May 17--Firefighters and medics are used to responding to shootings and violence.
Just not usually right next door.
An early-morning shootout on Wednesday between Columbus police and two people in a fleeing SUV ended in the parking lot of Fire Station 19, at Northmoor Place and N. High Street in Clintonville.
The SUV plowed through the station's bushes and stopped in the parking lot. When the barrage of gunfire was over and a man lay handcuffed on the ground, the police turned to the medics who were watching.
"They looked toward the firehouse like, are you guys coming out?" Fire Lt. Ken Peters said.
Peters and another firefighter met with the news media this morning to describe what happened at the station.
Seven firefighters and medics were at the station at the time, three hours from the end of their shifts, and most were asleep. Two medics had just returned from a run and were filling out paperwork when the shots got closer.
"I feel very lucky for my medic crew," Peters said. "They had just gotten back from the hospital. They would have been right in the middle of it, if it had been two, three, four minutes earlier."
Those same medics went out to pronounce Emmanuel Gatewood, 24, and his girlfriend, Kourtney Hahn, 21, dead.
Gatewood was a suspect in an April homicide, and police had been alerted to look for the SUV. When officers tried to pull it over, the SUV took off, and one or both occupants fired at police during the four-block chase, police said.
While it was shocking to have the shootout happen so close to the firehouse, what happened next was not unusual for firefighters.
"We have all been through this, responding to shooting scenes and accident scenes," Peters said. The drill on Wednesday was the same: "reacting with your training and doing what you need to do and then leaving it to the police department."
Three firefighters' cars were hit by bullets, including one that was completely shot out. That truck might've stopped bullets from flying into neighboring homes behind the firehouse, Peters said.
Firefighter Gary Greiner, whose Chevrolet Silverado pickup was pierced by one bullet, said he's still running what happened through his mind.
"It's hard to process everything that you're seeing, feeling, hearing when 15 seconds earlier, you were in a dead sleep and you wake up to a popping sound that's very close and you know that it's gunshots," he said.
Neither Greiner nor Peters would go into details of what they saw from the firehouse's second-floor windows, since as witnesses, they will be part of the police investigation.
The shootout reinforces that, even in normally quiet Clintonville, anything can happen, they said.
"It's a dangerous job," Peters said. "It can happen any time, anywhere."
@allymanning
Copyright 2013 - The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
