Tears, thank-yous flow at Las Vegas Coffee With a Cop
At most Coffee With a Cop events, residents relay concerns about burglaries, noise complaints and traffic issues. This day, all anyone wanted to do was thank Metropolitan Police Department officers.
As soon as Metro officers arrived Oct. 9 at Kneaders Bakery & Cafe, Monica Van Horn got up gave one a hug. She wiped away tears and later said, “They work all those hours to keep our city safe and help those people who (endured) the worst possible circumstances possible …”
She’d brought her son, Luke, 6, and called him her “designated hugger.” She broke the news of the Oct. 1 mass shooting to him by saying there were “a lot of people hurting after a bad guy came and did some damage, and we need to be the hands and feet of Jesus the best that we can by reaching out however we can.”
Stavros Anthony, the Las Vegas city councilman whose office arranged the Coffee With a Cop event well before the shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival, acknowledged the more somber setting.
“What this event is all about … is for people to come out,” he said, “and meet the officers who patrol their neighborhoods and keep them safe. What they’re doing today is coming out to thank them for what they do for this community, especially after this tragedy that happened.”
Anthony, who served with Metro for 29 years, said of police officers, “They signed on to protect and serve, and they know that they may lose their life in this particular job. They know they’ll have to run to the danger.”
Jay Carter, an officer with Metro, said he wished he’d been in the vicinity of the mass shooting when it started so he could have been of more help.
“All of us wish that,” Carter said of officers. “We go (where there’s danger). It’s what we do.”
Carter has two children, both elementary school-age. He told them little about the shooting, as they were “too young for those details. I just told them ‘a bad thing happened and some people got hurt,’” he said.
Donna Toussaint of Desert Shores had never been to a Coffee With a Cop before and said she wanted to be at this one “to support the officers because they’re just amazing. Our first responders, too. I have two nephews and a niece who are firefighter/paramedics and a brother-in-law who is a cop, so I just wanted to be here in support of them.”
Toussaint said she was shopping for groceries soon after the shooting when she saw a woman standing in an aisle, looking lost.
“She was just standing there, in the cereal aisle, and I smiled at her and went over to her and said, ‘Are you OK?’ And she said, ‘No, I’m not. I don’t know how to process this.’ So I gave her a hug and we both started crying. … Then somebody else came up, who didn’t even know us, just came up and gave us both a hug, right there in front of the Rice Krispies. And it was just amazing.”
Betty Rumford was at Coffee With a Cop with some girlfriends after getting learning about the event via email.
“We’re proud of our policemen, and they do an excellent job,” she said. “We’re here in our own little minor way to say, ‘Thank you.’”
Contact Jan Hogan at jhogan@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2949.
How to help
Anyone who noticed suspicious activity that might be connected to the Oct. 1 shooting is asked to report it at SNCTC.org.
