On Dec. 27, 2021, life changed for Lakewood Police Agent, Ashley Ferris.
She was the officer who stopped a shooter who had just killed 5 people in Lakewood and Denver that day. Agent Ferris has told her story from that time but there's a part of it she's never told, until now.
That day Ferris found, of all things, purpose. “I needed a moment that would shake me and wake me and that's what I got.”
No one knew it at the time, but Ferris was going through a tough time. “I was struggling with hypervigilance and stress, and I needed to be getting mental health help that I wasn't getting,” Ferris said. “It was my first Christmas alone after going through divorce. I was really miserable. I was feeling very alone.”
She was also working a lot of overtime, which just so happens to be the reason she was working that day.
“I went and I parked in the spot that I always park, it was a church parking lot,” Ferris said. “I just remember, and I sat there and I just started a spiral and I was crying and I was texting someone saying 'I just can't do this anymore'. That person said 'are you planning on hurting yourself? Are you planning on killing yourself?' All the questions that we ask as police officers and I didn't respond, I navigated around it. And the truth was I was going to kill myself. I was gonna go home that night after work and use my off-duty gun and take my own life."
She didn't know it but fate would intervene just moments down the road when she would be confronted by a killer in the middle of an intersection. He shot her and she fatally shot him back.
It was that day that her life was saved.