Casino marquees display an image honoring fallen Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Micah May on Friday in Las Vegas. (Photo: Wade Vandervort/Las Vegas Sun via AP)
By Ken Ritter Associated Press
Friday, August 6, 2021
LAS VEGAS — A Nevada Highway Patrol trooper who died in the line of duty last week was remembered Friday as a soft-spoken family man with a "warrior spirit" growing up in rural Massachusetts and living since 2008 in the Las Vegas area.
"The good deeds of good officers will always be remembered, as they should be," NHP Col. Anne Carpenter told hundreds of people, many in law enforcement uniforms, who filled an arena-sized church in suburban Henderson to remember Trooper Micah David May.
May had "an impeccable work ethic," Carpenter said. He specialized in identifying and arresting impaired drivers and won a Medal of Valor in 2014 for a New Year's Eve pursuit similar to one that took his life.
"Micah was a true silent guardian, with a warrior spirit," said May's best friend, retired NHP Sgt. Russell Marco. "He loved (his wife) Joanna dearly, and his children Raylan and Melody were his world."
"He appreciated recognition for his accomplishments but was uncomfortable receiving it," Marco added.
May, 46, a 13-year NHP veteran, died July 29 from injuries he received two days earlier trying to deploy a tire-flattening device during a vehicle chase led by a carjacking suspect on busy Interstate 15 in Las Vegas.
The car that struck May was then disabled by crashes from NHP vehicles, and the driver was shot and killed by law enforcement officers.
The service, with full honors for a line-of-duty death, was livestreamed by the Nevada Department of Public Safety and local television stations.
May was posthumously awarded another Medal of Valor and a Purple Heart. Carpenter, the highway patrol commander, noted that four people received his donated organs when he died.
May's brothers, Paul May and Seth May, remembered growing up in Greenfield, Massachusetts — splashing in streams, climbing trees, jumping from the roof into snowdrifts — and once when their 17-year-old older brother, who didn't have a driver's license, crashed the family car off a dirt road into a ditch near the Vermont state line.
Seth May, who was 8 or 9 at the time, said he walked home and never told their parents until this week that he had also been along for the ride.
Paul May said their boyhood image of heaven was of people looking down on the living from beyond the clouds. Both Paul May and Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman invoked images of rainbows around Micah May.
"Surely he is a hero," the mayor said of Micah May, "a role model, an idol and a champion ... who chose to be a selfless caretaker of others in law enforcement and as a first-responder."
A 90-minute procession of emergency vehicles escorted May's white hearse from downtown Las Vegas to Central Christian Church — passing the spot on the interstate where he was struck — and moving down Las Vegas Boulevard, where onlookers jammed pedestrian bridges.
Casino marquees and T-Mobile Arena displayed memorial messages with May's photo and badge number. The Dodge Charger patrol car that he drove, decorated now with handwritten messages, was parked outside the church where his flag-draped coffin was carried inside.
Another procession led mourners from the church to his burial at a Las Vegas cemetery near McCarran International Airport.
May was the 10th Nevada Highway Patrol trooper killed in the line of duty since April 1941, and the first since patrol Sgt. Ben Jenkins was shot and killed by a motorist he stopped to help on a remote state highway in March 2020. Jenkins' assailant recently pleaded guilty but mentally ill and faces life in prison without the possibility of parole at sentencing in September.
