Former SWAT team leader lifts veil on PTSD

When you think about Navy SEALS, Green Berets and SWAT police officers, you may be linking them to the Hollywood stars pretending to be them. Tougher than tough, trained killers unable to feel regret but that is not the truth. They are still as human as anyone else.

Here's a story you won't read about often. An ex-SWAT team leader talks about PTSD and the price he paid for what he had to do.

In tailspin after police shootings, former SWAT team leader lifts veil on post-traumatic stress syndrome

Curtis Rush
Police Reporter

It was 12 years ago when Jim Bremner killed a man.

Looking at him now, balding at age 52, with sorrowful blue eyes and an apple-pie humbleness, it’s hard to imagine him as a trained killer.

Now he’s a spiritual man who talks about lifting the veil of secrecy over an alpha-swagger police culture that treats post-traumatic stress disorder as a weakness.

But 12 years ago, he was a different man. He was the team leader of Special Weapons Team One on the elite Emergency Task Force.

He was the best of the best. An assassin if he needed to be.

However, nobody trained him how to deal with the crippling emotions, nightmares and flashbacks that followed.

How terribly ironic that it was in a major metropolitan hospital, where countless lives are saved, that he took a life with an assault rifle on New Year’s Eve in 1999.

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