One Too Many

Matt Sedensky: LOS ANGELES — Jay Westbrook's cowboy boot is planted firmly on the gas pedal of his shiny black pickup. Everywhere he turns, a memory flashes.

In Van Nuys, it is the lifeless little girl he held at Valley Presbyterian Hospital after she was found in the bottom of a hot tub. Near Beverly Hills, outside a Wilshire Boulevard high-rise, it is the old woman in a seven-figure condo whose misery he tried to soothe. On Skid Row, it is the 29-year-old crack addict he brought morphine to numb the pain of cancer, as she died in a box on the street.

There have been thousands of them, thousands of souls he journeyed with to the intersection of living and dying, who helped establish him as…