Police Officer Richard Thomas Steed

For Officer Steed's Family, Friends and Colleagues and Child- it is time.

These are personal facts and the police had done a fantastic job of keeping my privacy in anonymity. Although the fact is I am not anyone special, just a homesteader's kid from Alaska who everyone felt certain would become a forest ranger one day. But at age nineteen I witnessed your death Rick and was the last person to hold your hand in that alleyway. I saw your assailant come running out of a carport but it was too late. That same individual who requested your assistance because he claimed someone else had slashed his hand. That same individual who before you arrived claimed 'the bad guy" who cut him had left the scene which may have caused you to come in alone cancelling your back up. Emergency over, right?

When you parked your patrol car in the alley in front of the trash dumpster and exited to the rear of your patrol to investigate that's when the unthinkable occurred. I dropped my dog's leash when the shot rang out (I cannot recall today if more than one) and my dog took off after the individual and I stayed behind with you while the world stood still.

I suppose our time here seems to be punctuated by these moments of truth when we stand at one threshold or another and are required to put it all on the line.

Being there with you that night is what lead me later to Harbor General and Paramedic training, then into a decade of emergency medicine in Las Vegas of all places. In fact, you lead me into becoming a doctor of chiropractic and to becoming a lawyer.

Officer Steed's death had profoundly defined the majority of my life and molded my own character. It is now the time for me to come forward and state that you had not been forgotten, not for a moment.

Nancy M. Molina, DC, MBA, JD
Your Witness

September 23, 2020