Life Gives One Back

I came across an interesting follow-up to a local story from last August. Two Huntington Beach police officers found themselves facing down an irate 18 year old woman with a knife in a local park. The woman had already slashed her mother and threatened the officers who ended up shooting and killing the woman. There is now a pending $20 million lawsuit, which I personally think has no merit whatsoever, but the courts will make that call.

Gordon Dillow, a columnist with The Orange County Register, reported on another act by two Huntington Beach officers that had a connection by a very different outcome:

It was a seemingly ordinary story, placed in the Local section of Tuesday's Register.

The story was about two cops in Huntington Beach who responded to an emergency call on Sunday afternoon. According to the police department, the officers arrived at an apartment complex and found a 5-year-old girl who had stopped breathing while playing in one of those inflatable "bounce houses" during a birthday party at a friend's home.

So the two cops did what they were trained to do. As noted in a police press release, one of them began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while the other monitored the little girl's pulse and chest – and after about a minute she began breathing again on her own. She was then taken to the hospital by paramedics, where she was expected to fully recover.

As I said, so far it was a pretty routine "good news" story about police doing their jobs with happy results. Cops rescue man from burning car, cops save woman trapped by floodwaters, cops save little girl with CPR. In my thirty years as a newspaperman I've written dozens of such stories, and seen hundreds more.

But then the story took a different turn.

Because while the story identified Huntington Beach Police Officer Jennifer Marlatt as the one monitoring the little girl's pulse, the officer giving her mouth-to-mouth was identified as Officer Shawn Randell. And as the story noted, that's the same Officer Randell who was one of two officers involved in the fatal shooting in August of 18-year-old Ashley MacDonald as she was reportedly wielding a knife in a Huntington Beach park – a shooting that prompted widespread outrage and condemnation.

In short, the same cop who's being damned by some as a cold-blooded killer is being credited by others as a life-saver. It's as if the lowest point and the highest point of the cop experience had collided on the same badge number.

For the sake of the officer involved, I'm glad that life gave him a chance to win one for the good guys. The situation he faced in the shooting case was one that nobody would want to face, and the aftermath will be long and trying. I believe he did his job at that time, and certainly did his job with the 5 year old. I believe he can look back with pride in the way he handled both cases.