Kansas City Firefighters Honored with Public Safety Officer Medal of Valor
WASHINGTON -- Six Kansas City firefighters who braved a hail of gunfire last year to rescue a severely wounded paramedic received the nations top public safety award Thursday.
At a White House ceremony, Vice President Dick Cheney presented each with the Public Safety Officer Medal of Valor.
The six members of the department were Capts. Patrick Martin and Phillip Atwood; firefighters David Bradley, Marvin Donaldson, Stephen Johnson; and apparatus operator Sean McKarnin.
"We're on top of the world," Martin said just before the ceremony. "It's a great honor. It just blows me away."
Law enforcement officers from Florida, Georgia, Kentucky and Washington, D.C. also were honored at the gathering also attended by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez.
The medal, Cheney said, was reserved for men and women who display exceptional courage, extraordinary decisiveness and presence of mind, and unusual swiftness of action, disregarding their own safety in order to protect others in action above and beyond the call of duty.
Gunfire greeted Martin and his crew, and Atwood, who commanded a pumper, when they responded to a house explosion in south Kansas City on Feb. 23, 2004. Police and ambulance units had already arrived.
Two bullets struck paramedic Mary Seymour of the Metropolitan Ambulance Services Trust in the chest. She was on the ground and not moving. With little hesitation, the fire department crew went in to get her.
"There was no plan," Martin said. "There wasn't, 'This is what were going to do.' We didn't draw anything on the ground."
Seymour, who is fully recovered, also was at the ceremony. "Since the shooting, we've all become very good friends," she said.
"They deserve this. They're firemen. They're not supposed to be rescuing people under gunfire."
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