Rancocas Valley football captain honored by police for bravery during crisis situation
The young woman pulled a knife from the kitchen drawer and placed it to her wrist.
“I’m going to kill myself,” she said.
David Godbolt started calling the police, but the 17-year-old woman responded by pointing the blade toward Godbolt.
The Rancocas Valley High School student had already directed his older sister and 11-year-old foster sister to the basement for protection. He stayed upstairs to try and help his other foster sister, who was having the episode.
“When she put knife to my stomach, I’m just right in front of her with phone (talking to the cops),” Godbolt recalled. “She put the knife to her neck and she was back on the topic of wanting to kill herself. She was saying it repeatedly. When she lunged the knife at me again, that’s when I moved around her and got to the basement. There’s no lock. I had the phone in my left hand and was holding the door with my right hand as she tried to get in.”
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Godbolt didn’t panic though. He continued speaking to the police. He told the dispatcher how the woman was hearing impaired, that the other people in the house were in the basement and would stay there until help arrived. He calmly unlocked the front door for them from the phone.
He had told the dispatcher the woman’s name so the police would have it. When they entered the home, multiple officers had their service weapons drawn. Others had tasers out.
Godbolt told them again the woman couldn’t hear well to help them understand if she didn’t heed their words. His attentiveness to details and poise in the face of danger helped officers defuse the situation without injuries.
That happened at the end of April. In June, the Westampton Township Police Department nominated Godbolt for its Civilian Service Award for “his quick thinking and bravery” to help keep everyone safe, including “the young woman in crisis,” per its Facebook page.
Last month, he received a letter from the New Jersey State Legislature informing Godbolt they wanted to honor him with a proclamation.
And on Aug. 26 at the Battle at the Beach in Ocean City, he returned to the gridiron after a year away and protected the back end of the Red Devil defense at safety with a pair of tackles, an interception and a batted two-point conversion in a season-opening 21-6 victory over Union.
“You can’t coach leaders,” head coach Garrett Lucas said. “Does a kid want to do the right thing and be consistent with it every single time? It’s hard to find those kind of guys, and he’s one of ’em.”
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Woman in crisis
Rhonda Harris raised three children but felt she could do more.
That’s why Harris, Godbolt’s mother, opened her home to other kids that weren’t afforded the same opportunities hers were.
The young woman struggling that April day was one of those youths.
“I only had her about a month,” Harris said. “Everything was fine. Her situation is fostering. You hear a lot about mental health. … but her situation wasn’t the reason she was in foster care. She was in foster care because she was an orphan. She was looking for a forever home. The underlying factors, no one knew.”
“The young lady, she lost her mother and her father (recently),” Harris explained.
On the day of the incident, Harris went to the store with a neighbor. One of Godbolt’s sisters turned off the lights in the house because it was daytime.
“It caused a mental trigger,” Harris said.
The woman punched the younger foster sister and began yelling. She started slamming multiple doors when Godbolt told her she should go outside and get some fresh air. The woman began punching the garage, then put a hole in the bathroom door and broke a towel rack.
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“I told my sister and my foster sister to remain calm, don’t talk to her, let her blow off some steam,” Godbolt said. “The 11-year-old foster sister, she was having trouble breathing after getting punched in the chest, so I gave her water, and the other foster sister smacked the cup out of her hand. She picked it up and threw it at the TV in the family room and broke the TV. After that she went to the kitchen, threw a chair and broke it on the ground.”
Then she grabbed the knife.
“It hasn’t really affected me in a really huge way,” Godbolt said. “In the moment, I was focused on keeping everyone else safe, so I didn’t have time to worry about myself.”
Police were blown away by Godbolt’s conduct during the incident.
“He was able to lead and control the situation,” Harris said. “That’s a talent and a gift that most people have to be trained to do that he did automatically. The officer said to me, do you guys train (your kids)?”
“I showed the picture of the officers coming,” Harris added. “One lady had tears. She said it could’ve gone so different.”
Godbolt named captain of Rancocas Valley football team
There was a small skirmish during a Rancocas Valley track practice last spring.
First-year head coach Brett Flood remembers his captains Godbolt and Devon Brooks handling the matter before he even had the chance to get involved.
“They kind of took hold of the situation and kind of took care of it and came to me afterward, explained the situation to me and said we took care of it,” Flood said. “They didn’t have to.”
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Flood has been Godbolt’s jumps coach since his freshman year. Godbolt, the reigning gold-medal winner in the South Jersey Group 4 high jump, hasn’t just developed athletically during their tenure together.
“There’s two types of leaders,” Flood said. “There’s good leaders and bad leaders. You’re either going to be one or the other, and I just look at him and he kind of decided he wanted to be a good leader.”
Godbolt remembers not always doing that. He missed a football game his sophomore year to go to a friend’s party.
That Godbolt is long gone though.
The 6-foot-2, 205-pound Godbolt was easy to notice when he came out for the team this summer after deciding to focus on track as a junior.
“The first day out there, he’s like making Troy Polamalu (Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Steeler safety) interceptions and flying over the field,” Lucas said.
But the second-year coach was even more taken aback by how other kids gravitated toward him, which is why Godbolt was named a captain.
“What I’ve seen is this outstanding, hyper-focused student-athlete academically and athletically,” Lucas said. “What are we doing? Let’s get it done. It’s rubbed off on other kids.”
His humbleness has resonated too. Godbolt never told his coaches about the April incident. He just said one day during the summer he had to go get honored by the police.
“I was like David, why didn’t you tell me?” Flood asked. “When I talk about a guy being modest, he’s like I didn’t want anybody to know. It wasn’t a big deal.”
It was a huge deal. Godbolt saved lives.
“The young lady did have a traumatic situation, and although she was trying to harm him, he thought so much about her life, he wanted the officers to have a full understanding of why she was enraged, not that this person was enraged and wanted to harm others,” Harris said. “He gave her respect and an identity. … I’m just proud that as a young man, he took that leadership. He took control of his life, his sisters’ lives, the other young lady’s life, and the officers’ lives.”
Josh Friedman has produced award-winning South Jersey sports coverage for the Courier Post, The Daily Journal and the Burlington County Times for more than a decade. If you have or know of an interesting story to tell, reach out on Twitter at @JFriedman57 or via email at jfriedman2@gannettnj.com. You can also contact him at 856-486-2431. Help support local journalism with a subscription.
This article originally appeared on Cherry Hill Courier-Post: Rancocas Valley senior David Godbolt honored by police for bravery
