By Keith Morelli
The Tampa Tribune
Copyright 2008 The Tampa Tribune
TAMPA, Fla. — Tampa Fire Rescue Lt. Natalie Brown has seen a lot in her 14 years as a firefighter and paramedic. Victims and patients come and go, but she always will remember Willie Robinson, the man impaled on a spike fence.
The incident occurred just before 6 p.m. Thursday at 3101 E McBerry St. “The call came in as a fall,” Brown said. The man had fallen off the roof onto the fence. Initially, rescuers arrived and just thought the man was straddling the fence. Then they found he couldn’t move, held there by 6 inches of metal stabbing into the back of his upper leg.
As she and her crew stabilized his position and tried to comfort him, a bond formed between rescuer and patient, she said. He could barely touch the ground to keep weight off the painful wound. “He was on his tippy-toes,” she said.
So she and her partner propped a cinderblock under him for better support. They held him up and gave him painkillers while firefighters used a hacksaw and bolt cutters to cut the fence. The man eventually was taken via helicopter to the hospital, with the piece of fence still stabbed into his flesh.
“You don’t take it out,” Brown, 34, said today. “The only time you ever pull an object out is if it is blocking the airway. We need to let the surgeon do that at the hospital.”
The rescue took between 15-20 minutes. The victim was weak and had lost a lot of blood, she said.
“He was a very brave man,” said Brown, who has been a paramedic for nine years and a firefighter since she was 19. “He was really a lovely gentleman. He didn’t complain at all about the pain.
He even joked with her about her name, she said, and as silver paint dripped on the rescuers from a roofing project the man was working on before he fell, “he was telling us how to get it off.”
The 46-year-old victim was taken to Tampa General Hospital where the metal spike was surgically removed from his leg. Brown said he was in fair condition today.
Saying she would never forget this rescue and “it is something I’ll be telling stories about,” Brown said, “I hope to meet him again someday. He was so nice.”