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Excerpted by Joe Schoenmann • Photo
by Denise Truscello
The first time I heard of LT. Randy Sutton it
was in late-February 1998, a little before 10 p.m.
I was seeing what I could at the scene of a drive-by
shooting in front of the Eureka casino on East
Sahara Avenue, where a red Honda was parked, a
baby seat was tipped on one side and a husband
and wife were weeping. One of the cops told me
Sutton had been driving by and saw the couple crying
for help. Inside their car, he found their 1-month-old
girl with most of her face torn off, the result
of at least four gunshots fired into the car by
some animals who then did a U-turn and sped away.
Sutton grabbed the girl, got into the front seat
of a black-and-white and told the cop driving it
to get to University Medical Center. On the way,
Sutton pulled flesh from the girl's throat, gave
her mouth-to-mouth, and she began to breathe.
Sutton tells his wrenching version in his second
book, "A Cop's Life," a series of 19 stories
encapsulating more than 20 years of police work,
most of those years in Las Vegas. The book is being
released this month by St. Martin's Press, which
also published Sutton's "True Blue: Police Stories
By Those Who Have Lived Them," in 2004. While "True
Blue" was an unquestioned success—proceeds
from the book went to the families of officers who
died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks—the book,
itself, wasn't about Sutton. It was a series of stories
collected from officers throughout the United States.
In "A Cop's Life," you get a longitudinal
sense of the change that occurs in an officer's mind
over time, after seeing the suicides, the drive-bys,
the desperately beaten housewives. And you come away
appreciating an officer like Sutton even more. Not
because he's saved lives, but because even when faced
with arguably some of the worst society has to offer,
he struggles and mostly manages to maintain and demonstrate
an empathy, an intrinsic humanity, for both the victims
and the criminals who made them so.
- Joe Schoenmann |
