Editor’s note: “The saved effect: True stories of lives reclaimed by people who were ready to act” explores what happens after a life is saved. Written by Fire Captain and Paramedic Brad Newbury and his daughter, EMT Kiera Newbury, the book brings together true stories of cardiac arrest, drowning, choking and other life-threatening emergencies to reveal the lasting ripple created when someone is prepared and willing to act.
Moving beyond the rescue itself, “The saved effect” follows survivors, families, bystanders, first responders and medical teams into the years that followed, showing how one decisive moment can preserve relationships, change careers, shape families and allow futures to continue. It is both a tribute to those who step forward and a call for every reader to become trained, ready, and willing to act when a life depends on it.
By Brad Newbury and Kiera Newbury
Saving one of their own
Excerpted from Chapter 6 of The Saved Effect
On the morning of March 14, 2017, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, was preparing for a brutal snowstorm that was projected to drop more than a foot of snow in just a few hours. Richard S. Smith, a seasoned Bridgewater firefighter/paramedic with 14 years of experience, had spent his final shift responding to almost triple the usual number of calls overnight. With minimal sleep, a magnesium deficiency he would later learn about through blood work, and the chaos of the night before, the conditions quietly had built the perfect recipe for disaster.
“The last thing I truly remember is bending over to put my socks on to go home, and ironically, that’s the way they found me,” he said.
Neil Harrington, a Bridgewater native, always knew he wanted to serve the community that had raised him. His EMT education and later paramedic training at NMETC gave him the skills he would rely on to save lives.
Neil was hired by the Bridgewater Fire Department shortly after completing paramedic school and was sent to the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy to represent his hometown. When he began his orientation at the department, he met challenges that would be difficult even for firefighters with decades of experience, never mind a brand-new firefighter/paramedic on his second day.
He was instructed to report to Bridgewater’s Station 2 at 7:30 a.m. to help prepare for the storm. After grabbing some food from home, Neil decided to drive to the station early, eating breakfast in the parking lot before what he expected to be a long day.
“I had an orange in the truck, and I said, ‘Let me just eat this, I’m probably not going to have time to eat once I get into work.’ I remember sitting in my truck for an extra five minutes to eat that orange.
When he walked into the station’s day room, the usual gathering place before a shift, it was empty. The silence felt wrong. Anyone who has spent a morning in a firehouse knows the usual sounds: chatter, coffee brewing, jokes being traded between shifts. Instead, the station was still. “That’s weird for a firehouse,” Neil recalls thinking.
Neil figured the others must have gotten an early start preparing equipment in the apparatus bay, but something in his gut told him to take the long way there.
“As I’m walking down the hall, my intuition of something being wrong was already taking over. You would never pass the second bedroom to get to the apparatus bay. I honestly can’t chalk it up to anything other than intuition or gut instinct that something was wrong.
As he moved down the hallway, the uneasy feeling pulled him farther past the door to the bay. Approaching the last room, he heard a loud snoring sound, deep, almost unnatural. “It’s 7:30 a.m. We’re prepping for a storm. Who’s still sleeping?” he wondered. He kept walking and was just past the bunkroom door, but something didn’t feel right. That sound was not right. He turned around.
When he walked into the room, he saw his coworker Richard, who was in the fetal position, wedged between the bed and the nightstand with the lights still on. Neil entered quickly, shaking him and calling “Richard! Richard!” His voice got louder with each passing second. He applied a sternal rub, but the sound in Richard’s throat confirmed what Neil feared: agonal respirations, the last reflexive attempts of a failing respiratory drive.
A quick check of his pulse told Neil everything he needed to know.
“He’s already dead or about to be dead, and we need to do something now.
With only seconds to choose his next move, Neil knew that experienced help was only a hallway away. He sprinted into the apparatus bay and yelled for assistance. “It was an eerie moment for me,” he said, “because nobody knew what I knew yet.
He was a brand-new rookie on only his second day, with no credibility yet established. But the words came out with urgency and certainty: “Somebody’s dead in the bedroom, and I need your help.
It wasn’t “somebody.” It was a brother, a coworker, a mentor.
Up until this moment, every call Neil had ever run had given him time to prepare, the tones sounding overhead, the crew gathering, the ride to the scene, the seconds to plan for what they might find. But this was different. There was no lead-up, no warning, no moment to steer himself. The emergency was inside their own house, involving one of their own.
Relying only on muscle memory and training, Neil brought his lieutenant to the room. Within seconds the team placed Richard onto the floor and began CPR. Neil and his lieutenant started compressions while others rushed to gather equipment. Once the defibrillation pads were placed, Neil assumed control of the airway, ventilating with a bag valve mask while the team prepared for advanced airway management.
“Matt Fay did an outstanding job on the monitor. He’s a great paramedic and one of the best in the department. He was the right guy for that job.
Fay identified a shockable rhythm, charged the monitor, and delivered a lifesaving shock. Richard’s arms contracted as the electricity moved through his body. Compressions resumed immediately, and as the team worked to stabilize Richard, someone brought a stretcher down the hallway. They had been working on him for several minutes. The team paused to check for a pulse. They had one!
Now an experienced firefighter/paramedic, Neil reflected on the strangeness of that morning. “You’re usually doing this in somebody’s home. This was our home. Our safe space. Our place of work. And now we’re doing it in our own hallway, in our own bedroom, on one of our own firefighters.” What had seemed like an empty station only minutes earlier now felt full. “After we realized what was going on, it felt like the entire department was in that room.
Once Richard was secured and moved to the ambulance, Neil joined him in the back of the vehicle.
“Captain Elder could already tell that the situation was overwhelming for me,” he recalled. “He said, ‘You need to be in the back of that ambulance and transport him. You need to see this call through, from start to finish.’
In the ambulance, Richard began to fight against the care being delivered. It wasn’t aggression; it was the disoriented combativeness that often follows ROSC, return of spontaneous circulation. Richard wasn’t fighting his coworkers. He was fighting his way back to life.
Excerpted with permission from “The saved effect: True stories of lives reclaimed by people who were ready to act” by Brad Newbury and Kiera Newbury, published in August, 2026, by Mission Driven Press, available for purchase at Amazon.
