Montgomery County Cop (Ret.) to Gracie Survival Tactics. Tom Chuckerel
Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt and finding purpose after law enforcement
On the first day of the police academy, Tom Chuckerel stopped to help push a car off a curb during an ice storm. He and the other recruits made it to formation late. Their explanation didn’t matter. They got push-ups and disciplinary slips, and Tom learned that three slips could end his academy run.
He’d wanted to be a Montgomery County police officer since he was six years old. The dream survived that first morning, a shoulder injury, and the long shifts that followed. Tom spent years answering calls in the district where he’d grown up. When he moved into training, he kept asking to go back.
Jiu-jitsu entered his life through a fellow officer and eventually became part of what he taught at the academy. Still, as retirement approached, Tom didn’t see himself making a living as an instructor. His wife and children were already in California. He had a date to leave the department, but no settled answer to what he’d do next.
His story moves through patrol, family, injury, teaching, and a civilian career that took shape through years of practice and a few conversations he couldn’t have planned.
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Growing Up in Gaithersburg, MD Wanting to be a Police Officer
Tom grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland with his parents and a brother five years older. His father worked as a hair stylist, and his mother worked for the federal government. Tom describes their circumstances as somewhere between middle and lower middle class.
Most of their extended family lived elsewhere. His father’s family was in New Jersey, and his mother’s sister moved between Florida and Texas. His grandfather, a retired Air Force colonel, lived about an hour away at Andrews Air Force Base. Tom spent time on the base as a kid, though relatives weren’t a constant presence in the family’s daily life.
Outside, there were sports and bikes. Tom remembers a diverse neighborhood and the freedom of a childhood spent playing outdoors. He also says the neighborhood “wasn’t the best.” When asked where his interest in policing began, he doesn’t point to one encounter or a family decision. He says he doesn’t know.
What he does remember is a white police cruiser with a bubble light on top. He watched the officers driving around his community and admired them. To him, they were protecting people who couldn’t protect themselves. By age six, he’d decided he wanted to be one of them. He carried that goal through school without finding another career that pulled him away from it.
His brother joined the Police Explorers program. Tom didn’t; he was busy playing sports. The two eventually entered the same profession by different routes. His brother began with Rockville City before moving to Montgomery County, where he went on to work in patrol, investigations, elder abuse, and supervisory assignments. Tom speaks about that career with pride.
Tom had another interest as a kid: martial arts. He remembers seeing Good Guys Wear Black and wanting to train. His parents didn’t have the money or time to take him, so the idea stayed in the background. For now, sports gave him a place to put his energy. He ran track for one season at junior college.
After two years at junior college, Tom transferred to Towson State and studied sociology. He doesn’t recommend the degree when he looks back on it. He’s more interested in what a student does with those years: whether they show up, manage their time, and finish what they started.
He had plenty to manage. Tom went to school full-time while working three jobs. He did overnight hospital security, sold shoes at Herman’s Sporting Goods, and worked at Sneaky Feet. He kept working toward the same goal: finish school and get onto a police department.
By his final semester in 1993, he was going through police hiring processes. He applied to Gaithersburg City and thinks he also applied to Frederick City. Montgomery County was the agency he pursued hardest. It served the place where he’d grown up, but the work reached well beyond Gaithersburg. The county included busy urban areas near Washington, DC, and more rural ground farther north.
Tom’s picture of the job remained specific. He wanted to wear the uniform, drive the cruiser, and answer the calls. Specialty units would become familiar to him later. At this point, the patrol officer he’d watched as a child was still the person he hoped to become.
Not specified in transcript: Tom’s birth date, the names of his childhood schools, and his college graduation date.
Montgomery County Police Academy, Injuries, and Working Patrol
Tom joined the Montgomery County Police Department in January 1994. He was 22 when he entered the agency’s academy, a regional training facility that also took recruits from the sheriff’s department and nearby municipalities.
The six-month academy was academic and paramilitary. Recruits studied criminal, civil, and traffic law, along with crime-scene work and accident investigation. They trained in defensive tactics, firearms, and emergency vehicle operations. Tom enjoyed encountering parts of the job he’d never practiced before. He also learned quickly that the instructors, many from the Vietnam veteran era, expected recruits to work until the work was done.
That expectation became clear on January 18, his first day. An ice storm had hit. On the way in, Tom saw a driver put a Volkswagen up on a curb. He parked, joined a couple of other men, and helped push it free. The delay made them late to formation. The instructors issued disciplinary “green slips” and ordered push-ups. Tom says three slips could get a recruit removed. He didn’t receive another one.
The physical training itself wasn’t his main difficulty. Firearms were. Tom had never shot a gun before joining the academy, and a boxing exercise made the learning harder. He’s left-handed; when he threw a hook, he partially separated his shoulder. He still had to qualify. He relied on practice and the study methods he knew worked for him, including flashcards and repetition. He passed without remedial training.
He graduated with a marksman badge, then kept going back to the range. Tom says there was nothing wrong with that qualification, but he wanted a higher standard for himself. He earned an expert pin.
Boxing stayed with him for another reason. A fellow recruit took a beating, threw off his helmet, dropped his gloves, and quit. Tom called afterward to ask whether he was coming back. The man said he was done. Tom would later supervise academy boxing himself, matching recruits and refereeing rounds while worrying about injuries. He understood the purpose of learning that you could still fight after being hit. He also knew how much could go wrong in a short round.
After graduation, recruits submitted preferences for their first districts. Tom got the old 5th District, exactly where he wanted to go. It included the Gaithersburg streets he knew. Familiarity helped when a field training officer expected a rookie to find an address and get to a call, but convenience wasn’t the whole reason. Tom wanted to patrol his community, and the district had plenty of work.
He primarily worked midnights. He answered calls, made DUI and drug arrests, served warrants, and handled domestic incidents. He took his yearly evaluations seriously and cared what his supervisors thought of his work. He eventually became a field training officer, a role he enjoyed even when a struggling trainee brought difficult questions about performance and continued employment.
The academy had shown Tom what else the department offered. Detectives, SWAT officers, narcotics personnel, and plainclothes teams all came through to describe their assignments. He later completed two temporary narcotics assignments and a plainclothes surveillance assignment. He liked parts of both. He also went to SWAT school and was eligible for selection, though he wasn’t chosen for one of the limited openings.
None of that erased what he liked about patrol. Tom didn’t need every arrest or call to become a specialized assignment. He wanted to run calls and do the work in front of him.
Off duty, an older interest finally found its way back. Newly married, Tom saw a karate advertisement in a coupon magazine at home and told his wife he’d always wanted to train. She asked what was stopping him. They looked up schools and drove around to see them. Then Tom mentioned his search at roll call to John Connors, a fellow officer who practiced martial arts. Connors offered to pick him up the next day and took him to jiu-jitsu.
That was in 1997. Tom says he was hooked, though he’s careful about what that meant. Training was hard, and returning to class required persistence. He kept returning. He began at Mario Yamasaki’s school in Rockville, trained in jiu-jitsu and Thai boxing, and later stayed with instructor Mike Moses as Mike opened a school closer to Tom’s home. The practice had begun as something Tom wanted for himself and his work on the street. He had no reason yet to think it would help him earn a living after policing.
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From Night Shift to Defensive Tactics Instruction
Tom spent about nine years at the 5th District and had no intention of leaving patrol. Then doctors removed a growth or tumor from his ear. Recovery took roughly a year. During that period, he worked in background investigations.
The assignment also brought him closer to the police academy. He’d become a field training officer in patrol, and by then he’d spent years practicing jiu-jitsu and teaching at Mike Moses’s private school. While working backgrounds, Tom went to the academy to help with defensive tactics. When a full-time opening appeared, he applied, went through a competitive process, and got the job.
He dates that first academy move to around 2004. His main responsibility was teaching defensive tactics to officers already on the job. Shanda Berry led instruction for new recruits, and they helped each other with both groups. Tom respected her as an athlete and officer. Together, they sought training that could improve what the academy offered.
Tom describes the earlier defensive-tactics program as having met the standard of its time. Once he was responsible for teaching it, that standard wasn’t enough for him. He and Berry brought in more jiu-jitsu and Krav Maga. Tom had also trained in Thai boxing. He showed command staff what he wanted to teach and gained their support.
He had two classrooms to consider. Recruits had to attend, learn the skills, and pass. In-service officers came with years of experience and a different set of concerns. Some were tired. Some were hurt. Some didn’t want an injury from a required training day. Tom knew what a private jiu-jitsu school felt like when students paid to be there. He wanted serving officers to find enough value in defensive tactics that they’d want to train, too. He’d go back out on calls with some of them. Their preparation mattered to him personally.
The academy work extended beyond demonstrating techniques. Tom and Berry wrote detailed lesson plans so another instructor could teach the same material if one of them was absent. Tom read recruits’ disciplinary writing to see whether they took responsibility and could put a clear account on paper. He also remembered how much work it had taken him to learn his own systems for brevity and chronology. He’d dealt with dyslexia growing up, though he didn’t recognize it for what it was until his son received a diagnosis.
For all the teaching he enjoyed, the urge to patrol never went away. After about four years at the academy, Tom submitted a transfer request. His supervisor didn’t want to lose him and told him patrol was full. Tom stayed another year. When the department honored the request, he returned to midnight calls and had a good time doing it.
One change caught him off guard. Computerized reporting had advanced while he’d been away. Tom says he could once complete an accident report on the old template in about ten minutes. His first one on the computer took roughly two and a half hours. The reporting system, with its tabs and fields, frustrated him far more than working through the night.
Tom stayed in patrol about a year before another academy opening caught his attention. This one was for entry-level defensive tactics. He applied and returned, now teaching recruits in the program he’d helped build. His days also included physical training, ASP, Taser, OC spray, firearms, inspections, quizzes, and assistance with emergency vehicle training. Boxing remained part of his responsibility, and protecting recruits from serious injury while supervising it weighed on him.
Promotion was possible, but the process posed another challenge. Tom says the study material included departmental directives, criminal law, traffic law, and the union contract. With dyslexia, that volume of reading was difficult. He made the qualified list, but the department promoted from a higher tier before reaching his place on it.
As retirement drew closer, Tom considered one more return to patrol. His sergeant, who was also a close friend, asked him where he was doing the department more good: teaching new officers or taking a burglary report. Tom didn’t stop loving patrol. He did stay with instruction.
Outside the agency, his connection to the Gracie family’s training program had grown gradually. Tom met Rener Gracie at a 2005 course and took lessons when family visits brought him to Southern California. Around 2014, he arranged to host a Gracie Survival Tactics course at his academy. About 60 students attended one of the classes. He hosted further courses and kept in touch.
Tom and his wife had made a long-term decision about where they’d live after his police career. She and their children moved to California ahead of him, partly to establish residency for the children’s college plans. He worked his final year in Maryland, rented a room from a friend, and visited them every six to eight weeks. The retirement date was approaching. What he’d do for work afterward was much less certain.
Police Retirement, a Train Ride West, and a New Teaching Career
Four months before retirement, Tom was having dinner with his mother when Rener Gracie called. Tom’s father was living on an Alzheimer’s unit, and his mother lived separately. Tom stepped outside to take the call.
A GST course was coming to Tom’s agency. Rener proposed that Tom first travel to Atlantic City, assist Brian Ortega during a course there, and then work with him again when they came down to Maryland. Tom’s first response was to check that he’d heard correctly. He’d taught officers and jiu-jitsu students for years, but he hadn’t assumed he belonged among GST’s instructors. His supervisor supported the opportunity, and Tom took leave to help.
It still wasn’t a civilian job waiting for him on retirement day. Tom says those early assists were essentially voluntary. In his cubicle, he searched for programs near Monterey in X-ray technology, physical therapy assistance, and even butchery. He hadn’t settled on one direction. The jiu-jitsu he’d practiced since 1997 was familiar, but he didn’t yet see it as a dependable livelihood.
Another connection gave him a place to begin. During a Gracie Certified Training Center instructor evaluation, Tom met a man named Steve on a crowded mat. Steve was wearing a blue belt and offered to evaluate him. When they spoke, Tom mentioned his coming move to Monterey. Steve had secured a school territory there and was looking for instructors. He invited Tom to teach. The school opened in October 2017, the month after Tom retired, and Tom went on to run it for about three years.
First, he had to finish the move. Tom retired on September 1, 2017. Instead of rushing across the country, he took the train. He traveled through Chicago and onward toward California, spending days looking out the window, having a few beers, and letting the pace slow. His family met him after the final leg into Salinas.
Monterey wasn’t unfamiliar. Tom had first visited in 1995, when his wife’s parents were living there, and the family had returned once or twice a year. Their children had grown up visiting. Living there still meant adjusting to a different pace. Tom missed the East Coast’s greenery, fireplaces, fall, and spring. He also had to get used to work no longer keeping him attached to his phone and email. During the conversation, he allows that the adjustment may have been bigger than he’d first thought.
He kept busy. Alongside the new jiu-jitsu school, Tom took private-security and executive-protection work. He’d done player security at the US Open during his police career and received State Department training connected to that assignment. About six weeks after retirement, a contact offered him an executive-protection job. At first, Tom had more private-security work than GST work.
Then came an invitation to assist with more GST courses. He spent roughly a year and a half in that role. During the early COVID period, courses paused for about four months. When travel resumed, another lead instructor was stuck in Brazil and couldn’t work. Tom was asked to lead.
GST grew until it became his primary work. He told Steve that someone else would need to run the Monterey school because the traveling classes required too much of his time. At the time of the interview, Tom estimated he was away teaching about two weeks a month and had led roughly 150 classes. He taught at the organization’s Torrance headquarters, traveled to agencies elsewhere, and had taught in Canada.
He remains invested in how officers train. In the conversation, he describes why he believes restraint instruction must address both officer control and the safety of the person being restrained. He also talks about the instructors’ responsibility to keep learning. His own police experience gives him something specific to bring into a GST classroom, while jiu-jitsu still gives him something to learn from others.
Nearly 30 years after his first class, Tom’s body doesn’t respond to training the way it once did. He changes how he trains so he can keep doing it. The mats remain a place for concentration and company: after class, he might get coffee with a property manager, a tattoo artist, an electrician, or someone else he’d never have met through police work.
Tom calls himself an introvert. He also says the conversations with students are what make each class different. People tell him about critical incidents and experiences from childhood. He listens, teaches, and keeps showing up for the next group.
When asked what matters most, he names his faith in Christ, his wife, and their children. Their first grandchild is on the way. He loved being an officer and loves teaching GST, but he’s seen people give so much to a job that they lose sight of their families or finances. His advice to officers facing retirement is to develop their skills, make connections, and look for work they have a reason to do beyond the paycheck.
Closing
Tom’s son helped bring this conversation about. While serving aboard Nimitz in the Middle East, he watched an interview with John Collins (Episode 188) and urged the me to speak with his father.
Tom knew Collins’s father from his years with the Montgomery County Police Deparment. He’d gone to a UFC event with them and remembered seeing photographs during John’s long path through BUD/S. The connection reached across Tom’s old work and his current life.
Near the end of the interview, Tom returns to a simple question for anyone considering what comes after the uniform: “What’s your why?”
He’d had a clear answer about where he wanted to live after policing. He hadn’t had a complete plan for how he’d work there. What he did have was a practice he’d kept for years, experience teaching officers, and relationships built by showing up. Those things gave him work to try when he reached Monterey. He stayed with it because he loved teaching.
The full conversation lets Tom tell those turns in his own voice, including the academy stories, the returns to patrol, and the quieter parts of leaving.
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