Lee Lucero

If you don't know what a respiratory therapist does, you're not alone. They're the Navy SEALs of the hospital: when they do their job well, you never even know they were there. RTs respond to every emergency, every high-risk birth, every cardiac arrest, every moment when breath becomes a battle.

Lee Lucero has been that person. He has held a grieving husband just weeks after his wedding, as his wife became an organ donor. He has felt hearts beat their last under his hands. He has been directly responsible for soothing hundreds of lives, perhaps thousands, with respect, empathy, and the kind of quiet grace that rarely makes the headlines. Later, he trained as an ECMO Specialist, working in trauma, neuro, burn, pediatric, and neonatal ICUs. He spent two decades, learning to be a steady presence in other people's worst moments.

None of it prepared him to recognize what was happening in his own life.

Lee grew up in a home where CYFD visits were as frequent as the rent. His mother was a masterclass in performance: warmth in public, control behind closed doors. His stepfather, a journalist by day, taught him that stories had to hurt to matter. He took both lessons seriously. By twelve, child services had intervened. By sixteen, he had his own lease, two jobs, and a community college class schedule. Poverty wasn't a backstory; it was Tuesday.

What followed were years of learning the same patterns in different disguises. A relationship with someone living with borderline personality disorder: volatile, not malicious, but capable of using self-harm threats to keep him emotionally captive. He wasn't a passive participant. Both of them were damaged, both of them were surviving, and neither of them were innocent. Then came a covert narcissist, patient and deliberate, a more sophisticated version of the woman who raised him. She didn't wound; she dismantled. Lee played his part there too, becoming at times the very thing she accused him of being. He doesn't excuse it. He examines it.

Therapy wasn't a choice; but the only path. What emerged on the other side was a different kind of fluency: the ability to read predatory patterns before they fully form, to name dynamics that most people don't have language for, and to trace the mechanisms of manipulation through both personal scar tissue and academic research.

Unlikely Predators is more than just a book. It’s a true crime analysis built on peer-reviewed psychology, court records, and survivor testimony, examined through the eyes of someone who has been on the inside of these dynamics and made it out the other side.

Lee lives in New Mexico with his wife and is a stepfather to four kids, three of them at home. He loves tattoos, road trips, metal and punk, and the kind of concerts that leave your ears ringing for days.

Now a prolific author, he was a formerly a trained respiratory therapist.