Dr. Richard Carmona Faces a Tough Race as the Democratic Candidate for Senate in Arizona
Dr. Richard Carmona, running for the Senate in Arizona, faces an uphill battle in a predominantly Republican state that hasn’t elected a Democratic senator for 24 years, Terry Greene Sterling writes.
One fall day in 1999, on a busy street in Tucson, Arizona, Dr. Richard Carmona shot and mortally wounded Jean Lafitte, a mentally disturbed man who had just stabbed his own father to death.
Carmona, a Tucson trauma M.D., had been on his way to a football game when he stopped to deliver first aid at what appeared to be a traffic accident. When he got closer to the scene, bystanders told him Lafitte was armed. Carmona returned to his car, retrieved his Pima County Sheriff Deputy badge and gun, identified himself repeatedly and warned Lafitte to drop his weapon, news accounts say. Instead, the gunman blasted away at Carmona—one bullet grazed Carmona’s head. Carmona returned fire, mortally wounding Lafitte. Next, he triaged the wounded man. And later, he was credited with saving the lives of bystanders and Lafitte’s girlfriend, whom Lafitte was going to kill next.
The former U.S. surgeon general, who was asked to run as Arizona’s Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate candidate by President Barack Obama, downplays the head wound, right along with the wounds he sustained as a Special Forces medic in Vietnam. (He still wears his medic medal; it dangles from a gold neck chain.) “I am classified as a disabled veteran,” he told The Daily Beast recently, as he munched a turkey burger and fruit salad in a Scottsdale restaurant.
Read the rest at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/19/dr-richard-carmona-faces-a-tough-race-as-the-democratic-candidate-for-senate-in-arizona.html
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