Researching John Nelson

After the Watts riots of 1965, Sergeant Nelson personally approached LAPD chief William Parker with his proposal for a SWAT unit. Nelson had served in the United States Marine Corps and based the SWAT concept on the Recon units, believing that a small squad of highly trained police officers armed with special weapons would be more effective in a riotous situation than a massive police response.

Chief Parker liked the proposal and presented it to his command staff. He asked for a volunteer to form the SWAT unit. Fearing a political backlash, no one on his command staff was willing to volunteer, including Daryl Gates. Parker then told Nelson to go ahead and form the SWAT unit himself, which he did.

Nelson was from Skelton, York. He was nearing 40 when he left for Douai in 1573 for training as a priest. Two of his four brothers would later follow him there to become priests. He was ordained at Binche in the County of Hainaut by Monsignor Louis de Berlaymont, Archbishop of Cambrai, on 11 June 1576. The date and place of his admission to the Society of Jesus are unknown. The following November, he left for his mission, which appears to have been in London.

He was arrested on 1 December 1578 at his residence, "late in the evening as he was saying the Nocturne of the Matins for the next day following", and was put into Newgate Prison as a suspected Papist. He had written to the French Jesuits during his imprisonment for permission to be admitted to the Society.

When interrogated about a week later, he refused to take the oath recognizing the Queen's supremacy in spiritual matters, and was induced by the commissioners to declare the Queen a schismatic. Under the Legislation of 1571, this was high treason and was punishable by death. He was condemned to death on 1 February 1578, and was confined after the trial in an underground dungeon in the Tower of London, the Pit of the Tower. While in prison he subsisted on bread and water and was able to say Mass.

On his execution day he refused to see several Protestant ministers, after meeting with family members. He was taken to Tyburn and was allowed to speak before the bystanders, who were mostly hostile in the historically Protestant London. When asked to beg pardon of the Queen, he responded, "I will ask no pardon of her, for I have never offended her." He then asked any Catholics in the crowd to pray with him as he recited several common prayers in Latin. He was hanged and cut down alive, then quartered. His last words were, reportedly, "I forgive the queen and all the authors of my death".

He was beatified on 29 December 1886 by Pope Leo XIII.

Nelson studied at Wheaton College and later at the Juilliard School of Music with Jean Morel. Nelson was music director of the Greenwich Philharmonia and the New Jersey Pro Arte, and also served on the conducting staff of the Metropolitan Opera. In 1973, he conducted his New York City opera debut at Carnegie Hall in an uncut performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens. With the Metropolitan Opera, his professional opera conducting debut was also with Les Troyens, on one day's notice as an emergency substitute for Rafael Kubelík.

Nelson was music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1987, making commercial recordings there of music by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Charles Martin Loeffler for New World Records. With Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, he was music director from 1985 to 1988, and principal conductor from 1988 to 1991. He was also music director of the Caramoor Festival in Katonah, New York, from 1983 to 1990. In 1998, Nelson became music director of the Ensemble Orchestral de Paris (now renamed the Orchestre de chambre de Paris), a position he retained for ten years.

Nelson's interest in choral music led to his position as artistic director of Soli Deo Gloria.

Nelson and his wife Anita had two daughters, Kari, and Kirsten. Anita Nelson died in October 2012. Nelson now lives in Florida with his daughter, Kirsten, and her family, as well as in Costa Rica.

Nelson was born in Chicago, Illinois, and attended Pompano Beach High School in Pompano Beach, Florida. He enrolled in Yale University, where he swam for coach Phil Moriarty's Yale Bulldogs swimming and diving team, which included other Olympic-caliber swimmers such as Don Schollander.

At the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, Nelson received a silver medal for his second-place finish in the men's 1,500-meter freestyle. Four years later, he competed at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, where he received a gold medal in the men's 4×200-meter freestyle relay beside his teammates Stephen Rerych, Mark Spitz and Schollander. In individual competition, he received the bronze medal for his third-place finish in the men's 200-meter freestyle.

Nelson improved the world record on the 400-meter freestyle (long course) on August 18, 1966 (4:11.8), only to be beaten by Schollander, his American teammate, on the same day (4:11.6).

He also won the 2018 British Academy of Film and Television Arts for the Special Visual Effects in Blade Runner 2049

After graduating with high distinction from the University of Michigan in 1976, he worked as a cameraman, technical director and a director at the pioneering computer animation and commercial production company Robert Abel and Associates, where he won two Clio awards and earned six additional Clio nominations. Early in his career while at ILM, Nelson modeled, animated, lit and composited several shots for Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), including the iconic scene in which the shotgunned head of the chrome terminator splits open and reseals. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Visual Effects Society, the International Cinematographers Guild and the Director's Guild of America.