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Phillip Todd, lying bloody on a public street, needed someone to pray for him.
The then-26-year-old Senate staffer had just been attacked in a random act of violence, one of the many that were brutally etched in 2023 in Washington, D.C. At that moment, he was full of fear and needed a helping hand from a higher power.
That higher power, as it turned out, was channeled by the paramedic working to keep him alive.
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“The first thing that I had thought of was, ‘Well, I need to pray. Maybe I can’t pray myself, but someone needs to pray for this,’” Todd told Fox News Digital. “So, I asked the paramedic to pray for me. And he said, ‘Are you Christian? Like, what are you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I’m a Christian.’”
“He goes, ‘Well, I’m an atheist,’” Todd continued. “And I said, ‘That’s fine. You can pray for me.’ He was kind and obliged.”
The incident on H Street in Washington, D.C., could have been the perfect flashpoint for a political operative looking for an anecdote about crime in the district — to use as a cudgel against Democratic policies in the nation’s capital city.
Todd was working for Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and was attacked in broad daylight in the midst of one of the worst crime years Washington had experienced in the last three decades.
After all, he was millimeters away from becoming a statistic. He was stabbed at least four times, with the knife piercing his skull, nearly severing his ear, plunging through his diaphragm and coming dangerously close to his heart.
Even now, in the midst of a hyper-politicized push by the Trump administration to crack down on crime in D.C. that has spurred accusations of authoritarianism from Democrats and accolades from Republicans, Todd, who still works on the Hill, has kept politics and what happened to him separate.
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But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t struggled with that balance in the years since. A self-described “political creature,” Todd said the political thoughts of how his story could be used to shine a light on crime in Washington had bounced around in his head.
However, his focus has been on the deeper connection that he found with his faith, a journey he was already on when his assailant, Glynn Neal, attacked him out of the blue.
“The story for me, or the obligation for me, is to focus on the goodness of God, and focus on obedience to God and stewarding that story,” he said. “Maybe the politics come later, but I think it seems to me that there’s two kind of obligations that anyone who goes through something like this has, and I think there’s a personal obligation, there’s a societal obligation.”
Still, lawmakers and Washington residents are grappling with President Donald Trump’s decision to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), and flood the district’s streets with federal law enforcement and the National Guard in an effort to crack down on crime.
When asked what he thought of troops walking the streets, Todd said he wasn’t sure what the right solution to crime in the district was, but that he thinks “it’s a problem worth solving.”
“I think what I’ve told some of my friends, I don’t know whether or not troops in the city is the best way to do it,’ Todd said. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But I do think that the attitude of trying to solve that problem is something that people need to have, and it’s worthwhile.”
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One of the most striking things about Todd is his ability to crack jokes about a knife plunging through his skull and piercing the membrane that surrounds his brain.
Now, he has a titanium plate that has further affirmed his friends’ belief that he is hard-headed — it also doesn’t set off metal detectors at the airport, he noted.
However, the fact that he underwent a traumatic situation at the hands of Neal, who had been released from prison just days before the attack after serving over a decade behind bars and was found to be mentally incompetent to stand trial in June, was not lost on him either.
But it was his decision to forgive Neal early on while still recovering in his hospital bed, a choice he wondered if he would have made had his entire faculties been there. Nonetheless, it’s one that he stood by and credited for his ability to look at the situation in a light-hearted manner.
“I think the opportunity for redemption in this particular story, it seems to me, and maybe this changes over time, doesn’t lie necessarily with the political but lies more on the fact that this was a very egregious crime,” he said. “This is a very big wrong that was done to me.”
“It would be totally understandable to have a lot of desire to see retribution,” Todd continued. “And yet instill in those moments — because God had gifted me with the ability to forgive, and God had saved me from death — showing how obedience to God can also lead others to a life full of meaning and satisfaction and redemption and tough trials and situations.”
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