Life can be so mean and unfair sometimes and make you suffer for things you have not done, but its important to let the light of goodness shine brightly in you and overtake the darkness.
A man who was wrongly imprisoned risked his life to save a police officer from his burning car, the crash involved a police cruiser happened just outside the apartment of Daylan Mclee in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
It was so loud that Mclee thought it was an earthquake, but when his relative told him it was an accident, the 31-year-old immediately took action and helped pull out police officer Jay Hanley from the mangled car before flames totally consumed it. “I don’t know what came across me, but I ripped the door open and just pulled him to safety across the street,” Mclee said.
Hanley’s family and fellow police officers thanked Mclee and appreciated his bravery and putting his life on the line to save another life.
Mclee said, “There is value in every human life. We are all children of God and I can’t imagine just watching anyone burn. No matter what other people have done to me, or other officers, I thought, ‘This guy deserves to make it home safely to his family.’”
Mclee had apparently some run-ins with the law and had even filed a lawsuit in 2018 against four Pennsylvania State Police Troopers for wrongful arrest. He had gone to a bar to pick up his sister, but a fight broke out and Mclee disarmed a man with a gun and threw the weapon aside. A police trooper shot at Mclee, claiming Mclee pointed a gun towards him which landed him in prison for a year, but later the jury discharged Mclee after reviewing a security camera that invalidated the police trooper’s claim.
Again a few months ago, he had fled from police officers who approached them with plain clothes and guns drawn as he didn’t know that they were cops till they announced their identity. Although he submitted to them, they still charged him with fleeing and resisting arrest and says that an officer kicked him in the face during the arrest and he plans to press charges against him.
But he still chooses to forgive in spite of all the injustices and prejudice he has faced from police officers. “We need to work on our humanity … that’s the main problem of this world,” he said. “We’re stuck on how to get up or to get even, and that is not how I was raised to be. You learn, you live, you move on and I was always taught to forgive big. You can’t base every day of your life off of one interaction you have with one individual.”
Alec Wright, Mclee’s attorney, said, “Over the course of his life, Daylan McLee has had multiple, unjustified encounters with police officers just because of the color of his skin,” Wright said. “Those encounters make him the perfect candidate to hate and resent the police. But, that is not Daylan… The answer is not to disregard human life; the answer is to accept it for all that it is. That is Daylan.”
As our country continues to face protests against racial injustice and prejudices, our prayer is that racial equality should be established in our country because no one should be treated unfairly on the basis of their skin color and race.
