I'll never forget the first time I killed a man.

Wait...I'm getting way ahead of myself calling it a killing. Yes, I did kill him, but you couldn't really classify it as a murder. I shot him in order to save an innocent person's life, in the line of duty.

I used to be a cop.

Well, I'm still a cop, but I guess I just don't feel like one. A righteous cop, anyway.

I almost lost everything.

It was a justified shooting ? a young man by the name of Tommy Ray Wallace.

To say that Tommy was born on the wrong side of the tracks was putting it mildly.

Born to an alcoholic mother and a father with a violent criminal background, Tommy had quickly become the poster boy for a dysfunctional family and child abuse.

By the time he was fifteen-years-old, he had already spent six months in a juvenile detention center for vandalism, theft, and killing a neighbor's dog with a baseball bat. Upon his release, the first thing he'd done was shoplift a bottle of liquor and gone on another violent rampage, this time attacking the liquor store's owner, choking him into unconsciousness.

And he was just getting started.