On the hard days, Ray Lepone closes his eyes and sees the vestiges of human terror and evil — carpets soaked in blood and spatter patterns on ceilings, proof of the blunt trauma a human feels free to inflict on another.

All of it — the drained empathy well, the lost sleep and time stolen from family — is the price longtime criminal prosecutors pay.

Lepone, 55, is affected by it all, and suspects that won’t immediately change when he leaves his position as deputy district attorney with the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office on Aug. 31.

Deputy DA Ray Lepone retiring, chief prosecutor Paul Hagerman successor

But what is just as true — and for Lepone easier to access — is the uncommon strength and courage he’s seen for decades in victims and their families.

It saved him.

“They have given me the energy to keep coming back. The things they’ve endured … You can’t compare yourself to what they’re going through,” he said.

“Because if they can have the resilience and resolve to move on and try to build new lives after what they’ve endured, how can I say that, handling that case, I can’t fight to do the same thing?” he said from his office on the 11th floor of 201 Poplar.

“You see the worst of human behavior in this building. But you also see the best of it.”

He prosecuted Devin Jefferson, found guilty in the robbery plan that ended in the 2007 killing of University of Memphis football player Taylor Bradford.

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Lepone was on the team that prosecuted Jessie Dotson, guilty of slaying six people in the Lester Street massacre in 2008, two of them children.

He also worked on the case that closed Platinum Plus Club in 2008 for drug trafficking and sent owner Ralph Lunati to federal prison.

“The victim cannot walk into court and tell the jury who did it, what they must have endured when they went through what happened to them. And so, you try to paint that picture, once you get the facts and the evidence and the law.”

Ray Lepone

But it isn’t only the headline cases that have settled deeply into Lepone’s subconscious.

In 2013, the Downtown murder of David Santucci, a nurse, rocked the city. Lepone got two guys put away for the killing, but his empathy meant he also helped perhaps a too-trusting young woman — the getaway driver — move out of town, get a job and start over after she identified the assailants, a sign of the compassion he has for the human condition.

His job as prosecutor in the homicide division, and later the guy in charge of the division in the District Attorney’s Office, put him in touch with all kinds of victims, including the people who loved them.

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Besides prosecuting the perpetrators, the job for him was letting the voice of the victims, silenced in death, be heard.

“The victim cannot walk into court and tell the jury who did it, what they must have endured when they went through what happened to them. And so, you try to paint that picture, once you get the facts and the evidence and the law.”

Even if the verdict wasn’t exactly what the family had hoped to hear, Lepone noticed a resolution, a gratitude.

“I never understood all those years the psychology behind just having a group of the community know what happened to your loved one. And that someone is saying ‘it wasn’t OK.’”

Beginning Sept. 1, Lepone will go to work for Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, handling appeals to trials from the Shelby County D.A.’s office.

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He will do it from Memphis.

The job puts him right back in the lawyer’s seat, where the colorful Lepone, once a bouncer, Golden Glove amateur boxer and a rugby player, made his mark.

He’s comfortable in the arena.

In 2018, then-District Attorney Amy Weirich appointed Lepone her deputy, the office’s No. 2 position, putting him essentially in charge of its 230 employees, including 100 attorneys.

He reviewed resumes, settled staff disputes and weighed in on the snarly issues — some legal, some personnel — that always rise up in large law offices.

It was stressful. The office was still winning cases. But he was now a layer removed.

Lepone stayed on last summer after Steve Mulroy was elected, pledging his experience and judgment to the new boss.

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Last week, a year after the election, Lepone announced he was leaving.

A staffer noted that the tissue in his office had to be restocked because so many people came in in tears. 

“They were crying because he is such a good leader. He helped run that office. And it was run well. He’s a good person and a good person to work with,” said Leslie Ballin, one of the city’s best-known criminal defense attorneys.

The two faced off in court dozens of times.

“He went about doing his work ethically. If there wasn’t evidence to call for a prosecution, he didn’t mind saying ‘case dismissed; this person doesn’t need to be prosecuted.’”

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Mark Mesler, a defense lawyer who also battled Lepone frequently in court, respects him as a “fabulous person” and a trial lawyer.

“When Amy Weirich was filling positions with people she liked and trusted, Ray got the deputy district attorney’s spot, a fabulous honor. But it’s not trying cases,” he said.

“You never get to a courtroom, and you’re not doing the thing that Ray was really good at. So, after a while, I think he just decided that he needed to change the scenery.”

When Mulroy was elected, a mutual friend got the two together to talk about what the future might include, Mulroy said.

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“It quickly became apparent to me that he was very open to new ideas. He was open to reform. He was not some sort of holdout for the status quo that was going to be resisting what I was trying to do,” Mulroy said.

Lepone provided stability in Mulroy’s first year and sent a “reassuring message to the outside world” that there was continuity in the office, Mulroy said.

Former D.A. Bill Gibbons hired Lepone pretty much straight out of the University of Memphis law school.

“It did not take me long to realize Ray’s abilities as a prosecutor, his strong work ethic, and his leadership skills. He left the D.A.’s office for I believe a better salary but luckily returned, realizing that prosecution was his true calling,” Gibbons said.

At 8, Lepone wanted to be a police officer, patterning his life after an uncle who served on the Philadelphia force and charmed his nephew with stories of how he helped people.

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“I looked at him like a superhero, you know what I mean? Those stories stuck with me over the years,” Lepone said.

When Lepone decided on law school, it clicked for him that being a prosecutor was the legal sector’s parallel to what he’d seen his uncle do.

Lepone started his career as an assistant district attorney and spent the first 12 years prosecuting homicides, then gang violence. He jokes that he took a two-year break to be a magistrate in Juvenile Court, presiding over dependency and neglect cases.

“I was making decisions where children go and knowing when I did that, I could get the call that where I placed them, they had been injured or killed,” he said.

The work may be complicated, but Lepone, as a person, is not.

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“Everyone that knows me, there’s three things they know: I love pizza. I love the (Philadelphia) Eagles, and I love boxing. That’s it,” Lepone says.

His great-grandfather left Minturno, Italy, for a better life, which he ended up making in Philadelphia.

For years, Lepone has reminded reporters to spell his last name correctly, in deference to that man, memorialized on Ellis Island. 

“And don’t capitalize the “p” because I’m Italian, not French,” he says.

Lepone also survived a brutal brush with bone marrow cancer when he was 39. He later found out even his oncologist doubted he’d make it.

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He pushed through, coming to work through the chemotherapy and nausea, with a bald head and baggy suits.

“I tried to work as much as I could. Honestly, for me to deal with it, I needed normalcy.”

The stories he tells as he prepares to leave are the career-definers in the D.A.’s office.

“He helped run that office. And it was run well. He’s a good person and a good person to work with.”

Leslie Ballin

Like the time a defendant in custody in court tried to make a run for it.

“He jumps over the retaining wall. I’m at the podium in my suit in Judge Montesi’s courtroom. The guy knocks the bailiff over. So, the only thing between him and the door is me,” Lepone says.

“Just out of instinct, before he hit the door, I grabbed him, picked him up and put him on the ground. I put my knee in his back and got his arms back so the bailiff that was running in could cuff him.

“I always joke that that was the first time I had ever gotten in the news. It was 2001.”

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The Lester Street massacre will always be part of Lepone’s legacy for the sheer horror of the crime and the intricacy of the case, which took two years to come to trial.

“It had everything that you would ever confront in any case,” Lepone says. “Everything like DNA. You had a crime scene with hundreds of exhibits. You had numerous bodies. You had every kind of testing, starting with ballistics. The FBI was involved.”

It brought in a behavioral analyst to pinpoint the psychological makeup of a person capable of committing such a horrific crime.

That was before two children, left for dead in the house, one with a knife broken off in his skull, were later able to tell police who the perpetrator was.

And Lepone will never forget the day the verdict was delivered in the Taylor Bradford case.

The jury had not come to a conclusion on Saturday. The next day was Mother’s Day in 2010. Lepone and co-prosecutor Reggie Henderson arrived at court with flowers for Bradford’s aggrieved mother.

“She got the verdict on her son’s case on Mother’s Day. And the emotions of that are a lot to take,” Lepone said.

Bradford’s parents tend a memorial on the tree on Zach H. Curlin Street their son’s car hit. Lepone passes it daily, instantly in touch with their loss and courage.

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He leaves 201 Poplar with a deep appreciation for having been a member of a team, law enforcement included, that gives its all, he said, to pursue justice in Memphis.

“No matter what job you pick in this building, it will change you from who you were when you walked in. That I will guarantee.”