Personal Injury Law

Death of a Firefighter -- Part 1 in an editorial series

By Steve Lombardi

If you drink as an underage teenager read this story and watch the YouTube video. I've previously written (here and here) about how much a young adult can drink before dying, this story should demonstrate to you how situations can escalate that result in a person dying.

For five days this week and two of the next week we will reprint, with permission, a story published by The Oregonian about Shannon Halvorson, an underage firefighter who died not through the line-of-duty, but under less than clear circumstances while at a training conference of the Oregon Volunteer Firefighters Association. The words and reporting is credited to The Oregonian. We wish to thank the Associate Editor, Doug Bates for granting us permission to do so and for Shannon's father, Dick Zimmerlee, whose tireless efforts will not let this matter rest until justice is done.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52r4h2KkA

Death of a Firefighter -- Part 1 in an editorial series by The Oregonian Editorial Board

Shannon Halvorson's fellow volunteer firefighters killed her.

They didn't mean to, but they killed her just the same. During a night of rowdy partying at an Albany motel five years ago, they got the underage woman so dangerously intoxicated she should have been hospitalized.

Instead, two inebriated male colleagues removed her from the party, according to police reports. She died as a result, and her grieving father has been fighting ever since for some measure of justice for the young son she left behind.

It's a disturbing story that says much about the exalted status of firefighters and a community's eagerness to close ranks around them. In America, firefighters are heroes, and deservedly so, but police reports and other public records indicate there were no heroes in the chaotic final hours of Shannon Halvorson's life.

In the spring of 2003, Halvorson was a 20-year-old volunteer with Crook County Fire & Rescue in Prineville. She was a vivacious, hard-driving survivor of a teenage pregnancy and a high school marriage that fell apart. Despite obstacles, she got her high school degree, graduated at the top of her community college class, became an emergency medical technician and firefighter and won admittance to a training program to advance her goal of becoming a registered flight nurse.

She received that welcome news on June 12, 2003, while in Albany for training at a conference of the Oregon Volunteer Firefighters Association. She shared a room there at the Comfort Suites with the wife of a Crook County division chief, who did not attend.

Late that evening, while the chief's wife went to bed, Halvorson took a dip in the motel pool. There, another firefighter joined her, shared wine with her and eventually invited her to go with him to a late-night party in the association president's suite next door at the Holiday Inn.

Witnesses said Halvorson appeared fine when she arrived at the hospitality suite, Room 209, just after 11 p.m. Two to three dozen firefighters, most of them men in their 30s and 40s, were there, and the liquor was flowing.

At the door, Halvorson was handed a 1.5-liter bottle of Captain Morgan spiced rum and told to drink from it as a requirement for entry. Reports say no one questioned whether she was of legal drinking age.

The moment she stepped into the room, other firefighters gave her at least two cans of beer and coaxed her to drink from open bottles of tequila, bourbon and rum. Witnesses told police she was soon chugging from a 1.5-liter jug of Jack Daniel's as men chanted "Go, go, go."

By 11:45 p.m. she was fading in and out of consciousness, showing symptoms of alcohol poisoning, according to paramedics and EMTs who were at the party. No one called 9-1-1 -- not, at least, in time to save her.

Reports show one EMT did argue that she should be taken to a hospital. He nearly came to blows with two intoxicated Prineville firefighters who wanted to remove her from the room instead.

They carried the unconscious woman out a side door, avoiding the lobby. Outside, one of the men flopped her limp body over his shoulder and began staggering across a parking lot toward their rooms at the Comfort Suites.

Minutes later, Shannon Halvorson's fellow firefighters finally called 9-1-1. By then, it was grotesquely too late.

Visit tomorrow to read about how the accident may have occurred.

Full post as published by Des Moines Personal Injury Lawyer on March 16, 2009 (boomark / email).