By Frank Main
Chicago Sun Times
Copyright 2007 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
The Chicago Fire Department announced today that a nationally known assistant deputy chief is under investigation for allegedly asking about the race of a paramedic who needed to leave work to visit his daughter in a hospital.
In early March, Donald W. Walsh was on the phone with a supervisor who asked him whether the paramedic could go to the South Side hospital for the family emergency, said Larry Langford, a spokesman for the department.
According to what the supervisor told department officials, Walsh, 51, then asked if the paramedic was white or black. Told that the paramedic is black, Walsh, who is white, allegedly said the paramedic or the supervisor would have to find a replacement before the paramedic could leave to see his daughter in the hospital.
Walsh, a department veteran of more than three decades, is being investigated for conduct unbecoming a member of the department, Langford said. If the allegations are found to be true, he could be fired, Langford said.
“We are conducting a complete and thorough investigation of these charges,” Fire Commissioner Raymond Orozco said in a written statement. “It saddens me that anyone in a position of authority in this department would display this type of poor judgment. When I accepted this job, I promised the citizens of our city that I would not tolerate behavior of this kind at any level.”
Walsh, who was placed on administrative leave, defended himself.
“I’m a highly decorated chief,” he said in an interview today. “This whole allegation is nothing but lies. It’s deplorable.”
In 2002, Walsh won the James O. Page Award from the emergency services section of the International Association of Fire Chiefs “on the basis of his hard work and dedication to fire-based EMS both here in the United States and throughout the world.”
Walsh, who holds a doctorate, worked through the United Nations to help fashion an urban rescue program for Turkey following a 1999 earthquake that killed more than 20,000 people there, according to the association.
Walsh also is president of the Cyanide Poisoning Treatment Coalition, a not-for-profit group of national experts, and he is president of a private consulting firm, International Emergency Medicine Disaster Specialists, according to the organizations’ Web sites.