{"id":204083,"date":"2026-03-14T04:10:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-14T04:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/204083\/"},"modified":"2026-03-14T04:10:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-14T04:10:07","slug":"a-decade-after-being-shot-six-times-fort-worth-detective-focuses-on-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/204083\/","title":{"rendered":"A decade after being shot six times, Fort Worth detective focuses on family"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday marks a milestone Fort Worth Police Detective Matt Pearce<\/a> never takes for granted.<\/p>\n

A decade ago, Pearce was shot six times<\/a> while chasing a suspect wanted on felony warrants. He was the first officer to find the man \u2013 but, as Pearce puts it, “the suspect was first to shoot.”<\/p>\n

Pearce said the moments leading up to the gunfire remain vivid.<\/p>\n

“It still lives fresh in my memory, like it happened yesterday,” he said.<\/p>\n

Body\u2011camera video from that day shows Pearce running through a wooded area moments before the suspect opened fire.<\/p>\n

“Time slowed down to the point where when he raised that gun, I could see the nose of that bullet through the barrel,” Pearce recalled. “When they impacted me\u2026 it literally knocked me over backwards, like you see in a movie.”<\/p>\n

Wounded and struggling to breathe, Pearce tried to call out “blue,” the distress word officers use to signal they’ve been shot.<\/p>\n

“I couldn’t catch my breath,” he said. “Even when I’m trying to yell ‘blue,’ I couldn’t get a full breath.”<\/p>\n

A decade of physical healing \u2013 and lingering memories<\/p>\n

Pearce survived six gunshot wounds, including one to the head.<\/p>\n

The bullet “traveled down my face, broke my jaw, wrapped around the back of my neck, [and] came up to less than the width of a human hair to my heart,” he said.<\/p>\n

He spent weeks at JPS Hospital, followed by months of rehabilitation, learning to walk and talk again.<\/p>\n

But while his body has healed, the memories remain close.<\/p>\n

“It’s been ten years, but in my mind it hasn’t been ten months,” Pearce said.<\/p>\n

“Please tell me he’s not going to die”<\/p>\n

For his wife, Laura, the trauma of those days never fully fades.<\/p>\n

She remembers a nurse sitting beside her during one of the darkest moments.<\/p>\n

“I remember saying, ‘Please tell me he’s not going to die,'” Laura said through tears. “She looked at me and said, ‘I can’t tell you that. But what I can tell you is that we’re going to do everything we can.'”<\/p>\n

Doctors and nurses did exactly that.<\/p>\n

Back to the job he loves<\/p>\n

Eighteen months after being shot, Pearce returned to the Fort Worth Police Department. Two years later, he revisited the spot where he nearly died.<\/p>\n

Since then, life has been full \u2013 and busy.<\/p>\n

Pearce has been promoted to detective. His daughters, Madison and Makayla, are now 11 and 13, active in school and sports. Laura works as a nurse at Cook Children’s.<\/p>\n

“I’m thankful I got to see my kids grow up”<\/p>\n

Pearce said the tenth anniversary of his “alive day” is less about the shooting and more about the life he’s lived since.<\/p>\n

“I’m thankful I got to see my kids grow up,” he said. “That was the biggest thing. I remember having that conversation with myself laying in that field.”<\/p>\n

Between school events, practices, and volleyball tournaments, the Pearce family stays constantly on the move \u2013 and he wouldn’t have it any other way.<\/p>\n

“We run our tails off\u2026 and it’s exhausting,” Pearce said. “But I love watching them. I have the blessing of being an exhausted parent. I’ll complain about it until the day I die, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.”<\/p>\n

A quiet anniversary<\/p>\n

The family isn’t planning anything special for the ten\u2011year mark.<\/p>\n

Just being together, they say, is more than enough.<\/p>\n

In:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sunday marks a milestone Fort Worth Police Detective Matt Pearce never takes for granted. A decade ago, Pearce…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204084,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[116,118,117,430,27],"class_list":["post-204083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth-headlines","tag-fort-worth-news","tag-north-texas","tag-texas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}