A car crash crushed this officer’s legs. He’s trying to get back to work.

Kepp joined the conversation and soon was helping them take positions along the wide roadway that cuts through Montgomery County, Md.

“We’re obviously not chasing,” Kepp said into his radio. “But if we can get him stopped by other means that’d be awesome.”

Nine minutes later, knowing the Challenger was approaching his position, Kepp got out to throw a chain of tire-piercing “stop sticks” across the pavement. He was quickly back on his radio.

“I’ve been hit,” he said calmly. “I need fire and rescue. I’m at Watkins Mill. Please send ASAP.”

His tone belied the gravity of what had just happened. Kepp, 36, had been violently struck by the car, coming to rest seated on the pavement. He’d reached down to his right thigh, felt the blood of his severed leg and cursed. He tried to get up but couldn’t.

Other officers and medics and tourniquets — for both legs — arrived in minutes.

“They were leaning over me saying what they’re supposed to say in that situation: ‘You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay,’” Kepp recalled. “And I thought, ‘Of course I am going to be okay. I’m here. I’m alive.’”

A medical chopper was summoned.

“Make sure you shut off traffic to 270. Both sides. So the helicopter can land,” he told the others.

Officer nearly killed by speeding driver tried to stop him months earlier

It has been two months since the collision, which Kepp spoke about this week in his first interviews about it and his recovery. He spent seven weeks where the helicopter had flown him — the Maryland Shock Trauma Center. Doctors there had closed off his right leg above the knee and amputated his left leg below it. For two weeks he has resided at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he is learning to live life in a wheelchair that he sees as a temporary station on the way to walking and running on prosthetic legs.

Doing so, Kepp says, would return him to a pair of passions: working as a road cop and — on Saturdays — as a college football official.

The man accused of veering toward Kepp and striking him, Raphael Mayorga, 20, remains in the Montgomery County jail. He was indicted last month on 18 criminal and traffic counts, including attempted first-degree murder and driving without a license. Mayorga’s attorney, Isabelle Raquin, declined to comment.

Kepp grew up in Howard County, Md., where he wrestled in high school, going on to earn a business degree from Towson University. In 2009, he enrolled in a program to become a high school football official, befriending a classmate, Brendon Johnston, whose regular job as a police officer sounded a lot more interesting than what Kepp was doing — analyzing customer service operations for a major insurance company.

Johnston let him ride along on one of his night shifts, during which they were called to the scene of where a man had crashed his van into some woods, bailed out and ran. It all seemed so dynamic and investigative. “I wanted to do that,” Kepp said.

By 2014, at age 27, he was finishing second in his Montgomery County police academy class of 76. He took a position on the night shift in and around Silver Spring, where he netted more than a dozen driving-under-the-influence arrests in his first 14 weeks as a trainee. That became a priority in his patrol work, eventually leading him to take command of a small unit of officers devoted to finding drunk drivers around the county late at night. By this October, with just under 10 years on the force, he’d arrested 784 people for DUI, according the department — and was regularly cited as a top-performing officer in that line of work by the Washington Regional Alcohol Program.

Searching for drunk drivers — generally at night and on busy roads and highways — naturally puts officers around aggressive and speeding motorists, even if they’re sober. And by this year, they were having repeated interactions with Mayorga as he sped near them to try to bait them into pursuits, according to court records.

Kepp himself clocked Mayorga driving his green Challenger at 136 mph on I-270 on May 26, according to court records. Kepp chased him with his lights and sirens on, but halted the pursuit because it was causing Mayorga to become more reckless and dangerous to others, the sergeant wrote in court records.

Early on the morning of Oct. 18, after Kepp’s regular shift ended, he had three hours until his next job — an overtime assignment helping with crowd control at a planned demonstration in D.C. — so he drove onto I-270, heading for a police station parking lot to grab a two-hour nap.

Before he arrived, though, Kepp heard the radio traffic about other officers tracking a lime green Challenger topping 110 mph on and around I-270, and he joined their effort.

“It’s our Mayorga subject,” he said, eventually telling his colleagues that a supervisor had authorized them to spread out along I-270 and deploy the stop sticks, according to radio traffic archived by Broadcastify.com.

Kepp declined to discuss the moments just before the collision, which probably will be a key part of his testimony if the attempted murder case against Mayorga goes to trial. But speaking in an early court hearing in the case, Assistant State’s Attorney James Dietrich said Mayorga purposely veered toward Kepp and struck him.

The Challenger kept going, according to court records, and was stopped a short time later by other officers.

The radio recording reveals concerns rising from the officers who rushed to Kepp’s side: “I want to make sure that you have a helicopter coming. … We need fire and rescue here now.”

The medics soon arrived and treated him in an ambulance as the helicopter touched down. Kepp was airlifted to Baltimore’s Shock Trauma and quickly taken into surgery. By noon, recovering in a hospital bed and draped in blankets, he knew part of his right leg was probably gone. He wasn’t sure about his left leg, and he stopped nurses from describing what had happened in surgery.

Johnston, his football official friend from the force, walked in with Kepp’s father and made his way to Kepp’s bedside.

Kepp opened one of his hands, gesturing toward his legs. “Football,” Kepp said.

Being an official. Running up and down the field. Growing close with six others you see every weekend in the fall — a team as close as the guys in helmets.

“I’ll do whatever it takes to get you back on the field,” Johnston told him.

In their minds, the same applies to Kepp’s desire to return to full-time police work.

“We’ll have to figure out a car that’s designed for me,” Kepp told him recently.

The officer is more likely to tick off what he came out of the collision with — no brain injury, no spinal injury, nothing damaging to his hands — than what he lost.

“It’s not luck, it’s fate,” he said. “It’s what I was meant for. I have to take every bit of good that came from this and keep going forward.”