There are many movies based on real events, some follow what happened more or less to the letter and others take only certain elements and then go in a different direction. The case of ‘John Wick’ belongs to the second group, but it should not be forgotten that the vibrant action film, one of the best of the genre, was inspired by something that happened to Marcus Luttrell.
The Marcus Luttrell Story
Luttrell is a retired Navy SEAL who was the sole survivor of a mission that pitted his team against a group of Taliban in Afghanistan in 2005. That story was brought to the big screen in 2013 in ‘The Lone Survivor’ with Mark Wahlberg playing Luttrell, but what interests us now happened years later, back home.
To help him heal from the trauma of that experience, Luttrell was given a labrador retriever named DASY in honor of several of his comrades killed in combat. The D for Danny for Daniel Phillip Dietz Jr. (died at 25), the A for Alexson for Matthew Gene “Axe” Axelson (died at 24), the S alluded to Luttrell’s nickname as Souther Boy ) and the Y for Yankee for Michael Patrick “Murph” Murphy (died at age 24).
Everything seemed to be going smoothly until during the early hours of April 2, 2009, a gunshot woke him up when he was sleeping peacefully on a Texas ranch. Luttrell took the gun from him and went found the body of DASY -later it was testified that he had also been hit repeatedly with a baseball bat-, with a couple of young people nearby, pointing everything out that they had been responsible.
Of course, Luttrell did not shoot with them, but it started a high speed chase, exceeding 160 kilometers per hour. DASY’s owner had time to call the police during the chasesomething vital for the suspects to be apprehended shortly after he lost track.
The detainees were Alfonso Hernandez and michael edmonds, who initially managed to escape. Edmonds pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 5 years probation, while Hernandez went to trial, where he was sentenced to 2 years in prison and fined $1,000, thus fulfilling the wishes of Luttrell, who stated the following shortly after what happened to DASY:
I want them to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. They murdered my dog. He is a member of my family. That is murder.
Those of you who have seen ‘John Wick’ will already be quite clear that the similarities between the Luttrell case and the film are reduced, but do not forget an essential detail that reveals the inspiration even more, and that is that the dog that the dead wife of the lethal killer leaves him before his death was called… Daisy. Of course, the character played by Keanu Reeves chose to act quite differently than Luttrell, who was even said to have justified his decision not to kill them by stating that “I spared their lives because I had already killed enough people“.