He was shot six times. In the arm, the leg, the back — and once in the face. Nearly a decade later, Fort Worth Detective Matt Pearce still remembers the exact moment a fugitive’s bullet found him in the dark, and he’s not letting anyone forget it either.
On March 15, 2016, Pearce was pursuing a suspect through a wooded area when the chase turned fatal — for the suspect, nearly for the detective. What followed was a recovery spanning nearly two years, a courtroom appearance that raised hard questions about justice, and a story that refuses to quietly fade into a department file somewhere. It matters because officers who survive the unsurvivable rarely get to tell it like this.
A Chase, a Fence, and a Gunfight in the Woods
It started as a roadway pursuit. The suspects — two of them — eventually bailed on foot, climbing a barbed wire fence and disappearing into the brush. Pearce followed. That decision, the kind patrol officers make instinctively without calculating the odds, is what put him directly in front of Ed McIver Sr.‘s gun.
What happened next, Pearce has described in the kind of detail that doesn’t come from a report — it comes from replaying something over and over until the edges are burned in. “I see the gun come up,” he recalled. “And it’s so slow and so vivid that I can see the nose of that 9 millimeter bullet in the end of that barrel. And then that first round goes off.”
Six rounds total. The last one, point-blank. “He basically walked up to me, put the gun to my head in the bushes, and pulled the trigger,” Pearce said. Somehow, it didn’t kill him. That’s not a small thing — that’s the whole thing.
The Shot That Blew Him Backwards
There’s a moment Pearce describes that sounds almost cinematic, almost too clean to be real. But it happened. McIver had gone down — Pearce believed the threat was over — and then it wasn’t. “All of a sudden, he pops back up,” Pearce explained, “and I see him pop back up and he shoots me literally like a movie scene and blows me backwards.”
McIver Sr. was killed in the subsequent shootout with police. Pearce survived — barely — and spent the better part of two years putting himself back together physically. The psychological math of something like that, well, that’s a longer timeline.
Then Came the Courtroom
Here’s where the story gets complicated. Pearce eventually testified at the trial of Ed McIver Jr. — the shooter’s son, who had also been involved in the initial pursuit. The younger McIver was convicted on a misdemeanor evading arrest charge and received two years of probation.
Two years of probation. For a chase that left a detective shot six times, fighting for his life in the woods. That’s not an editorial opinion — that’s just the sentence sitting there on the page, doing its own work.
Still, Pearce has continued to speak publicly about the shooting, nearly ten years on. There’s something deliberate in that. A refusal to let the weight of it compress down into something manageable and forgotten.
Nearly a Decade Later
What does it mean to survive something like this and keep talking about it? It’s not therapy, exactly. It’s not performance. For Pearce, it seems to be something closer to witness — the act of staying present to what actually happened so that the record stays honest.
The woods, the fence, the gun barrel, the bullet he says he could see coming. Six shots. Two years of recovery. A son who walked away with probation. And a detective who’s still here, still telling it.
“He basically walked up to me, put the gun to my head in the bushes, and pulled the trigger.” The trigger pulled. The gun fired. Matt Pearce lived anyway — and it turns out, that’s the part he’s not done talking about.
