MODESTO, Calif. — A Modesto Police Officer is back on the job after he was seriously injured in a car accident on the job a little more than a year ago.
It took a long road to recovery, but Officer Juan Arroyo told ABC10 he is thrilled to get back to work.
"It felt like a dream, like one of those dreams where you're going to wake up and you're going to be like, 'Alright, everything's good.' But I wasn't waking up," Arroyo said.
Arroyo, 29, laced up his shoes and suited up for work one year after doctors worried he wouldn't make it through the night.
"It was emotional just because, at one point, I didn't think this day was going to come," he said.
Arroyo was seriously injured on January 16, 2018 when a suspected drunk driver ran a stop sign and destroyed his patrol car.
"How did I make it out?" he wondered.
He spent a week in the ICU, went through multiple surgeries and physical therapy, he even had to learn how to walk again.
"It was from a skull fracture to a fractured jaw, fractured ribs, broken pelvis, and a compound fracture in my left arm and a broken tibia," he said.
But later, Arroyo learned how to run again, too, with some help from kids training for the '10k with a Cop' program.
"It motivated me because it forced me to get off my chair when I didn't want to and run with them. Some of these kids are energetic and if you didn't run with them, they'll be like, 'Come on. I'll race you.' and you're like, 'Oh, man, I'm tired,' but they don't believe in excuses," he said.
A positive mindset, Arroyo says, helped him push through.
"I mean, we all go through down times in life. We can't hold it back. We can't let our situation hold us back, and that was my mindset. I was like, I need to get better. I need to get back to work. I love what I do and at the time I didn't think that my chapter was done," he said.
Arroyo says it all comes back to holding that thin blue line. While he was still recovering, Stanislaus County Sheriff's Deputy Tony Hinostroza was killed in a crash as he was also working to get a suspected drunk driver off the roads.
A month later, Arroyo lost his friend, Cpl. Ronil Singh of the Newman Police Department who was shot and killed in the line of duty.
"It didn't cross my mind like, 'Hey, I should leave law enforcement,' because we owe it up to them to continue holding the thin blue line. We can't let those situations scare us and keep us away from doing our job," he said.
Arroyo says he's read every letter, every post on social media using the hashtag #thumbsupforjuan and got a lot of support from his identical twin brother Officer Luis Arroyo who also works for the same department to get to this point today.
"It just feels nice. It's like riding a bicycle. You never truly forget how to ride a bicycle," he said. "There's nothing else I'd rather be doing than police work."
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"I could not imagine how they feel, and the grief that they have," a Seattle man told ABC10. He came all the way, "to be one of the people that's standing along the street when the motorcade goes by," and show his support for the Cpl. Singh's grieving family.