The Burger Road Mobilization

Some events remind a man how astonishingly efficient government can become once somebody has gone and committed a crime in broad daylight. Most days, bureaucracy travels with the speed and enthusiasm of a turtle pulling a wagonload of bricks uphill, yet on Monday afternoon in Fernley, it moved like a startled jackrabbit.

The trouble began around 4:30 p.m. on Burger Road, which sounds less like the setting of a homicide investigation and more like a place where a fellow ought to be debating ketchup. Instead, authorities say 45-year-old Richard Allen Hightower lost his life in a shooting that brought a sudden and tragic end to an ordinary Nevada day.

Investigators identified 40-year-old Jeremy Barrett as the shooter and 44-year-old James Edward Karol as an involved suspect. Before the sun had much opportunity to consider the matter, both men had been located, arrested, charged with open murder, and lodged in the Lyon County Jail without bail.

Now, in the old days, a sheriff might gather a deputy, a horse, and perhaps one citizen who happened to be standing nearby and looked reasonably awake. Modern law enforcement, however, has embraced the principle that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing with enough personnel to populate a respectable frontier town.

Authorities report that more than half of the Lyon County Sheriff's Office sworn personnel responded to the incident and the hunt that followed. Deputies arrived from the north, south, central, and western patrol areas, which sounds suspiciously like the opening chapter of a military campaign rather than a criminal investigation.

Then came the investigators, the Special Investigations Unit, the Major Crimes Unit, K9 teams, SWAT personnel, detention staff, supervisors, administrators, and enough communications specialists to ensure that no radio frequency in western Nevada felt neglected. Lyon County Emergency Services joined the effort as well, proving once again that when trouble arrives, it rarely arrives alone.

The sheriff's office also credited assistance from the City of Fernley, Nevada State Police, and the Washoe County Sheriff's Office Forensic Investigative Services Unit. By the time the list of participating agencies was complete, a reader might wonder whether the suspects had been pursued by law enforcement or invaded by a small coalition of determined governments.

Yet beneath the impressive roster of personnel and equipment rests a grim fact. A man is dead, two men stand accused, and a community is left to sort through the wreckage that follows violence. The speed of the response may be commendable, but it cannot restore what was lost on Burger Road that afternoon.

That is the peculiar arithmetic of crime.

It takes only a moment to create a tragedy, but it takes an army of officers, investigators, reports, court hearings, and sleepless nights to deal with the aftermath. Humanity has made remarkable progress in many fields.

But it still struggles with the simple challenge of keeping one citizen from deciding another citizen has reached the end of his usefulness. And so Fernley finds itself with another sad story to tell, while the law proceeds with its work.

The suspects are in custody, the investigation continues, and Burger Road has acquired the sort of notoriety no street ever asks for.