Kevin Mohat remembers the day he died.

On Valentine’s Day 2022, my heart stopped beating while behind the wheel on Warner Road and Ray Road.

“I had a widow’s heart attack in my car,” said Gilbert, a 61-year-old man. “At first I hit the brakes, but then I leaned forward and pushed the car into the parking lot.

“I lost my life, I am dead.”

Mohat’s car survived three or four light changes as other vehicles drove around him. Finally, a woman stopped behind to check on what had happened and noticed that Mohat’s skin was blue.

She called for help from passing motorists, who pulled her out of the car and gave her life-saving cardiopulmonary resuscitation. While the woman was performing 150 chest compressions, the man called 911. Two police officers took turns arriving at the scene and together they pressed the center of the woman’s chest a total of 1,050 times, Mohat said.

“The amount of pressure they put on me was just despicable,” he said. “They hit me in the heart 1,200 times. I’m surprised it didn’t break.”

Four months after Mohat’s death, Gilbert Police announced they had equipped all of their patrol cars with fully automated external defibrillators.

Done correctly, this portable medical device delivers an electrical shock to the heart to restore a normal heartbeat, unlike CPR, which restores blood flow to vital organs such as the brain and heart.

Police spokesman Levi Leyva said the 92 cars were priced at $1,736 each and were funded from the budget after the department failed to secure subsidies.

“These AEDs are bilingual and fully automated, allowing officers to receive on-screen CPR feedback on the depth and rate of compressions needed during use,” he said.

Leyva said Griffith Bluehart helped develop the Gilbert Police Department’s AED program.

“Brandon Griffiths shared his story with Gilbert PD and we were able to recognize the need to respond quickly to cardiac emergencies,” Leyva said. “Having his AED on patrol vehicles, along with training in hands-on CPR, could make a difference in survival rates when calling for service.”

Griffiths did not respond to a request for comment.

Griffiths, who is also a Pinal County Sheriff’s Deputy, founded the nonprofit in 2014 to train law enforcement and equip AEDs. The organization is close and dear to Griffith, who died of cardiac arrest at the age of 26. Saved by his wife, Griffith has a defibrillator implanted in his chest.

“I’ve been on the job, helping people who needed chest compressions,” Leiva said. “For me personally, I can’t tell if an AED is better because each request for service has a different degree of need.

“These were recently installed in patrol vehicles, so there are no service calls to compare how good this unit is for police officers and the community.”

Numerous studies have shown that police officers, who are often the first to arrive at an emergency medical scene, have higher survival rates if they have a defibrillator. Studies have also shown that if a defibrillator is introduced within 3-5 minutes of him collapsing, his survival rate can reach 50-70%.

Given the fact that cardiopulmonary resuscitation alone has a 6% chance of survival for a person who goes into sudden cardiac arrest, according to a trade publication for local governments in the United States, a defibrillator can dramatically improve that chance. Police cars are increasingly equipped with AEDs.

The Chandler Police Department received $10,500 from the Arizona 100 Club in 2020 to purchase an AED, but other law enforcement agencies in the state, including Sedona, Flagstaff, Marana, and Oro Valley, also have AEDs.

About 805,000 people in the country have a heart attack each year, according to the American Heart Association, with 605,000 having their first heart attack and the remainder having had a previous heart attack.

The nonprofit reports that 436,000 Americans die from cardiac arrest each year, more than 350,000 of which occur outside of hospitals.

That Gilbert now has an AED is something Mohat defends. He wrote to the mayor, city council and mayor asking why the police did not have this machine.

“I went to a hardware store and they had an AED machine,” he said. “I asked myself, ‘Why does a home improvement store have it and not the police?’ It didn’t make sense.

“I’m a big proponent of having an AED device in their car. They didn’t have one for me. They put the old-fashioned pressure on me.”

When paramedics arrived, Mohat said they put an IV into the bone marrow in his left arm because he was dead and had no living veins.

“And they gave me two shocks,” he said. “It didn’t work.”

An ambulance paramedic impacted Mr. Mohat with an AED, which briefly revived him. He got up, quickly got up and lay down.

He was rushed to hospital, where a catheter (a thin, flexible metal tube) was inserted into a coronary artery to remove the clot.

According to the American Heart Association, only 12% of widowed heart attacks and myocardial infarctions that occur outside the hospital survive. This fatal stroke occurs when the heart’s largest artery, the left anterior descending artery, which supplies oxygen-rich blood to the heart’s left ventricle, becomes 100% blocked. It is given an informal name because it mainly affects men.

“The moment they removed the clot and hit me with electricity, I came back to life,” Mohat said. “I was in a pitch black, pitch black horror, and I remember exactly the specific moment it happened. “

He said he was temporarily deaf and blind because blood had not been pumping to his retinas, ears, or other parts of his body for 15 minutes.

A few people held him down as he screamed for his wife, Connie. He was intubated and medically placed in a coma.

“Even though they knew what happened to me, I was alive and doing very well,” Mohat said. “This was at 1:20 pm on Monday. I’ll be in ICU until Thursday and Thursday night, but I was moved to a regular room on Friday.”

On Saturday, Mohat was released from the hospital and returned home.

“They all thought I was dead,” he said, adding that he then stopped to visit with the drivers and first responders who had come to the rescue. “The look on their faces was, ‘You’re dead.'”

Mohat said he doubted the deputy commissioner would have addressed the heart because the aorta had been completely blocked, but he still supported police instituting the program.

Experts say AEDs should only be used when sudden cardiac arrest occurs due to an electrical problem in the heart. However, a heart attack can cause changes in the heart’s electrical activity, leading to sudden cardiac arrest, in which case a defibrillator is used.

Initially, the heart attack was a mystery to Mohat. Mohat said his family had no history of heart disease and had a heart rate of 55 and a blood pressure reading of 95/65.

“I feel great,” said the musician, who plays guitar and writes songs. “I don’t smoke either. I’m retired from Taekwondo. I’ve been playing ice hockey my whole life.”

He regularly set solid times of at least an hour on the ice. On the day of his heart attack, he was playing hockey at AZ Ice near Santan Village Parkway and Ray Road.

“After about an hour of skating, I started feeling like I was skating at 800 pounds,” Mohat recalls. “I literally could barely move.”

Mohat, who was vaccinated last October and contracted Covid-19 in January, blamed the virus for his lack of energy.

“I thought Covid-19 was my problem,” he said, recalling struggling to get off his skates and safety gear.

He was on the road heading east towards Higley and Warner, about a mile from his home in Cooley Station, when his heart collapsed.

Mohat said the doctor who examined the blood clot told him it was due to the coronavirus vaccine and not the kind of blood clots found in people with normal heart disease. He said he worked in real estate and was in public contact with people, and that his wife had cancer at the time, so he got the Moderna vaccine.

The heart is now “functioning very well”, but the lack of oxygen has caused 30% damage to the ends of the muscular organs. He has had to wear a defibrillator vest for three months and is on medication to keep his heart from overworking.

He is currently undergoing physical therapy with hip replacement surgery because he injured his left hip joint for some reason when he was pulled out of the car.

“Anyway, this is a miracle,” Mohat said. “I saw myself die.

Mohat’s favorite sayings are: “God is real, miracles happen every day, heaven is beyond words. I will go again someday.”

For now, he said, “I’m ready to buy a hockey stick and I’m going back to ice hockey.”