Editorial: Dreaded words: ‘Officer down’

Friday, Feb. 3, 2006 | 12:30 p.m.

There are millions of doors in the Las Vegas Valley, and a Metro Police officer will approach thousands of them over the span of a career, called upon for as many reasons as there are doors.

And yet each call carries the same risk. For it only takes one gunman behind one door to end a police officer's life. Sgt. Henry Prendes was responding to a routine domestic disturbance Wednesday when he was shot and killed as he entered the doorway of a home in the southwest valley.

Amir Crump, 21, fired about 50 rounds from a semi-automatic rifle in a gun battle with police that left a second officer wounded and Crump dead.

Crump was a "crazed, obviously mentally imbalanced, focused criminal with firepower he had prepared for this," Sheriff Bill Young said during a press conference a few hours after the 1:20 p.m. incident. "He was ready, waiting and willing to kill a police officer."

We call police officers for help when we're afraid. We depend on them to protect our children, the aging and the battered. We expect them to catch the murderer, the thief and the drug dealer.

We rarely consider the risk each officer faces, every single time he or she stops to help or responds to a call. "While others may be going the other way, we're going to the gunfire," Young said.

Prendes was dispatched to one of the "tens of thousands" of domestic calls Young says the department receives each year. It turned out to be the one that every police officer and every officer's family dreads.

"It's our worst nightmare as an agency," Young said.

Mercifully, it is rare. Regardless of how the rest of the world perceives Las Vegas and the raucous image it sells, those of us who live here know just how rare this kind of tragedy is. It is one our community has not faced since Metro Officer Marc Kahre was shot and killed when responding to a domestic call in 1988.

Still, that offers little comfort to Prendes' wife, two young daughters, mother, sister and friends. Young called the 37-year-old officer and his co-workers heroes whose actions "prevented the death of several citizens and certainly several of our other officers.

"This could have been a lot worse," Young added.

But as our community mourns the heartbreaking loss of a heroic native son, it can be difficult to imagine how.

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