In the spring of 2011, Shelia Vitalis was preparing to deploy for the second time to Iraq as an Army reservist. She will be stationed there for a year as a military police officer. Here in the United States, Shelia is a career fire captain with the Durham County, North Carolina Fire Department, where she has served since 2001.
Prior to joining this department, Shelia was a firefighter with the City of Durham Fire Department for three years. She served in the Army full time from 1986 to 1991 and then did “odd jobs. I didn’t have a career. There wasn’t anything I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I never imagined being a firefighter. Growing up, I always thought firefighters were kind of silly. Why would you go into a burning building? Now here I am.”
Shelia remembered a particularly harrowing medical call she responded to.
“We went to a call that came in as a cardiac arrest of a seven year old boy. A seven year old boy in cardiac arrest? I thought maybe the dispatcher made a mistake, and maybe it was someone who was seventy. But when we got there, we found out it was indeed a seven year old, and that his father had killed him.”
“His mom and two other kids were still in the house. The father had tried to kill them also, but they were bigger and older and they were able to fight him off. The mom was crying and looking at me with these eyes that said, help me. But there was nothing we could do.”
“They sent all of us to counseling afterward. It affected all of us because most of us have kids. I have a kid, and a grandbaby. Just to see that kid there and be so helpless; it affected us for weeks, for months. Still to this day, to think about it, I tear up a little bit. Even on the scene I had to go around to the back of the house and let my emotions go. It was awful.”
“The dad was upstairs and we had to go up and help him. He had tried to kill himself too and had stabbed himself three or four times, in the neck and the stomach. So in addition to having to move the child, we had to go up and put the dad on a stretcher and bring him down.
Blood was everywhere. And I know it’s wrong to think this way but we all thought, why are we helping him? He did this to that little boy. He survived. It was hard to treat him knowing what he had done. But they tell you in all the EMT and fire classes, you have to do your job. We helped him to survive, but we could not help the little boy.”
“I had never been to a scene where a child was murdered. He just looked like he was sleeping. He had been strangled with bare hands. The mom wanted to come to the station and tell everyone thank you a few weeks later, but the crew couldn’t face her. So I said, okay, I’ll do it, I’m not going to let the lady down because right now she’s reaching out. She wanted some closure.
So I talked to her, and then the whole neighborhood had a gathering for the little boy with food, drinks, and a 5K run. I went and I did the 5K run for him. The mom came over and gave me a hug and she was crying, and that made me get emotional too.”
“As hard as it was, it helped me a lot to see her. She was trying to move on with her life; she had to, because she has two other kids to take care of. She was probably putting on an act for the kids, but I could feel her emotion when she gave me that hug. She almost broke down crying. I wanted to tell her it would be okay, but I don’t know that it will be okay for her. I hope so. But I don’t know.”
“The thing I am most proud of is that we get so much respect — from little kids, from women that see me on the truck. It’s a male dominated field. But I think any woman can do this job if she chooses to. Serving my community gives me a lot of self worth. Everybody thinks I’m a hero, especially my family.”
“I want my son and my grandchildren to know that they can be anything they want to be. I want to make a path for kids growing up today, male or female, to make it easier for them. People come up to me, strangers, little kids. I get a lot of questions. They ask me, how hard is it, and are you afraid? And I tell them, I am afraid sometimes, but I have a job to do, and you can do the same thing if you set your mind to it.”