up. I remembered that, and it reminded me of who I was. I realized I wasn’t just fighting for me. I was fighting for my family, for a lot of people. So I decided to go back to therapy. I told my therapist, “I want more pain. I want more suffering.” Because I knew, the quicker I took the pain and the suffering, the quicker I could go home. On my feet, not in that chair. I stayed positive and worked hard. I had to re-teach my brain every single movement. After two months, I walked out of that hospital. It wasn’t pretty, I still had a lot of work to do, but it was just the beginning. I worked hard, kept going. Eventually, I felt it was time to go back to the skydiving center. I wanted to skydive again, not to be a hero or get attention, but to prove to myself that if I could do something I loved safely, I could do anything. On bad days, when I wake up and everything hurts, I remind myself: “You can skydive. So stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get up. Get dressed. Don’t be a victim.” But everyone else disagreed. “You’re crazy. You’ll get paralyzed again.” Nobody wanted to help me. Then I called my friend, she’s a rigger, fixes parachutes like a mechanic fixes cars. She also manages Skydive Shenandoah in Virginia. I told her nobody would help me. She said she had my gear and was fixing it. She said, “If you get a doctor’s note and meet me in Virginia in four weeks, I’ll take you on that jump.” Fantastic. I called my doctor in North Carolina, he said, “No problem. You want to skydive? Work hard enough, you can do it.” The doctors in New York said, “No way, you’re crazy.” I ignored them. Four weeks later, I went to Virginia. I was still in bad shape, I couldn’t tie my shoes, hold a fork, or button my shirt. I thought she might change her mind, but she didn’t. She said, “If you do anything unsafe or I think you’re not ready, I’ll ground you for six months.” We got on the plane. I was laughing at myself, I still couldn’t tie my shoes, but I had elastic laces. We got to altitude, two miles up. She opened the door, gave me a thumbs-up. I hung my legs out, looked down, gave her a thumbs-up, and leaned forward. I fell out of the plane. The wind hit me, I did a barrel roll, a flip, then stabilized. Everything was good. She came down, we linked up, she was smiling ear to ear. Then I heard the signal to deploy my parachute. I reached out, pulled it, it opened, but I had line twists. My shoulder was weak, so I couldn’t reach them. I kicked, spun out of it, and finally, beautiful canopy above my head. At 4,000 feet, sitting in my harness, I thought of all the people who helped me. I was so grateful. Five months and twelve days earlier, I was lying in someone’s backyard wishing I were dead, and now I was skydiving. I yelled at the top of my lungs, “I’m alive!” Because at that moment, I was more alive than I’d ever been. This accident took so much from me physically and mentally, but it gave me more than it took. It changed how I see the world. Gratitude and appreciation, those words mean everything to me now. Because we don’t know how our story ends. We can’t give up. If I’d succeeded in ending my life, what a waste that would’ve been. That was three years ago. I still have a limp, pain, and weakness, but I’m alive. Everyone has problems. Everyone has pain. I wake up every day, put my feet on the ground, and choose to have a good day. I control my mind now. When negative thoughts come in, I stop them and think, “No, I’m gonna have a good day.” When I was falling through the sky that day, I didn’t think, “I’ll miss my car,” or, “I wish I’d bought a bigger house.” That stuff doesn’t matter. I want to build wealth and equity in my soul. By being good to people, everyone, even those who don’t deserve it. No matter what someone says or does, I won’t let them change who I am. We can’t change the past, but the past can change our future. It can drag us down like an anchor or guide us like a compass. It’s our choice. That’s how I live now. Since my accident, I’ve done 108 solo skydives. People look at me funny because I limp. I don’t care. Every time I get on that plane, it’s a testament to everyone who helped me, and to God. I don’t have to say a word. I just have to exist. People say, “You’re amazing.” I say, “No, I just had no choice. I reached down and found the will to survive.” We all have that. A picture above my wall says: “A champion is someone who gets up when they can’t.” , Jack Dempsey. That quote is special to me because it’s true. To be a champion, you have to choose it. We only lose when we quit. Trying might lead to failure, but quitting guarantees it. When I was in therapy, some people gave up, and they never improved. So I believe: since we don’t know how our story ends, we have to fight until the lights go out. That’s how I live my life now.

Ramnani: Thank you. That was truly amazing, Gary. I really enjoyed hearing your story.

Pacelli: Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate you. I truly do.

Ramnani: It was lovely to know your story, it was inspiring. Thank you for your time.

Pacelli: My pleasure. Thank you. Have a great day.

Ramnani: You too. You’ve been listening to Share It With Me. If this episode offered clarity or connection, consider sharing it, the right story at the right time could change everything. Music you heard is A Perfect Day by Ahron Less, courtesy of upbeat. This is Dr. Sapna Ramnani, signing off. Stay curious, stay connected.