The source of the longstanding anguish I felt about killing someone was much simpler: I had a deep-seated religious belief rooted in my Christian faith that one should kill other humans only when it absolutely couldn’t be avoided. In that moral context, I blamed myself for the killing because I believed that it happened because I had failed to hang onto Randolph’s wrists. It took me many years to see things differently, to realize that it was Edward Randolph’s actions that led to his death, but that’s a different chapter of my life story. And thus a topic for some other time and place.
Beyond my knowledge that I wouldn’t have felt the anguish I experienced about taking a life, I wouldn’t have held the fears about my losing my job and going to jail, and that there wouldn’t have been an extended investigation in the immediate wake of the incident, there is much I don’t know about how my life would be different had I not killed Edward Randolph.
Chief among them is that I don’t know whether I would have followed the initial career path I had set for myself upon being hired by the LAPD, which included getting promoted to lieutenant or captain during my first ten or so years on the job, then going to grad school at UCLA part time until I earned my PhD so that I could teach college after putting in twenty years on the job and earning a police pension. But I believe those few seconds were instrumental in me cutting short my police career and heading off to grad school in 1984, after first having left Los Angeles to work for the Redmond, Washington police department.
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