The hardest day in a wounded police officer’s life isn’t always the day they’re injured in the line of duty.
For many, retired Las Vegas police Lt. Randy Sutton said, it’s the day they realize they’ve been forgotten.
Sutton knows that feeling firsthand. After surviving a career-ending stroke, the former officer founded The Wounded Blue, the nation’s only nonprofit dedicated exclusively to injured and disabled law enforcement officers.
HEROIC ICE OFFICERS, STAFF MEMBER OPEN UP ON GROWING DANGERS: AM I GOING TO DIE?’
Over the past eight years, the organization has helped more than 17,000 officers nationwide through peer support, advocacy and critical resources.
As America celebrates its 250th birthday, Sutton hopes the nation takes time to recognize not only those who wear the badge, but also those whose service continues long after they’ve left it behind.
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“If you had asked me what I’d be doing in my retirement years after 34 years of police service, this never would’ve been in the informational packet of my own brain,” Sutton told Fox News Digital. “But fate works in very, very strange ways.”
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Those twists of fate began one night while Sutton was patrolling the Las Vegas Strip.
“I literally felt my brain slowing down,” he recalled. “I stopped the car and said, ‘Get me medical. I’m having a stroke.'”
The stroke ended his law enforcement career, but Sutton said what happened after he left the hospital changed the course of his life even more.
HEROIC ICE OFFICERS, STAFF MEMBER OPEN UP ON GROWING DANGERS: AM I GOING TO DIE?’
“I lost my career,” he said. “I lost my identity.”
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As he fought for his medical benefits, Sutton said he began receiving calls and messages from officers across the country sharing similar stories.
“‘Randy, I was shot in the line of duty.’ ‘Randy, I was paralyzed when my police car was struck by a drunk driver.’ One after another from cops I didn’t even know,” he said. “I realized at that point this is a national issue and there was no national resource for these men and women. So I created it.”
That organization became The Wounded Blue, whose motto, “Never Forgotten. Never Alone,” was born fro
