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A security guard driving to work comes upon the scene and opens fire on the shooter as Atkinson's car rolls ahead aimlessly and plows into a utility pole. The guard, a red-haired, 300-lb. Irishman named Rory Vertigan, wings the shooter, who drops the Lincoln into reverse, slams into Vertigan's car and comes out flashing metal. Vertigan, his gun empty, rushes the driver, rips his gun away, throws him to the pavement and hands the weapon to another civilian just on the scene, ordering him to stand watch while Vertigan rushes to Atkinson and sees he has been shot.
The first officer on the scene is Masino, whose wife had not wanted him on the street today. He kicks a hole in the passenger window, unlocks the door and tries to revive Atkinson with help from another officer. She is Patricia Johnson, Atkinson's best friend on the force--the one who had lent him the book on street survival. Atkinson has taken two bullets in the right side of his head. Says Masino, 28: "It's almost like Marc's spirit was standing there next to him."
With the help of civilians, including two Hispanics who followed one of the fleeing suspects and used cell phones to report his location to police, all three suspects are in custody within minutes. All three are illegal aliens.
And now the commander of the Maryvale Precinct, a man who was born in Mexico and became a naturalized citizen at 24, is on his way to the murder scene. Manny Davila lives in two worlds, one the color of his uniform and the other the color of his skin, and he knows those worlds have collided on this horrible day. A day in which a brilliant, falling sun glints across the sprawling desert city, catching the top of the utility pole that Atkinson plowed into and casting the shadow of a perfect cross onto the side of a building across the street.
Police brutality in New York City. Racial profiling in New Jersey. Quick trigger fingers in Chicago, where two unarmed black motorists were killed by police in separate incidents on a single day earlier this month. Judging by the national headlines, it is a season of cops gone mad. The story in Phoenix is different, but it is part of the same drama--the constantly stressed marriage between mostly white police forces and the minorities they work with, who are at once disproportionately the victims of crime and its perpetrators. The great majority of hardworking, law-abiding minority residents need the police for protection, just as the police need their help to catch the bad guys. But it is a relationship that can easily spiral into mutual recrimination, triggered by a cop killing or by police brutality.
Phoenix has had its share of both. Last year the city paid $5.3 million to the family of a black 25-year-old who died as the result of a neck hold during a 1994 altercation with police; he was a double amputee whose prosthetic legs came off during the struggle. And a civil trial awaits in the 1996 police killing of a 16-year-old Hispanic, shot 25 times while armed with a butcher knife.