TWIN BROTHER OFFICERS SHOW COURAGE UNDER FIRE
On the whiteboard, under the names of the injured, he wrote his brother’s name.
How a pair of 33-year-old twins wound up in the midst of one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history is a reflection of the incomprehensible scale of the tragedy. But the brothers’ roles could hardly have been more different. One brother carried out careful plans he helped devise. The other had little to guide him but instinct, duty and fear.
“I think about it now and it sounds stupid, but I’m just like, you know what, if I am going to die I want to be helping people,” Casey Clarkson said in an interview the day after he met President Donald Trump during his visit to Las Vegas. “You just want to do something. You feel helpless.”
Police officials said they were still at a loss to explain why the gunman, Stephen Paddock, 64, had brought an arsenal of rifles up to his suite on the 32nd floor of Mandalay Bay, smashed out two windows and opened fire on the concert crowd, killing 58 and wounding nearly 500 before killing himself.
The Clarkson brothers said they knew such an event could eventually happen. Every officer on the force has completed drills on worst-case scenarios, including gunfire coming from the towering casino resorts.
“The inevitable,” Casey Clarkson called it, but it was still surreal.
When he first heard the shots, he said, he asked his partner, Detective Tara Brosnahan: “What the hell was that?”
They walked down the street and heard the shots again. “434,” Brosnahan yelled into her police radio, using the official term for illegal gunfire. She was the first officer to alert the shooting.
Casey Clarkson started running along the perimeter of the concert area, larger than the size of two football fields. “It was all under attack,” he said.
He pushed fans down toward a waist-high brick wall. The bullets started falling toward his feet. He felt a couple whiz by.
With his pistol in his left hand — he does not recall unholstering it, saying it got there “like a magic trick” — he scurried behind a van, convinced a gunman could approach at any second. He didn’t know where the bullets were coming from, only that they kept coming.
As he stood over his partner, she told him: “Casey, you’re bleeding from the neck.”
“I kept thinking, how come I am not dead yet?” he said. The gunshots continued. Someone suggested escorting fans out two at a time. “No way,” Clarkson said he replied. There were too many. People had to be ushered through fences five at a time.
There were bodies everywhere, and now people were looking at him, wondering if he was going to become one, too. His partner used her fingers to put pressure on the wound. They made their way to the concert’s medical tent, where a nurse told him the blood was not squirting out, but rather dribbling.
Somewhat relieved, the partners made their way to their police SUV, taking several other wounded people with them to the hospital. Casey Clarkson’s wife, Tara, met him there. The injury, a wound about the size of a nickel, was sewn up with a few stitches. He said he still does not know if it came from a bullet or shrapnel.
At the command center, his brother tried to keep his mind off his twin by focusing on the momentous task at hand. “The command staff kept coming up to me and saying, ‘Hey Branden, are you OK, do you need to get out of here and go to the hospital?’” he said. “And I said, ‘Well, you know, my brother is OK, there’s a lot of work to get done.”
Casey was soon released from the hospital, rejecting an offer of morphine so that he could be clear-minded and get back to the scene.
He went first to the command post. When he appeared, the place fell silent. The brothers hugged.
And then, Branden said, he told his twin: “I’m glad you’re OK, but we’re really busy. I’m going to need you to check in with the staging area because you’ve got to get redeployed.”