Bloodied and half-blind, this cop’s grip was the last defense against disaster

Editor's note: This story contains graphic details, images and video.

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Highway Patrol Officer Dane Norem rushed out of his car, sprinted to the curb, jumped and grabbed the suicidal man by the ankle just as he straddled the top of the overpass fence. A busy highway roared beneath them.

If Norem let go, the jumper would die. Cars would swerve and crash. Others might die too.

But Norem was determined not to let that happen. He wrapped the man’s leg in a bear hug and lifted his feet, using his body to anchor the jumper to the overpass. The man had too much leverage for Norem to pull him off the fence, but Norem – a big cop loaded with gear – was too strong and too heavy for the man to yank free. It was a stalemate in a tug-of-war between life and death.

But the jumper had a knife.

He stabbed downward.

“When I got struck in the face, it didn’t really hurt,” Norem said. “It felt like I had been punched and it felt wet, like a water balloon had popped. I came to figure out later that was my eye.”

Over the next two minutes, Norem would be stabbed seven times, including once in his right eye, yet he would refuse to let go, knowing that his grip was the last defense against catastrophe. This rescue, which occurred Oct. 25, 2012, would become the defining moment for a hero police officer, praised across California for bravery so remarkable that it makes other cops pause in awe. Norem’s selflessness would save a life – likely more than one – but in the process he would be so viciously wounded that he nearly lost his eyesight, his career and his identity.

After the stabbing, it would take three years and a state-of-the-art surgery for Norem to become a full-fledged police officer again. He would finally return to duty just in time to respond to the San Bernardino terror attack, when California needed its cops more than ever. And throughout his recovery, Norem would maintain enlistment in the California Air National Guard, going to the Middle East this year on a deployment that was once considered unthinkable because of his injuries.

“It would have been very easy to give up,” Norem said, speaking to The Desert Sun in his first-ever interview about the stabbing. “I could have just medically retired, but instead I kept working to find an answer. And now, because of that, I get to keep doing what I love to do.”

Although Norem’s dramatic rescue occurred nearly five years ago, it has never been described in detail. Norem has previously been unwilling to speak publicly about the incident for fear of jeopardizing the prosecution of his attacker, Javier Hernandez. That prosecution is now complete. Photos of the crime scene and video footage from Norem's dash camera became public earlier this year.

Norem was driving east on State Road 91, halfway through his night shift, when the radio in his patrol cruiser blared to life, reporting a distraught man had climbed the fence on the La Sierra Avenue overpass and was dangling his body over traffic.

Norem knew he was the closest cop. He had just driven under that overpass, and at this very moment it was vanishing in his rearview mirror. Norem whirled his car around at the next exit, flipped on his overhead lights and sped back towards La Sierra Avenue.

A minute later he was there. A slender man in a dark T-shirt and jeans was sitting on the sidewalk, hugging his knees against his chest. Hernandez stood as the patrol car approached, then started climbing the fence that separated the overpass from the traffic below.

Norem didn’t have time to think.

He didn’t see the knife until it was too late.

Norem screamed as the pocketknife slid along his cheekbone and sliced across his eyeball, but he did not let go. He ducked his head to protect his face, then Hernandez began to rhythmically stab and slash downward, jabbing the blade into the cop’s shoulder, arm and elbow.

Norem unwrapped his arms from the man’s leg, trying to retreat out of reach of the knife while still clenching Hernandez’s ankle. He kept his grip, but as blood poured out of punctures in his back and arm, his strength was fading.

Suddenly, Hernandez’s foot slipped out of his shoe and up into his jeans, leaving Norem gripping a handful of empty pant leg. Hernandez pulled so hard his pants began to slide off.

Norem realized he would soon be standing on the overpass alone, holding an empty pair of jeans, as Hernandez’ pantsless corpse was crushed in the traffic below.

“I would have struggled with that guy until I absolutely couldn’t do it anymore. I wasn’t quitting. But neither was he,” Norem said.

"If those other guys hadn’t showed up, either me or Mr. Hernandez would have died that night.”

John Walker, an off-duty sergeant with the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department, was driving through Riverside with his girlfriend when he saw a highway patrol cruiser zip past on State Road 91.

After 20 years on the job, Walker knew what it looked like when a cop was driving with purpose.

I wonder what kind of call he is responding to, Walker thought. I hope everything is OK.

A moment later, Walker exited onto La Sierra Avenue, then stopped at a red light. He peered through a thin line of roadside shrubs, where again he saw the patrol car. It was hurriedly parked on an overpass.

A trooper was out of the car, struggling with a man who had climbed the fence.

Walker knew he had to help. He ran the red light and parked behind the patrol car, then rushed up to the trooper, who was desperately clinging to the pant leg of the man on the fence. Blood was pouring down the right side of the trooper’s face.

To Dane Norem, it was as if the voice had come from nowhere.

“Hey brother,” Walker said. “I’m a cop and I’m here to help.”

“Grab my baton,” Norem said back, never taking his eyes off the man on the fence.

Walker grabbed a collapsible baton off of Norem’s belt, extending it with a practiced swipe of his right hand. He circled around to Norem’s left shoulder, climbed two feet up the fence and began swinging the baton at Hernandez, trying to knock a small pocketknife out of his right hand. Hernandez swung back.

For a moment, the two men clung to the fence, dueling, trying to smack and slice each others’ weapons away.

Nathan Asbury, an off-duty Riverside police officer, pulled over to assist Norem, and a few civilians followed, although there was not much that could be done. Walker’s girlfriend, Angela Madrid, also an off-duty police officer, retrieved a handgun from Walker's car, just in case.

But no one could match Norem, who was bloodied and half-blind but still holding Hernandez's pant leg in a vice grip. Nearly three minutes had passed since Norem was stabbed the first time.

“It was a true testament to who he is,” Walker said later, describing Norem. “If it wasn’t for Dane’s mindset, his determination to prevent someone else from getting hurt, that guy would just have gone up and over and caused an accident.”

Eventually, like all stalemates, this one came to an end. Another Highway Patrol officer arrived with a shotgun and pegged Hernandez with a less-than-lethal beanbag round. Hernandez immediately went limp, then collapsed on to the overpass, pulled to safety by the crowd of cops that had gathered around Norem.

Hernandez landed hard, appearing unconscious. Walker kicked the knife away and pointed a handgun at the suspect as other cops pinned him to the concrete.

Madrid cuffed Hernandez's hands behind his back. She took a deep breath of relief, believing the danger was over, then looked up at Norem’s face for the first time.

Oh my god, she thought.

Streaks of red ran from Norem’s right eye down his cheek and neck. His elbow had been slashed open, and the hair on his forearm was slicked with drying blood. A bloodstain grew on his back, where deep stab wounds in his shoulder were oozing through his beige uniform.

“He had so much blood on him,” Madrid said. “It was like a cup of blood, and although I couldn’t really tell where it was all coming from, you knew it was severe.”

Amanda Norem was asleep at her home in Hemet when her phone rattled her awake. The caller was a Highway Patrol officer who worked with her husband in Riverside. This was the call she had feared since the day she fell in love with a cop.

“Amanda, this is Seth,” the trooper on the phone said. “Dane is OK, but he has been hurt.”

“He’s has been stabbed. A few times.”

Amanda rushed out of bed and dressed while a patrol trooper drove to her house to pick her up. Her mind raced and the minutes seemed to last forever. Her husband had been stabbed. Where? How? Was he still in danger? With no answers, she clung to the only good news she could think of. The highway patrol had called. If her husband was going to die, the troopers would have come to her doorstep instead.

On the way to the Riverside Community Hospital, Seth told Amanda that her husband had been stabbed in the eye. She shuddered, picturing a dagger in his socket, thrust in up to the hilt.

If he had been stabbed like that, she thought, how “OK” could he really be?

At the hospital, she got her answer. Norem lay in a hospital bed with streaks of blood leaking from a white bandage wrapped around the top half of his face. The sheet beneath his shoulder was dyed a deep red. Doctors were stapling a gash across his elbow shut.

But the mood, surprisingly, was light. Troopers had crowded into the hospital room to visit Norem. The cops – as they often do – were joking around. Norem was in pain but still laughing.

Amanda breathed a little easier for the first time since her phone had rang.

“It was a sight that I wish I didn’t have to see,” Amanda said. “But I was glad to see everyone was joking around.”

Doctors had good news and bad news. The stab wounds on Norem’s back, shoulder and elbow were painful but superficial. Recovery should be only a matter of time, they said.

But the damage to his eye was much more complex.

The knife blade had sliced the face of Norem's eyeball, spilling out a watery fluid that keeps an eye pressurized from within. Doctors could inject more fluid to keep the eyeball from collapsing, but they couldn’t repair a slash across Norem’s iris – the colored portion of his eye – which now flopped open like a peeled banana. The hanging flap of iris had to be removed so Norem's eyeball could be stitched closed, but the surgery left his pupil shaped like a keyhole, unable to contract under bright lights.

Norem was out of the hospital in about two days, sent home with bandages on his arm and a large, itchy eye patch he was told to wear for at least a week. His wife tried to keep his spirits high, joking that now he had potential as a pirate, and his kids nicknamed him Mike Wazowski, a reference to the goofy, one-eyed hero of Monsters, Inc.

But, inside, Norem was frustrated and afraid. His misshapen pupil was unable to adjust to light, so his eye could barely read or decipher faces. It stung when he tried to watch TV or look at his phone. Daylight was blinding. Fluorescent lights were torture.

Most importantly, with so much damage to his dominant eye, Norem could not aim down a rifle sight.

If he couldn’t do that, he couldn’t be a cop.

“Pretty much everyone thought I was done,” Norem said. “I was all but 100 percent certain that I was not going to return to the job. At that point, I was just wondering what I was going to do.”

Stuck at home, scarred and bandaged, Norem tried to imagine himself as anything other than a police officer. He had wanted to be in the Highway Patrol ever since he was a teenager, back when he racked up a few tickets and a benevolent trooper cut him some slack. Norem first applied for the job at age 21, but he was told he needed “more life experience,” so he joined the Air Force, where he became a nuclear weapons technician instead.

Twelve years later, Norem came back to the Highway Patrol, more than qualified, to get the job he had always wanted. He spent two years on the road in central Los Angeles before being transferred to Riverside, where he worked the night shift patrolling State Road 91.

Most troopers hate night shifts, but Norem was happy.

Now that entire life was in jeopardy.

“I thought that I couldn’t be a patrolman and I’d probably be removed from the Air Force as well,” Norem said, describing his life after the injury. “It’s what I loved doing, but what do you do now? Maybe you could sell furniture? Or work on cars? Maybe you have other talents? But where do you even restart?”

In the end, Norem decided not to restart at all. About three months after the stabbing, he anxiously returned to work at his station, limited to “light duty.” The Highway Patrol started finding odd jobs for Norem to do.

First, he repainted the station. Then he worked at the front desk. Then he helped file court paperwork. Then he took responsibility for the station’s Breathalyzers, delicate devices that require regular calibration.

All of the work was important, but none of it was the job Norem had dreamed of. He wasn't out on patrol, keeping the roads safe. On light duty, he wasn't allowed to wear a uniform or carry his badge or gun.

He felt like he was barely a cop at all.

Never was that more apparent than on Feb. 3, 2013, when every other police officer in Southern California went into high alert.

That was the night that Chris Dorner, an ex-Los Angeles Police Department officer, shot a University of Southern California police officer and the daughter of an LAPD captain in a parking lot in Irvine. The next day, Dorner published a manifesto online, announcing “warfare” on the LAPD and their families.

A statewide manhunt began, drawing cops from throughout California. But not Norem. Half-blind and unable to defend himself, he was stuck on light duty. Nothing about Dorner was light.

Norem called his bosses anyway, begging for a role to play. He said he would help search, without a uniform and a gun, if necessary. He offered to hand out water as a volunteer. They said it just wasn’t safe.

“He could not stand it,” Amanda said. “He wanted to be out there so bad.”

Three days after Dorner's manifesto was published, his rampage came closer to home. Dorner fired on two LAPD officers in Corona, grazing one, then fatally shot another officer, Riverside Police Officer Mike Crain, on the corner of Magnolia Avenue and Arlington Avenue.

The shooting scene was just a few blocks from where Norem normally would be on patrol. Dorner had likely used State Road 91 to get from one shooting to another, driving under the La Sierra overpass where Norem was stabbed four months earlier.

“It was at a time when I normally would have been on shift, working with my friends – and to some degree – my family,” Norem said.

“I just remember just sitting around, not being able to help.”

In the two years after he got stabbed, Norem got used to getting awards and posing for pictures. This was the life of a hero cop.

First, in April 2013, Norem was given an award by the Riverside County Law Enforcement Appreciation Committee at a gala in Temecula. Four months later, Gov. Jerry Brown gave Norem the California Medal of Valor – the state’s highest honor – at a ceremony in Sacramento. Then the California Highway Patrol gave Norem a second Medal of Valor, praising him for his “courage, dedication and quick-thinking.” After that, the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office took its turn, calling Norem “our hero” and thanking him for the “bravery and selflessness he showed by never letting go.”

But awards and kind words don’t heal wounds. And Norem’s wound wasn't getting any better.

By the spring of 2015, Norem had spent more than a year and a half on light duty at the patrol station in Riverside, limping along as a cop with no uniform, badge or gun. He knew this couldn’t last forever – light duty is always intended as a temporary assignment. At some point, he would be expected to recover enough for full duty or retire because he could not do the job.

But Norem wasn’t ready for either. He hadn’t prepared for another career, and doctors had said a year ago that his eyesight was as good as it was going to get. Norem had tried to return to full duty in 2014, riding patrols with a partner on a trial basis, but the Highway Patrol decided his vision just wasn’t good enough.

Desperate, Norem began to search online for an answer that had been overlooked. Maybe, out there somewhere, there was an eye surgery option that his doctors had never considered.

Finally, he found an answer. It hadn’t been overlooked.

It was new.

A state-of-the-art procedure, so cutting edge that his other doctors didn’t know about it, was now in the works at UCLA. Surgeons were replacing damaged irises with new prosthetics that could block light and restore vision. The Food and Drug Administration hadn’t approved the devices for a clinical trial until 2013, a year after Norem had been stabbed on the overpass.

Ecstatic, Norem emailed UCLA. University doctors called back, saying they weren't taking any patients for at least 18 months, but they knew someone who was. They directed Norem to Dr. Sam Masket, a renowned Los Angeles ophthalmologist who was collecting patients for the same trial.

Masket, after meeting Norem just once, knew he had to help.

“He was so modest. He didn’t in any way try to let me know he was a hero,” Masket said, describing his first impressions of Norem.

"And I couldn’t imagine such an act of violence – attacking someone who was trying to save you. It made no sense to me. It still makes no sense to me.”

Masket explained how the new prosthesis worked. He would take detailed photographs of Norem’s good eye to serve as a model for a custom-made silicon disc, less than a half of a millimeter thick, that would replace his damaged iris. The disc would correct Norem’s misshapen pupil and filter out excess light, vastly improving his vision. And his rebuilt eye would appear almost indistinguishable from his real eye.

The surgery sounded too good to be true, but soon Norem saw the proof. In Masket’s office, he crossed paths with another patient – the son of highway patrol officer, coincidentally – who had been born with no irises due to a congenital defect.

Masket had given him two silicon implants.

Dane and Amanda peered deeply into the young man’s new eyes. They looked normal.

“That blew us away,” Amanda said. “Suddenly, we were so hopeful.”

But, of course, there was another problem.

Because Norem had been injured on the job, all of his medical treatment fell under the stringent, bureaucratic purview of California’s Workers Compensation Program. As a general rule, workers comp won’t pay for procedures that are in FDA trials because they are wary of spending public funds on unproven surgeries. Norem’s case was no different. Despite all of California's praise for the trooper, the state did not plan to pay for his prosthetic. It appeared Norem would be stuck paying for the surgery himself – a cost of about $38,000.

Norem hired an attorney, hoping to pressure the state to reverse its position. The argument was simple: If Norem didn’t get the surgery, he would be forced to retire at a young age, which would ultimately be more expensive for the state in the long run.

Masket took a different approach. Infuriated by the inability to get the surgery paid for, he launched a charity – The Samuel & Barbara Masket Foundation – which would collect donations to buy artificial irises for patients in need. Norem would be the foundation’s first beneficiary.

“We had always thought it would be nice to form a foundation, but Dane was the main stimulus to actually do it,” Masket said. “I was so horrified that this incredible young man, with such a story, would be denied the opportunity to have this device.”

In the end, the California Division of Workers Compensation caved to Norem’s attorney, agreeing to pay for his surgery, allowing Masket’s foundation to save its money for other patients. (It has since bought six artificial irises for other patients, the doctor said.)

Norem finally got his surgery in July 2015, becoming only the 157th person in the United States to receive an artificial iris as part of the FDA trial. At a surgery center in Los Angeles, Masket gingerly sliced open the front of Norem’s cornea, removing his damaged iris and a clouded lens, inserted a new artificial lens and silicon iris, then finally sealed it all with tiny sutures. The entire surgery was minuscule, performed by a microscope, with cuts no bigger than a few millimeters.

Norem went home wearing an eye patch, his new eye hidden underneath like a Christmas present waiting to be unwrapped.

In the morning, he dared to lift the patch as his wife watched.

Light flooded over Norem’s new eye, but for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t blinded. His keyhole pupil was gone.

“The difference was beyond dramatic,” Norem said. “It wasn’t exactly high definition … but I was able to see instantly and clearly, something I wasn’t able to do for the better part of three years at that time.”

With his sight restored, Norem’s next task was to watch Javier Hernandez go to prison.

Over the past three years, as Norem had climbed a steep path back to police work, Hernandez' court case had crept towards what seemed like an inevitable conviction. Hernandez had been charged with attempted murder of a police officer for the stabbing, and the evidence was strong. Not only had witnesses seen Hernandez attack Norem, but the entire incident was captured on the trooper’s patrol car dash camera.

Hernandez went to trial anyway, arguing he had intended to kill only himself, and was convicted of most charges, including attempted murder. His sentencing was set for August 2015, one month after Norem's surgery.

Norem attended the hearing, but opted not to speak. Punishment, he decided, wasn’t his job.

“It was mind boggling to me that he wasn’t angry,” said John Walker, the San Bernardino sheriff’s sergeant, now lieutenant who helped Norem on the overpass. “Sitting there in court, Dane held no ill will toward Hernandez. It rang so loudly to me.”

Hernandez was sentenced to life in prison with parole eligibility in 18 years. Riverside County Judge Michele Levine stressed that, as Hernandez was stabbing Norem on the overpass, the cop was well within his right to use deadly force. Norem had stubbornly insisted on saving a life instead of ending one.

"I believe you are the quintessential definition of courage and bravery," Levine said as the hearing ended.

When the sentencing was over, Norem returned his attention to getting back on road patrols. He re-enrolled in the Highway Patrol academy in Sacramento, taking a refresher course so he could be re-certified as a law enforcement officer, then retook tests for pursuit driving and shooting. At a rifle range in Corona, he pressed an M4 semi-automatic rifle against his right shoulder, looked down the sight with his rebuilt eye and hit the target every time. Just to be sure, the Highway Patrol asked him to do it again.

“That was by far the biggest question – Are you going to be able to do this?” Norem said. "And I was.”

Norem returned to full duty in October 2015, three years after the stabbing on the overpass. He picked up right where he left off, patrolling State Road 91.

"It was a great feeling to be back on the road and back in uniform," Norem said. “Driving out of the little fenced-in area where we keep the cars was like going back to an old friend."

Two months later, crisis struck California again.

This time, Norem was on duty when duty called.

In the neighboring city of San Bernardino, a county health inspector and his wife – Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Mailk – opened fire on an office Christmas party in an ISIS-inspired domestic terror attack at the Inland Regional Center. Fourteen people were killed and 22 were injured. The shooters briefly escaped before being killed by police in a gun battle.

Norem left his patrol when he heard a radio call of "shots fired" and "officers in need of assistance." He rushed towards San Bernardino, arriving in time to guard a police perimeter while a helicopter swept the city, chasing rumors of a third shooter that turned out to be false.

Halfway across the country, Amanda was getting out of a plane at the Dallas airport when a friend texted her a photograph she had seen in the news.

It was a photo her husband, crouching behind a police car with his rifle ready.

Amanda looked at an airport TV and realized what was going on.

“I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? Can you really not stay out of harm’s way?’” Amanda said. “But I know that’s just who he is. That’s our reality for the rest of his career.”

On a summer Saturday in early August, Dane Norem stepped off a plane at the Ontario International Airport wearing camo Air Force fatigues. After eight months at the Ahmed Al Jaber Air Base in Kuwait, he was home.

In a way, this deployment had been the last milestone in Norem’s recovery from the stabbing on the Riverside overpass five years ago. Despite a knife to the eye, Norem had now proven that he could see, he could work, he could drive, he could shoot and he could be a police officer.

And now, if he had to, he could go to war.

Norem had wanted to be in the Highway Patrol since he was a teenager, but military service was in his blood. His father was in the Air Force. Three of his grandparents were Marines. He had spent 12 years as an airman before he ever became a trooper, and as soon as he had settled in as a cop, he went back to the military to enlist with California Air National Guard based out of Moreno Valley.

“When I was first hurt, I had only been with the unit for right about a year at that point,” Norem said. “I was always worried it was going to affect my employment there – either medically retire or just have to separate.”

Although Norem worried he would be disqualified as a guardsman, he never actually left the Air National Guard in the three years it took to get his eye fixed. Norem was back at training only two months after the stabbing. Guard leaders put him to work as an aircraft mechanic.

Four years later, after his eye surgeries were behind him, Norem was cleared for deployment. In January he was sent to Kuwait, where he handled lodging, morale and discipline issues for a civil engineer squadron at the air base. The entire base is working in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, and although Kuwait isn’t hostile, troops still had to be wary of an attack at any time.

But one thing Norem never had to worry about was his eye. Ever since his artificial iris surgery, he is no longer sensitive to bright lights and his sight has been mostly restored. Scarring in his right eye creates some mirror images at the edge of his vision (not unlike how Hollywood portrays a fly’s eyesight) but additional surgeries can probably help.

At a glance, Norem’s bad eye is indistinguishable from his good one. Even if you stare, the only lasting sign of the stabbing is a scar on Norem’s cheekbone.

On Monday, Norem returned to the job he fought so long to keep. Most likely, the Highway Patrol will put him right back on State Road 91, on the night shift, just like he was five years ago.

Most days, Norem will drive under the La Sierra overpass, where he risked it all to save a life.

“Would I do it again?” Norem asked, thinking aloud. “I wouldn’t want to do it again, but I’m still on the job. I’m still taking those calls for help. So, yeah, I guess I’m still doing it.”

He paused to think.

“That’s probably not the answer my wife wants to hear.”

Reporter Brett Kelman can be reached by phone at (760) 778-4642, by email at brett.kelman@desertsun.com, or on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman.