Sometime around the year 2000, I was hired out of semi-retirement to be an editor of the Louisburg paper, which had recently been purchased by the Paola paper.
On one afternoon in May, I received a call about a fatality accident between Louisburg and Paola on Kansas Highway 68. When I got there, an EMT was leaning back, bracing herself against an ambulance. Covered with a dark sheet on a gurney nearby was the lifeless body of a newly minted high school graduate who had fallen asleep after a night of partying only to be involved in a head-on collision with a pick-up.
The EMT, who happened to be the daughter of my neighbor and wasn’t that much older than the victim, had recently been hired by the ambulance service. It was the first time she had worked a fatality, and she was struggling to maintain her composure.
In a quiet voice she told me how she had witnessed the young man’s final breath.
Flash forward a year or two, and I was notified of an accident closer to home. A grade school student had been riding a three-wheeler on a county blacktop and had somehow hit a tree and the machine caught on fire. A yellow plastic material covered the victim.
As I approached the scene, a lone firefighter was there, sitting on the back bumper of a pumper truck. Like the EMT, he was bracing himself, his hands on his knees, trying to absorb the tragedy that laid a few yards away. He said nothing to me.
I don’t really remember what pictures I took at either accident scene. I think the paper used one of a helicopter ambulance taking off carrying the shattered body of the young man. I’m not sure that any photo was used with the accident of the child.
What has stayed with me for more than 20 years, though, is the impact that those deaths made on the first responders. We think that they are tough and able to handle just about anything, but in some cases they are deeply affected by the tragedy before them.
I thought of that again a couple of weeks ago when the Linn County Sheriff’s Office reported that deputies, firefighters and other first responders had been in a debriefing after two young boys were found trapped below the ice on a partially frozen lake.
Being a first responder can be a job that gets the adrenaline pumping, but it can also be the catalyst for unimaginable sorrow when you know that a young life has slipped through your fingers – whether you could help it or not. That is particularly difficult when the victim is a child.
We should be grateful that those men and women are willing to put themselves on the line and take on that sorrowful burden.
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