He Loved Peace, But He Died In War: The True Story Of Jonny Wood.

On July 25th, 2024 my brother Jonathan Aaron Wood was shot to death in Crestone, Colorado by the Saguache County Deputy Jeremy Talbott and spent the next 20 minutes of his life crying out in agony before he was pronounced dead on the scene. Here is his true story:

My brother, Jonathan Aaron Wood, was a good man.  We call him Jonny, and he’s the best friend I ever had.  He was born on February 13th, 1984 in Fairbanks, Alaska and he died on July 25th, 2024 – shot by the police deputy Jeremy Talbott in Crestone, Colorado at approximately 11:48 am.

I haven’t written articles in a long time and I definitely didn’t ever think that I would be writing this one.  Usually when you see footage of a police shooting there’s a discussion about the cruelty of racism or a story about a drug raid. This is quite a different story: it is a story about a peaceful man—the most peaceful man I ever knew.

It’s taken me a week to process what’s just happened enough to where I can write this.  I don’t really know how it will turn out.  All I know is that my brother Jonny deserves to be remembered for who he was, not how he died. 

His death is a great tragedy.  He was a lover of peace, but he died in a war.  A war that wasn’t his fault.  A war that he didn’t ask for.

Before I get into what happened and how he died, let me tell you who my brother was. When you know who it was that died, not just how, it will allow you to see the situation for what it is:

An atrocity that should never have happened. An example of the societal system that is supposed to protect us taking a good human being who needed help and destroying them completely instead.

Here is a photo of my brother Jonny, meditating by the lake in Saint George, Utah where I lived with him from 2017-2019 while he was running his guitar shop, Dixie Guitar King:

This week has been a hard week for my family and I. Last Sunday at around 7:29 pm I got a Whatsapp message from my older brother Will where he said:

Reach out to Mom and Dad.

Our family is in the middle of some stress right now as my Mom was recently diagnosed with stage 2 breast cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy in Fairbanks, Alaska, so I immediately picked up the phone and I called them. The voice of my Father sounded of pain, as he proceeded to tell me:

Yesterday your Mother and I got a phone call from the Saguache County Police Department. After checking to ensure that the phone call wasn’t a scam and confirming the identity of the caller, they proceeded to tell me that this Thursday your little brother Jonny was shot twice by a deputy in Crestone Colorado and is dead.

A long pause followed, and I burst into tears:

Jonny was my best friend.

I said, with tears streaming down my cheeks.

What happened?

The story began to piece together but we didn’t really know everything. Now we do, and we are all starting to process it. In what I’m about to share with you, I am asking you to be gentle with my brother with this information.

So who was Jonny?

I grew up with Jonny, he is my little brother. Born February 13th, 1984, the 5th of 7 children born to my parents, Mark Wood and Kathleen Wood. Jonny was the smallest and youngest of the boys, and the most joyful spirit. We lived together for many years of our lives, sharing a room together as children. I remember in some territorial kids games (most likely incited by me) we put a piece of duct tape down the middle of the floor, he had his side of the room, and I had mine.

(this didn’t stop us from being the best of friends)

He was 2 years and 3 months younger than me and I loved him all of his life. He was a brilliant child—smarter than me, probably by a few standard deviations. When he was young, I remember there was a reading competition in his school in the first or second grade. Jonny read something like 200 or 300 books – the next closest person read 20. His mind was always faster than ours, and he could see things that we couldn’t.

Jonny was the best at everything that he ever did—the most talented person I have ever known and he pursued life with passion.

First it was basketball.

When he was a child he used to watch videos of Larry Bird and Michael Jordan and collect basketball cards, but it wasn’t just a brain game. Jonny would spend hours in the garage every day after school dribbling a basketball, doing hundreds of shots. He would go to outdoor courts and play for hours, 5 and 6 days per week. He wasn’t just good at basketball—he could beat everyone in his school, and also tell you the shoe size of every player in the NBA as well as all of the game statistics for hundreds of different players. Unfortunately the height bracket for Jonny wasn’t in alignment with his skill level, so when he didn’t make the team in 7th grade…

…He Decided To Master Skateboarding.

But he didn’t just skateboard. He would take his skateboard to school and after it was over, he would spend 5, 6, or 7 hours skateboarding—literally every day from the 7th grade all the way through his Senior Year in High School. Now keep in mind that at the same time, he was getting straight A’s all through school. In fact, out of all of the boys in the family, Jonny always studied the hardest. He got so good at skateboarding that he could go for 30 or 45 minutes without ever missing a trick, doing extremely complex and dangerous feats. This is a simpler video, but to give you an idea—Jonny is about 40 years old at the time this was filmed, was running a guitar store full time, and hadn’t skateboarded anymore than once or twice a month for the previous 20 years:

There were multiple times in his life that Jonny had the opportunity to be famous, and one of them was skateboarding as there was a time in his life around 18 years old it would have been very easy for him to be pro, and he turned down every opportunity he had.

In High School, he Started Learning Guitar

Like everything he did, Jonny didn’t just play guitar. It became a part of a skill trio between his studies, where he excelled in every subject (particularly mathematics) and it got mixed in with his skateboarding obsession. Sometimes Jonny would play guitar for 5 hours, or 10 hours straight—for years straight. Here is some music he recorded titled “How I’m Feeling” — he did all of the guitar playing, the editing and mastering for all of his music:

Jonny wouldn’t sell his music.

When we used to ask him why, it was because it was spiritual for him. So he believed his music should be given away for free. He would copyright it so it couldn’t be resold, just so he could give it away for “free-only.” Then he would take his own money, print CD’s, and give them to whoever wanted them. In his life, he wrote over 400 songs, most of which were never recorded.

We have a few of them, though.

He sang, too.

At first, we used to make fun of his singing. He sounded kind of like Bob Dylan or something like that. He kept doing it, though and eventually developed a beautiful voice. Here’s a song he did called “Sinking Ship” – you can hear his personality in the music and the words:

Guitar and music was the skill that Jonny stuck with. He eventually stopped doing skateboarding so much as he got tired of constantly busting up his shins. So he would still do it, but didn’t focus so much on it. Jonny mastered music, sound mastering, guitar and everything related to it. Later, he wrote up a business plan to open up a guitar store in Saint George, Utah and my father loaned him the money to get it started.

The business was a massive success and he paid my father the money back, plus interest.

Around the time his business was having its best years ever, I was going through a life crisis at the time where I had built a massively successful company that had fallen apart in dramatic chaos and I needed help. When I needed him, Jonny offered to take me in and he took care of me for the next 2 years while I got myself back on my feet.

I lived with him in his motor home in Saint George, Utah for about 2 years. We used to park in public parks with great views of the mountains after coming home from work at his guitar shop and spending time in nature. Jonny was great to be around. As an interesting side note, he was a fantastic cook and taught me a lot about making great vegetarian food for cheap. Mostly he would get his calories from pasta and olive oil and probably made the best pasta I’ve ever tasted.

At night time, we would talk about the universe and listen to each others ideas. We discussed everything from economics to spirituality, hitting everything such as politics and mathematics in between. He was extremely well read and had well formed opinions on virtually everything he talked about. I remember one time we were discussing how to expand his business and I suggested that he franchise it, as he had the most profitable guitar store I had ever seen.

His reply was something like this:

No that’s ok. The big company vibe would ruin the energy of the store. I could be a billionaire if I wanted to, making money is easy. I don’t care. Sure, you might have billions, but do you jump in the lake every day with your dog? That’s what life is about. Every day we go to the best spots in Saint George. Rivers and lakes that are some of the best in the world and nobody is there because they are chasing money.

Eye opening perspective. Jonny turned down money because he loved nature and loved life. He loved people and animals alike. He thought the world was lost, and chasing money was an endless rabbit trail that in the end leads nowhere.

I remember one time, picking up the phone and calling my brother Will. He asked how I was doing and I said:

great, Jonny is really healing to be around.

To which he replied:

Isn’t he?

Being around Jonny when he’s not working is like being in another universe where time moves slower, almost standing still. We would get out of his office, drive to a lake, and he would jump into water that was so cold it was almost freezing – literally every day.

Being around Jonny when he’s working is like watching everything in fast motion. He would walk around working so fast that I almost couldn’t tell what he was doing as he was fixing guitars, taking orders, cleaning his floor, helping 5 customers at once, doing his own accounting, mastering music tracks, and more. He worked fast because at 5:00 pm he wanted to be done so he could go outside and enjoy the sunshine with his dog, where he could relax and take in the beauty of creation.

Jonny loved creation because it is beautiful, and he was a beautiful soul. They say that what is happening on your life on the outside is a reflection of what’s on the inside, and for Jonny Wood, that meant his inside was as beautiful as a mountain sunset.

Jonny didn’t just love others.

He WAS love.

He was the greatest embodiment of Christ I have ever known.

He lived true to his principles.

He was compassionate towards others.

So the question is, what happened?

I’m not sure.

All I can do is tell the story.

I left Saint George Utah and moved to Colombia after I had started to get back on my feet in January of 2020, right before the pandemic started. All I know is when I left Saint George, Jonny was a picture of health, radiance, and wholeness.

His business was doing better than it had ever done. He was happy and bought a really nice house out in the woods in Saint George, which he lived in for about 2 years. Somewhere around that time, in early 2021, Jonny was walking in the woods when he was off work one day and he heard a voice that said:

A spiritual attack is coming on all sides.

He walked out into the woods for a few more minutes and suddenly, he started hearing a very large group of voices all at once. These weren’t internal voices, like the voice of your thoughts. These were voices that sounded audible, that physically were not there. This went on from 2021 early in the year until he died on July 25th, 2024—non stop, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, whether he was awake or asleep.

I found out about about 6 months later when he was selling his business in Saint George and attempting to sell his home so he could move out to Crestone, Colorado, which he called “The Nexus.” He called me and told me what happened.

The voices in his head were not positive, reassuring voices. They criticized him, insulted him, told him constant horrible things about himself and others, and drove him into stress levels that no person should ever have to experience. Over a period of time, the voices convinced Jonny that Elon Musk was the antichrist, that DARPA had implanted microchip technology (Neurolink) in his head and was communicating with his brain through physical technology implanted into his brain with smart dust through a 6g network that they were testing for a future enslavement of humanity, and that nephilim were living under the ground capturing people, cloning them, and replacing them with lookalikes. Many people that Jonny knew were eventually categorized as clones. Jonny would say:

That isn’t Ralph. It’s a clone.

Jonny was convinced all of this was 100% real.

In understanding the rest of this story and getting back to where we began, this is important. Before you say “why didn’t you help him?” — we all tried. There was no way in any area that he lived in to force any kind of help and he was not violent or dangerous towards others, which was a prerequisite for forced help in most of the areas he visited, including Utah, Costa Rica and Alaska. I for one feel a great failure in this as maybe, there was a way I could have gotten through. I really spent a lot of time with him trying to find some way to help him.

Whether or not what Jonny was saying has anything to do with what is real—Jonny believed it was real. What he was experiencing was maddening for him, and maddening to listen to as he would not stop talking about it. He was convinced the government was doing a top secret experiment on him. He was unbelievably paranoid everywhere he went. No matter what time of day it was, he was always watching his back. He was convinced that the police were the Mafia and that they were following him everywhere, constructing dazzlingly complex illusions to prove his points.

The more nobody believed him, the more frustrated he became. The voices became progressively more intense. In keeping with his character, he was constantly talking to them inside of his mind, telling them that he forgives them and preaching to them, telling them that there is still time to change and call off their evil plans and if they did, God would forgive them.

Through all of this, Jonny generally maintained a loving, kind character. But in his mind, he was in a constant war with nameless enemies, convinced DARPA was broadcasting signals into his mind. As such, he was experiencing some kind of distortion of reality.

I don’t know what causes this sort of thing. For a time in my life, I experienced some sort of delusional states—but with myself, I know what caused them, and eventually I found my way out of it.

With Jonny, I don’t know. It is just something that happened.

Now This Brings Us To What Happened In Crestone, Starting With When The Saguache County Police Illegally Raided The Home Of Jonathan Wood After Breaking His Window And Teargassing Him Without A Warrant On August 11th, 2023.

What happened?

On the 11th of August, 2023 Jonny was in his motorhome parked outside of his house in Crestone that was in the middle of construction, when he heard screaming coming from his neighbors house. As I’ve described, Jonny has always been peaceful. The only exceptions would be if he was defending someone innocent or himself.

So he picked up a stick and walked over to the neighbor’s house to rescue the person who he heard being tortured under the neighbor’s house.

(Of course. It’s Jonny.)

So a very short version of a very long story (I do have this footage) is that the neighbor and Jonny get in an argument, the neighbor calls the police, Jonny leaves and goes back to his motorhome, and the cops come.

After that, the cops are told by the neighbor to arrest him, they come to his house, surround it with guns, there is a shouting match back and forth while Jonny is telling him the neighbor is torturing people in the basement and that there are nephilim in the sand dunes…

…then the cops proceed to break his window (without a warrant) then they proceed to teargas him (without a warrant) they physically reach into his house (without a warrant) and Jonny smashes one of them in the arm with a stick (while his hand was in his house.)

More shouting and arguing—and about 30 minutes later they trick Jonny through sweet talk into coming close enough to the door to grab him, and they proceed to illegally enter his house, pin him to the floor, arrest him, drag him out of his house, then throw him into prison.

In case you don’t believe this story, here is a dramatically shortened version of it, courtesy of Be Schofield, who I released the entire footage to in anticipation of one sided “damage control reporting” by the mainstream “fake news” defending an unjustified police killing of a good man as heroism. Here is the short version of the illegal arrest:

There are some important things to point out about this video.

1. The police department in Crestone Colorado (Saguache County) knew that Jonathan Wood was having some kind of mental health problems. There is an hour or so of conversation that has been deeply edited in the version above, and even in the short version, Jonny is talking about nephilim, Neurolink and how Elon Musk is trying to take over his mind.
2. They surround his property pointing guns at it from every angle.
3. They break his window.
4. They teargas him while he is in his property.
5. They forcefully enter his property after tricking him.
6. They arrest him on his floor in his property.
7. All of this is done without a warrant.

In addition, they were repeatedly promising to get him help. Their version of help was to throw him in prison as they were just lying to him to get him to come to the door so they could arrest him as they knew that they did not have a warrant and had no permission to go inside of his house—which in the end, they did anyways. Violently, I might add. (see video above)

Regarding this arrest, this is what my brother, Aki Wood had to say:

Before they raided his home illegally, Jonny could be reasoned with. He didn’t really know if the delusions he was experiencing were real or unreal. After the police entered his home, teargassed him and broke his window, you could not convince him that anything else was true. He became unmovable in his belief they they were out to get him.

The Colorado State Defense Attorney on the case, John Hoag, told my father, who is a retired superior court judge from Fairbanks, Alaska:

This footage was highly disturbing. This is the most egregious violation of civil rights I’ve seen in a police arrest in my entire 20 year career in practicing law.

Jonny was told to simply show up, and allow the entire footage of the arrest to be played in court. If he did, the case would be thrown out as it was an embarrassment to the police and also the state of Colorado.

Well, he didn’t show up. If you ask why—it was because he was convinced that the cops were not real cops and that they were working for the mafia.

Not showing up made it to where there was a warrant for his arrest. A warrant that eventually led to his tragic death in a police shooting on July 25th, 2024.

On Thursday about 20 minutes before noon, Deputy Jeremy Talbott was out on patrol in Crestone and spotted my brother walking along the road on his first day of solo duty, just recently completing his police training. See this article by Be Schofield.

Before you say that he didn’t know Jonny, he had actually been a part of a previous arrest for the same warrant (not the original one in the video above). That is where the following incident happened. Before you watch this, understand that this is extremely violent.

Here is the bodycam footage of Deputy Jeremy Talbott fatally shooting my brother Jonathan Wood in Crestone Colorado on his first solo day on the job:

In the above video, you can see Jonny walking back to his home using a stick to carry his bags. Where was he? Having lived with him for 2 years of the last 7, he was walking through the mountains, where he had probably been all morning enjoying nature like he did every day of his life. The stick was a walking stick, a thin, hollow copper tube. He had it draped over his shoulder with supplies for a hike in the mountains.

The cop walked up to Jonny to approach him about the warrant and my brother crossed the road to avoid conflict. The cop is running up behind him saying “Mr. Wood” and Jonny keeps walking, replying “I’m not who you’re looking for.”

Eventually the cop runs up behind him and grabs his arm, to which Jonny replies “get away from me” and shakes his arm off. The cop asks him to put down his things, and Jonny puts down everything but the walking stick. The cop says “relax” and Jonny proceeds to do “karate thrusts” at the cop with his walking staff as he’s saying “I’m not who you’re looking for. Get the fuck away from me” — he hits the cop (who he thought was the mafia, not a real cop) 3-4 times. The cop says “put the stick down” followed by “I’ll fucking shoot ya, I swear to god” – Jonny followed by shouting “get away from me man.”

1 seconds elapse, and cop shoots a bullet through my brother’s chest on the side of his heart, followed by a shot through the upper part of his inner thigh. My brother falls to the ground and begins screaming in agony. This all happens in the video between minutes 1:28 (when there had been no striking) and 1:42 (when Jonny had been shot twice, one of them was a fatal wound). The total amount of time between the warning, where the cop says “I’ll fucking shoot ya, I swear to god” and the shots being fired is 2 seconds, including the time when Jonny shouts “get away from me man” – not even enough time to consciously process the warning.

The copper pipe had already been broken when Jonny was shot as it was a thin, hollow walking staff, not a weapon. You can see it bent as Jonny has it in the air. It would have been useless to do any harm. As it is, the police officer had no damage whatsoever done—yet the Colorado media sensationalized it as a “metal pipe wielding suspect” as I suppose they did not know that Jonny Wood was a successful businessmen and musician who had a half million dollars in assets and spent most of his time in the woods because he loved nature and animals.

Here you can see Jonny Wood exactly 1 second he is shot with a broken, hollow copper pipe he used as a walking stick as he is saying “get away from me” after the cop says “I’ll fucking shoot ya I swear to god.” One second later (see time stamps on bodycam footage between the shots) Jonny receives a fatal shot near the heart, followed by a shot near his groin through the upper part of the inside leg.

The video is grueling to watch, especially if you know Jonny and what he stood for. You can hear him crying out in agony, saying “you killed me” and “you shot me” and he looks at the officer and says “I didn’t mean to hurt you man” as he is on the ground in pain crying out for help the officer handcuffs him behind his back. A passerby walks up and the officer explains that Jonny attacked him with a stick. Jonny replies “he tried to attack me” and then says “he’s mafia… he’s mafia… he’s mafia” to which Deputy Talbott says “I’m not mafia man” (2:20-2:24).

More attention seems to be being given to explaining the story to the passerby than getting Jonny help. At minute 2:55 (1 minute 13 seconds after the shots are fired) Jonny is finally handcuffed. His shirt is then lifted up and gun shot wounds are identified as Jonny’s cries are getting quiet. The cop then runs back to his car which is about 100-200 meters away 2 full minutes after gun shots are fired to get first aid equipment (3:42). Finally, 3 full minutes after being shot through the chest, an attempt is made to plug the wounds (4:42).

Later, an ambulance arrives and pronounces Jonny dead on the scene. You can hear Deputy Talbott perhaps heaving or something, realizing he just killed someone his first day on the job. Sheriff Wilson comes up and reassures him, telling him everything is going to be ok, saying “we’re going to make sure everything is done exactly right” and can be heard saying “we’re going to make sure you’re covered.”

Jonny Loved Peace, But He Died In War.

I’m not sure what Jonny’s grave is going to say. I can’t make it up to Fairbanks, Alaska right now for his funeral where my family is gathering due to ongoing issues with the mother of my son Gabriel.

So I won’t be able to see his grave for a while, either. I’ve been left with some sense of sadness I can’t explain and a stirring sense of injustice inside of me. At this point, I have more questions than answers. For example, I could ask – what caused Jonny’s lapse in sanity? He certainly didn’t deserve it and was not doing any illegal drugs.

I could ask – why didn’t the officer have enough common sense to stay out of range of a walking stick when it was being held like a bow staff? I trained in the martial arts my whole life, understanding fighting zones isn’t advanced knowledge, it is basic stuff. My brother was untrained, isn’t a Deputy supposed to be trained? My brother is only 128 lbs — you could take Jonny and grab him and he cannot do anything if you are a trained person. He was a smaller, untrained civilian.

Was lethal force really necessary here? I have already shown at the time of being shot my brother’s staff was broken and unusable as a weapon for a full second. I could ask – is 2 seconds of warning really a long enough period of time for someone to process that you’re holding a firearm? Or better yet – why didn’t Deputy Talbott pull out a taser? He even says in the video (9:42) that he wasn’t hurt and “I didn’t even feel it, to be honest.” Witnesses on the scene confirmed that Deputy Jeremy Talbott did have both teargas and a taser on hand in addition to a club, any of which would have been sufficient.

I could also ask my brother if he was still around “bro, why are you karate lunging at a cop with a bow staff?” Of course, my brother isn’t around to answer that question because instead of being tased he was shot, and he was shot near the heart first rather than just to disarm him by shooting him with a non-lethal blow.

I have to ask myself if the use of force is really justified, especially when the entire Sheriff’s department knew that Jonny was having mental health issues. Before you say “well it’s a really big city” – remember Crestone only has 128 residents and the deputy who shot Jonny was part of a previous arrest in the month of June after graduating the academy on May 17th, 2024. Everyone knows each other in that town.

In other words, the entire department in that area KNEW Jonny, and KNEW he was having mental health issues from the time of their illegal, unconstitutional police raid on August 11th, 2023, which is what caused these series of events in the first place and is the reason that Jonny had a warrant.

Who is at fault here?

I don’t know.

All I know, is that my brother Jonny was a good man and I see this as a grueling failure of the system, who chewed a man who needed help up and spit him out on the side of the road, where he died under the lethal force of a police officer, sworn to protect.

A question I can ask for this is – how can we make sure that this kind of thing does not happen again? How can we change things to make it to where it is possible to get people help when they need it? How can we train officers to react with appropriate force?

Remember Jonathan Wood:

Remember his peace.

Remember his love.

Remember what he believed.

Jonny believed that we should all be working together for peace, that all religions can work together, that humanity needs to return to her roots and get back connected to the nature from whence we came. He believed that technology isn’t going to solve our problems and that we need to work together to change the world we live in in a positive way.

I leave you with this. Here is a gift of some of his music which is free to listen to for non commercial use. Listen to his soul, and remember Jonny Wood today:

www.TheFiveOfSeven.org

Here is something he wrote called “God loves us” and also a letter to the oppressors of society:

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1tljy7bEz-76HO3Pr8yfRixXswgqlgPE2

Jonny Wood, I will love you until the end of time. One day I will see you again amongst the stars. While I hope it is a long time from now, I will always hold you close to my heart and your memory through me will live on.

I honor you my brother, you are a good soul, one of the most beautiful that I’ve known in all my years of existence. You are the change you wanted to see in the world, and you shine with the love of the universe.

Even now I can feel you across the stars.

Your war is over now, my brother.

I love you.

Your Brother,
David Wood

P.S. Here’s a video we put together to remember Jonny:

P.P.S. Here’s a photo of Jonny and I how I remember him: A man of love and peace.