Acting Assistant Superintendent Samuel Wright. - NORMAN GRINDLEY/DEPUTY CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER
FIREFIGHTERS ARE taught to be brave. They know their jobs could take them into the jaws of death every time they respond to an emergency call. They hope to always save lives, but they brace themselves for the worst.
On Thursday, October 6, 2005, when Acting Assistant Superintendent Samuel Wright and other firefighters rushed to Barnes Avenue, off Maxfield Avenue in St. Andrew, he was not prepared for what he would find.
"In all my years of firefighting, I have never seen anything like it," the veteran with 30 years of firefighting experience said with a grimace. "It was a sad case of four persons who were burnt to death; it was very horrible. I have seen burnt bodies over the years, but this one touched me," he continued.
PRE-DAWN ATTACK
Just before daybreak, gunmen had torched the house and sprayed bullets at the four people inside the house when they tried to escape the inferno. The criminals also fired shots at residents who tried to respond to their cries for help as the flames engulfed them. A 10-year-old girl, Sasha-Kay Brown; her grandparents and her aunt perished in the fire.
"I stayed at the fence and saw two burnt bodies on the veranda, the place was grilled up and you could see that the people were running away, trying to get out, but they just couldn't," the firefighter recounts.
He says after they cut the grille and went inside the house to carry out search and rescue, they found remains of the other two persons near the back of the house. There was very little left of those two bodies.
"There were just a few bones left of one body and the other was just dust and a few intestines," he relates in a barely audible voice.
Acting Assistant Superintendent Wright entered the Fire Brigade at 24 years old, a few years after he left Kingston Technical High School, and he still remembers his first fire.
"I fought my first blaze at Nuttall Hospital at a home for the elderly; a lot of the residents died in that fire."
Residents, he says, sometimes get angry at firefighters, especially when they lose their property or if someone dies in a fire. He admits the residents' anger affects him, but he does his best to diffuse those situations and help the residents deal with their grief as best as he can.
"I have to use quick thinking when those situations come up, and I try my best to appease them, because if I don't, things might get ugly, lives might even be lost," he stated.
After three decades of putting his life on the line to secure people's lives and property, acting assistant superintendent Wright says there is no other job that he would prefer to be doing.
- Andrea Downer
