A set of twins, linked by duty as one finds himself in line of fire
It was the first overtime shift Detective Casey Clarkson had worked in four years. But he wanted the money, and he figured a country music festival would be fun.
Just before 10 p.m. Oct. 1, he and his partner helped a drunken woman stumbling along the Las Vegas Strip get a cab, the kind of task he expected for the night. Then he heard the shots.
Sgt. Branden Clarkson was just going to bed at his home a few miles away when he got a call from a friend about an active shooter. Clarkson, who helps run the Las Vegas Police Department’s training program to deal with such incidents, started throwing on his clothes and, knowing his twin brother was on duty, texted him: “Hey bro, you ok?”
“And I don’t hear from him,” Branden Clarkson would later recall, “so I’m just assuming he’s handling business.”
He was. Over the next half-hour, Casey Clarkson ushered people to safety, directed them out of the line of fire, and then, moving past the unsaveable, took wounded people to vehicles that would rush them to hospitals.
Branden Clarkson, meanwhile, was at the police department’s command post, helping direct officers and keeping track of who was where on a whiteboard.
Finally, a lieutenant came up to him and said, “Hey, your brother is OK.”
“And I’m like, OK, cool,” he said.
But his brother was not exactly OK. “Then she said: ‘He’s at Valley Hospital, you know, he got shot in the neck,’” Branden Clarkson recalled.
“And my stomach dropped and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.’”