Detroit Officer Amanda Hudgens
I have written Profiles of Valor for many years, most often about past and current recipients of the Medal of Honor. However, every week I review accounts of law enforcement officers (LEOs) killed in the line of duty.
Being a police academy graduate early in my career, and having served as a uniformed police officer, my association with LEOs and agencies has continued for decades. My connection with and advocacy for our brothers and sisters on that Blue Line has never ceased.
That advocacy has been particularly important since the summer of 2020, when Joe Biden and his Democrat race-hustling cadres politicized the death of a Minneapolis street thug in police custody, a career criminal and perennial drug offender with a violent history.
Endeavoring to enflame their (now defunct) so-called "Black Lives Matter" radicals and their antifa movement of self-styled “anti-fascist” fascists ahead of the 2020 election, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, they succeeded in turning the deceased into a "victim," fomenting riots nationwide under the “I can’t breath” mantra.
As Booker T. Washington declared a century ago, "There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.” (For the record, if Democrats really believed that Black lives mattered, they would be focused on their failed social policies resulting in the grossly-disproportionate record of daily Black-on-Black murders and violence.)
That "summer of rage" surge of violence across our nation resulted in dozens of civilian murders, billions in damage to private and public properties, and a significant increase in assaults against police officers. That record violence spilled over into the years that followed and has yet to subside.
In due respect to the officers who put their lives on the line every day, I am devoting this valor profile to one instance of the heroic actions by officers that occur almost daily across our nation, while defending fellow officers and citizens alike.
In this case, I salute Detroit Officer Amanda Hudgens, who protected her dying partner, Loren Courts, despite imminent threat to her own life.
The incident in question was typical of those that are repeated many times each day in mostly urban centers across our nation — officers responding to a “shots fired” call. But in this case, it was an ambush.
As Hudgens recounts the tragedy: “We’ve answered thousands of shots fired runs. He looks at me and I look at him. He asked, ‘You got me?’ Always. We do our special handshake. Then, I just knew. I got you.”
She continued: “We pull in. I remember hearing the gunshots, seeing the muzzle flash, feeling the glass break, and seeing him get out of the car as I’m getting out of the car. We run, in sync – we move in sync, everything we do is in sync. He goes one way, I’m going the same. We’ve got each other, always. I see him holding his neck, and then he collapsed, and I just, I screamed a horrific scream. I couldn’t – the east side heard me. Everybody heard me. I know the city of Detroit heard me, and I just held him, and I held pressure. I remember turning around and I remember seeing the assailant. I just looked at Loren, said, ‘I love you’ – I wasn’t letting go of him, because I won’t ever let go of him, and I just held on and I turned my back. I couldn’t drag him to cover because I couldn’t let go. The only thing I could think of was to be his cover, and just hold him.”
Courts suffered a mortal wound, and as the assailant rushed Hudgens position, but she kept pressure on Courts’s wound in hopes of preventing him from bleeding out. Hudgens says: “I just begged him not to go. I could feel him breathing, and then it’s slowing down, and I just started to scream, ‘Help me.’ And I feel like he was watching over me, because that’s when the other officers came, because I was bracing to get shot in my back.”
Fortunately, the 19-year old assailant was killed by other officers just before he reached Hudgens and Courts. In the previous two years he had seven other police encounters. This was another case of a Black assailant murdering a Black officer.
Detroit PD Chief James White described Hudgens’s actions as “beyond hero.”
Officer Courts is survived by his wife, Kristine, his 15-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter.
Subsequently, in reference to the hatred Demos have heaped on police officers, Hudgens said: “I’m a police officer. … I’m used to the hate.”
The fact is, police officers risk their lives daily, often for those who despise them. In the wake of the Demos’ “defund the police” campaigns, their jobs are much deadlier.
According to a just-released report from the Fraternal Order of Police, there were a record 378 law enforcement officers shot in 2023. According to the data, 46 officers were killed, 20 of whom were targeted in the 115 ambush attacks on officers. There were 138 officers shot in ambush attacks.
Please join me in prayer for our nation’s First Responders and their families.” Thank you, First Responders.