Air Force Veteran Dies From Medical Error, Returns With a Message

The Injury That Changed Everything

Chase grew up in Orlando, Florida, adopted by his grandparents from birth. His mother was 17 when she had him, his biological father never entered the picture, and his grandparents had already adopted several other children. Chase describes his family as wonderfully unconventional: "I actually have two Korean sisters, a Korean brother and a black brother." People at restaurants would ask what church they were with, unable to make sense of these different-looking kids piling out of a Tropic Traveler bus together.

In seventh grade, Chase joined a middle school ROTC program and knew immediately he'd found his path. His grandfather served in the military, his great-grandfather in the Navy. "There was always just something inside of me," Chase recalls, "that said you know this is this is what you need to do as well." The day he turned 17, he joined the Air Force. His father, an Army veteran, insisted on the Air Force. "I think he was always a little jealous of how good the Air Force had it," Chase says, "and you know as a parent you want the best for your kids."

He trained as a SERE instructor (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape), learning terrain and survival skills to teach pilots what to do if their aircraft went down. But during a training exercise, both his kneecaps dislocated and ruptured. The surgery that followed, a lateral release, didn't work. Chase reflects on how catastrophic it felt: "Up until that point I had a clear goal of what I wanted for my life and what I expected for my life you know 20 years in the military and once the knee injury happened it started to crumble my goals and my my vision for my life."

The Air Force began processing his medical retirement. He was 19, watching his entire future dissolve. He started showing up late to work, thinking bitterly, "What are they going to do, fire me?"

The Morning He Didn't Wake Up

One morning, Chase was really late. His supervisor came to his dorm room, expecting to catch him sleeping. Instead, she found him unconscious on the floor.

They rushed him to Langley Air Force Base hospital. Doctors ran every test they could think of: blood work, scans, drug screens. Nothing explained why a 20-year-old in peak physical condition would be unconscious. A nurse told him they'd do a chest x-ray, and if they still couldn't find anything, they'd send him home.

She adjusted his IV and left the room.

"From that moment," Chase says, "everything changed."

The alarm started blaring. His vision went hazy, tilting left and right like a movie scene. "It just didn't feel like reality," he remembers. Nurses and doctors came running so fast they nearly hit the wall at the end of the hallway. They surrounded his bed, and Chase could hear the nervousness in their voices.

Then someone sat down to his left. A hand stroked his arm. A calm voice told him everything would be okay.

The voice said: "You're going to have air is going to travel up your arm it's going to be really painful but everything's going to be okay."

The pain started. Chase describes it as feeling like "a silver bullet just a giant bullet... something 51 times too large in that vein." It traveled up his arm like a train heading toward his heart. His right leg kicked up reflexively. But the voice to his left kept reassuring him, kept stroking his arm. It was so calm, so certain, that Chase felt an impossible peace despite the agony.

He kept trying to look left, to see who was there. Finally, he did. "Not only was there nobody to the left of me but I saw the screen completely Flatline."

Leaving the Body

"In that moment as I saw myself Flatline," Chase says, "I started traveling upwards."

He felt his body release, like ice, like everything freeing up at once. Something poured out of his chest, a tunnel of light. "It was the best feeling I think I could ever experience," he recalls. "It was like this beautiful Blissful just this feeling of love surrounding my body."

He moved upward, unable to see where he was going but completely trusting the destination. If this feeling was just the journey, he thought, wherever he was headed must be impossibly beautiful.

He arrived in a garden.

The Garden Beyond

The garden was filled "with flowers and plants that we've never seen before and these beautiful colors and everything was just vibrant." Chase had to squint slightly, like looking into the sun. The colors weren't purple or red or blue in any earthly sense. They were brighter, warmer, vibrating with life.

Chase had grown up with a vague idea of heaven as clouds and peace, maybe Elvis waiting for him. This was nothing like that. "The heaven that I experienced," he says, "was so much more Vivid and so much more real."] There was no floating sensation. His body felt weightless, but the ground was solid. He could feel grains of dirt between his toes. (He hates being barefoot, which made the memory especially vivid.)

The plants and flowers didn't just look beautiful. He felt them. "When we walk past the tree or we walk down a sidewalk now you might say that's a beautiful plant or a beautiful flower where in heaven it felt like I was feeling the plants and the flowers."

This wasn't a dream. "When you dream," Chase explains, "you don't necessarily feel something you kind of Envision it... this was so real because I was feeling things."

Ahead of him, he saw a man in a robe chasing a little boy, maybe three or four years old, with curly blonde hair. The boy was running and laughing, looking back over his shoulder, being playful and cheeky. Chase watched this beautiful interaction, like a father and son playing.

Then he got closer and realized: that's me.

"I forgot I had blonde curly hair," Chase says, "and I used to be that happy and I used to just laugh all the time and smile constantly as a kid growing up no matter what was going on around me."

By 19, he'd forgotten how to be that happy. He'd become consumed with career, military rank, car payments. The little boy running through the garden was a reminder of who he used to be.

Meeting Jesus

The man in the robe turned toward Chase.

"I immediately knew it was Jesus," Chase says. "And I should say too Jesus didn't look like what I would have thought he would have looked like but I was so certain it was him."

Jesus had short brown hair, piercing green eyes, and the biggest grin possible. He looked healthy, peaceful, not the thin, long-haired figure from Sunday school paintings. But Chase knew: "As sure as you're sure of what your left hand and your right hand is and you look in the mirror and you know it's you I knew it was Jesus."

Jesus showed him the little boy, his younger self, and the message was clear: this is what your life should be. Spreading light, love, and laughter. It felt like a reminder of something Chase had always known but forgotten. "You've been here and you already know this," Jesus seemed to say, "like you you have forgotten it but you've all always known about the joys in life about finding any reason to make yourself smile throughout the day."]

At that moment in his life, Chase thought everything was over. His military career was ending, his goals were shattered. But this conversation told him: "I'm I'm focusing on all the wrong stuff here I'm focused on a career I'm focused on money I'm focused on making sure I can make a car pay when really none of that at the end of the day matters it's feeling fulfilled and feeling like I have given back to the world of uh making people smile."

They stood together for what felt like no time and infinite time at once. "I couldn't say if it was 5 minutes I couldn't say if it was 5 hours," Chase recalls. It was enough time to absorb so much knowledge, knowledge that felt familiar, like reuniting with an old friend.

Then Jesus joked and smiled: "You know you have to go back."

Chase didn't argue. "I said yeah I know and it was such a reminder that I have been here multiple times uh maybe not as dramatic as a near-death experience or or being flatlined but I have been there um so many times."

It was like saying goodbye to a friend you'd see again soon. "There was no part of my body that said I wanted to stay," Chase says. "It was just like you know spending time with a friend and you know you've got to go back to your house."] He understood he had more to do.

Waking Up in a Different City

Chase opened his eyes in a different hospital room, in a different city. The Air Force had sent him off-base to Hampton, Virginia, to be pronounced dead. But he was alive.

He tried to close his eyes and return to the garden, the way you try to return to a beautiful dream. It didn't work. His body felt completely normal. No chest pain. But he wasn't in the same room, and the people walking past weren't wearing military uniforms.

A nurse peeked in. She looked frazzled. "I'm going to go get a doctor," she said, and ran off. The doctor came back and told him, "I don't know what to tell you um but we're going to send you back to the Air Force and they're they can do what they want with you."

Chase called a friend. "I just died uh can you come pick me up from the hospital?" They went to Chick-fil-A. "I guess death made me very hungry," Chase jokes. They drove to Washington, D.C., for a few days, saw the monuments, took pictures. His left arm was black and blue from the air embolism, the bruising so severe he went back to the hospital for documentation.

The medical report confirmed: "Patients suffered an air embolism." A nurse had accidentally allowed air into his IV, sending it straight to his heart. The doctors couldn't explain how he survived. There was never an honest conversation about what happened or how he was still alive.

Chase didn't tell many people. He'd never heard the term "near-death experience." He thought people would think he was nuts.

The Life That Followed

By July 8, 2008, a few months later, Chase was fully retired from the military. Within a week, his life changed completely. "Anything that I had thought looked fun growing up or anything that interested me I said I'm going to go do it now."

He joined a breakdancing club at a university he didn't attend. He tried stand-up comedy. He became a photographer, shooting weddings. He learned ballroom dancing and became an instructor. "I just was almost like checking these things off of the box," he says, "of like I have another opportunity to be here and I'm going to go out and enjoy life."] He hosted contests with celebrities, appeared on TV, announced for a local baseball and hockey team in Norfolk, Virginia. He wanted desperately to do things that made him happy and spread the light, laughter, and love Jesus had told him to share.

But then he felt pressure to "grow up." He took a corporate job at a radio station. It paid the bills, bought a nice house. But he started to feel guilty: "I became selfish and I wasn't sharing laughter with everybody I was sitting in an office and I was not able to create memories for people anymore."

He went on a veteran's retreat focused on yoga, meditation, and mental health. He'd never meditated or done yoga before. "A bunch of Macho veteran guys you know doing yoga of course everybody at the time maybe rolled their eyes." But after five days, "it felt like it was the happiest I had ever been in my life."

His wife noticed immediately. "You're a different person you seemed so relaxed." Chase started asking himself again: what is my purpose? Why am I here? He started remembering his near-death experience more vividly.

The Gifts That Emerged

Within a day or two, Chase's body changed. "I started to feel my body completely changed and become so aware of my surroundings." The meditation and breathing exercises had relaxed his mind enough to perceive things he'd been blocking out.

He realized he had gifts that weren't common. "I started to really feel everybody's emotions around me the intuition became stronger and I was so aware of if other people around me complete strangers were suffering at the time." He felt a burden to fix everyone, to heal everyone's suffering, to bring positive energy to anyone in pain near him.

His grandmother was in the hospital. Chase started praying, hands out, asking for a little less pain for her. "It's a feeling within my kind of my my chest or my heart where I can kind of put my hands out and pray." He started feeling tingling in his palms. He looked down and saw "really visible marks on both Palms of my hands."

He showed his wife, took a picture to document it. People told him: "You have to stop taking other people's pain it's not your pain to take." Chase wanted to rationalize it: "In my brain my human brain I want to just say it's an allergic reaction it's it's just something that's happening to my body just like getting a a rash on your your for forearm." But the marks only appeared when he was trying to help someone. "It is not a painful experience at all," he says. "It is a peaceful experience that I can physically feel uh within my hands um like an energy is coming just through that that part of my hand."]

Recently, on a silent plane flight, Chase felt a presence hit him in the chest. He knew immediately it was Jesus again. They had an exchange: "You're on the right path but take care of yourself you you if you drain your battery you you're not going to be ever you're not not going to be able to help anybody."

Jesus told him: "You have to allow people to have a human experience you can't take everybody's pain because some people need to experience that pain."

"That was profound for me," Chase reflects, "but it also was really hard... it was a reminder that I can't go try to just heal everybody that I think is suffering because then I'm going to suffer too and I have to still allow people to experience this human world that we're in." He's learning when it's appropriate to intervene and when to step back.

What He Wants Us to Know

"It's hard to experience what I experienced," Chase says, "and not come back a different person."

Laughter and smiling are free, he reminds us. Like breath, like prayer, like meditation. "We can find joys in everything," he says. But we live in a world where we're so separated. He drives past the bus stop he used to wait at as a kid, where he had great memories of laughing and playing before school. Now "the kids are all 10 feet apart from each other on their phones and that's tough to watch to me smiling and laughter and being close to people is what I think is the best medicine for us."

He believes we're all here to serve a specific purpose, and not everyone's purpose has to be grand or holy. "We're meant to all have different goals and different personalities just like a fingerprint is meant to be different but for me it's to continually learn and evolve." When he was that little boy in the garden, he was absorbing everything, experiencing life without grownup constraints and stresses. He tries to live that way now: going back to school for alternative medicine degrees, a ministry degree, planning more education after that.

His grandmother always said education would heal the world. Chase believes as long as we keep learning (whether in school, reading books, or staying informed), we set the next generation up to make things better. "That is the meaning of life," he says, "learning evolving and making everything better than than how we came."

You can hear Chase tell more of his story in his extended interview on the Beyond with Heather Tesch channel and his talk at an IANDS conference, where he discusses his healing gifts in greater depth.

What This Account Reveals

Chase's experience contains several elements that appear consistently across thousands of NDE accounts: the sensation of leaving the body, the overwhelming feeling of unconditional love, the encounter with a deceased relative or spiritual figure, the life review (in his case, seeing his younger self), and the sense of timelessness. What makes his account particularly striking is the medical documentation of the air embolism and his survival, the ongoing physical manifestations of his healing abilities, and his second encounter with Jesus years later on the airplane.

The detail about seeing himself as a happy child playing in the garden is one of the most profound aspects of his experience. Many NDErs report encountering younger versions of themselves or seeing deceased loved ones at their healthiest, happiest ages. It's as if the other side shows us not just who we were, but who we truly are beneath the accumulated weight of adult concerns and traumas.

Chase's message about spreading light, love, and laughter isn't a platitude. It's a direct instruction he received from the source of all consciousness, reinforced years later when he needed the reminder. His struggle to balance his healing gifts with the need to let others have their human experiences reflects a mature understanding that not all suffering is meant to be removed. Sometimes pain is the teacher.

What awaits us, if Chase's experience is any indication, isn't clouds and harps. It's a place more vivid and real than anything here, where we feel connected to everything around us, where we remember who we truly are beneath all the forgetting, and where we're greeted by beings who know us completely and love us unconditionally. And apparently, we've been there before. We're just going home.