Tattoos a reminder of Nevada police officer’s great adventure

As 63-year-old Brad Carson changes his shirt, you can’t help but notice the handgun tattooed on his left hip.

Or the handcuffs tattooed on his right hip.

Also inked into the retired cop’s skin is a stun gun, police radio, the radio cord and a microphone near his right shoulder.

“It just occurred to me one day when I was on duty with the Capitol Police to get it done,” he says as he walks through his home near Jones Boulevard and Alta Drive. “I loved law enforcement, and I doubted others had ever done it. Life is a great adventure and getting this ink work is just part of that.”

Life is a great adventure.

Spend a few hours with Carson — he retired in 2014 after nine years at the Sawyer Building in Las Vegas as part of the state Capitol Police — and you hear that expression, or a form of it, again and again.

Waitresses at Lou’s Diner on Decatur Boulevard, where I first met him, call him their philosopher-in-residence.

He talks about the exhilaration he feels from the wind in his face as he rides his Harley around Lake Mead, Red Rock Canyon, Mount Charleston and Pahrump.

And he’ll also talk about it when he recalls how he rode a motorcycle into the back of a stopped car on the Strip — well before he was in law enforcement — and flew over the handlebars, landing spread eagle, unhurt, on the car’s roof.

“That part of the great adventure we call life taught me to always keep my eyes on the road,” he says.

He also talks about life and adventure as he recalls how a drunken driver hit him as he stood next to a car he had stopped for a traffic violation.

It was 2004 when then-first-year Nevada Highway Patrol trooper Carson stopped a Pontiac on the exit ramp connecting the westbound 215 Beltway to the McCarran International Airport tunnel. After the drunk hit his car, which then hit him, Carson was airborne. Unconscious after landing, he was taken to University Medical Center.

As he recovered from internal injuries and a concussion, he learned there was an opening with the Capitol Police in Las Vegas helping to ensure state agency documents and hearings were secure.

It also meant providing security for state employees.

“Life is a great adventure, but it isn’t all positive,” Carson says. “I wasn’t sure where my life was going after getting hit. You need patience as well as ambition. I knew I didn’t want to get hit by any more drunks. My life ended up great when I transferred to the Capitol Police, where I could be a people person.”

Incredibly, says former Capitol Police officer Kristin Ellithorpe, Carson learned the names of hundreds of state employees.

“He’d talk to people once, and then always know their names,” she said. “They loved it. What a memory.”

That his brain works that way is a mystery to Carson.

“It’s just a gift, ” Carson says.

For 25 years, Carson worked as a mechanic for auto shops, car dealerships, his own mobile car repair business and the Nevada Highway Patrol. Once, when he responded to fix a car that was running hot, a Chrysler New Yorker radiator cap flew into his face. He was so badly burned doctors at UMC wrapped his head in gauze for a month.

“I had to keep working looking like a mummy,” he says. “I was self-employed, so if I didn’t work I couldn’t support my wife and three kids. That was really an adventure.”

Talking with troopers prompted him to become one.

Capitol Police officer Tom Pascua says Carson’s memories of his police life should keep him honest.

Carson agrees.

If he landed in prison with his police tattoos, he says it would probably be his last great adventure in life.

Paul Harasim’s column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday in the Nevada section and Thursday in the Life section. Contact him at pharasim@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5273. Follow @paulharasim on Twitter.