Cain Velasquez has given his most detailed account yet of Feb. 28, 2022, the day he chased a truck carrying Harry Goularte through Santa Clara County, Calif., and fired at it. Goularte is the man accused of molesting Velasquez’s son. Speaking on the Shawn Ryan Show, the former two-time UFC heavyweight champion said that once he saw Goularte being picked up, something in him gave way. “I f*cking lost a will to live. Didn’t care about dying, didn’t care about anything,” he said.
According to Velasquez, it started at bedtime, when his son began describing what was happening to him at his daycare. The family filed a report. Goularte was booked and released that Friday, and Velasquez said there was no ankle monitor. In a clip shared by ACD MMA, Velasquez recalled warning signs he only recognized later, including his son regressing in potty training and avoiding the bathroom. Collin Rugg, posting about the interview on X, described the boy as four years old.
The breaking point came on a Monday. The family had taken their son to the zoo to get him away from it all. Then a mass email arrived from daycare owner Patty Goularte, which Velasquez said called the allegations false and announced the daycare would reopen. “The system f*cking sucks. It’s broken,” he said. He went for a drive with his gun on him. He told Ryan he had wished he would see Goularte, though he never had in public before. “Well, that day I saw him.”
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Velasquez said he talked to God before following the truck, and he spoke plainly about what he intended. “I went through an 11-mile chase shooting at them,” he said, adding that he went through two clips and that “All of them were guilty, so all of them could have got it.” Goularte’s stepfather was the only person hit. MMA Fighting reported he was struck in the arm, and Rugg wrote that it was the arm and torso. Velasquez also acknowledged the danger to everyone else on the road. “There was a stop there with police during traffic, so innocent people could have gotten hit. I was trying not to, but I wasn’t here.”
The sentence and solitary
In August 2024, Velasquez, now 44, pleaded no contest to charges including attempted murder and was sentenced to five years. He was paroled in February 2026 after receiving credit for time served and house arrest. According to MMA Fighting, Goularte was facing child molestation charges at the time of the shooting, and the current status of that case is unknown.
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Velasquez described nine months of solitary confinement, 21 hours a day in a small cell, as a blessing. He said he felt claustrophobic at first, like a mouse in a cage, and then forced himself to get comfortable. “I got these four walls, this little room,” he said. He told Ryan his son is doing amazingly well now.
Fighters responded quickly on X. Paulo Costa wrote that Velasquez deserves praise for what he did, and Tom Lawlor, after watching a clip, held him up as about the finest example of a human being there is.
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The instinct behind Costa’s post makes sense, but it skips over what Velasquez himself admitted about the traffic stop and the bystanders. He was clear about the people who weren’t in that truck, and that clarity is what stays with me. So does the line he saved for his son, a boy who told his father the truth at bedtime: “I see him as the hero in the story, him speaking up.”
