“It’s going to be hard to hear the sirens go by my house.“At this point, we cannot confirm that this was a hate crime,” Scott said in a statement Wednesday afternoon.
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“This has been a major part of my life for 28 years,” he said. He plans to retire at the end of the year, and he knows he’ll miss it when he goes. Still, he said, “The person who does this, and gets nothing for doing it, you’ve got to admire what they do.”Īfter 28 years in the engine bays and recreation rooms off Rainbow Valley Boulevard - after more than his share of midnight calls that got him out of his bed and driving his department pickup over to the freeway - the end is at hand for Fried.
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The volunteers are required to serve at least three 24-hour shifts every month, and Fried said almost all of them are working toward paying jobs at full departments.
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His is one of the busiest, tasked with all of Rainbow’s territory, plus a four-mile stretch of Interstate 15, from the Mission Road exit to the county line. Fried said you can count them on one hand: De Luz, Elfin Forest, San Pasqual, Rainbow. North County’s assortment of volunteer fire departments has waned through the years. His wife, Cathy, worked as a dispatcher at North County Fire for years, and both of his sons are paramedics working in North County: Ray as an engineer in Poway, and Derek as a firefighter in Vista. But it’s obvious that he is most proud of his family. Sure, there is pride in numbers like that, Fried admitted. “When they had my little retirement thing and gave a little talk, they figured I’d had a hand in teaching approximately 5,000 EMTs,” Fried recalled.
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But when you live in a small community, you’re going to run into people you’ve worked on.”Īs a teacher, Fried influenced a vast number of young men and women who are now saving lives all over the state.
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“He said, ‘Bruce! You helped deliver me!’ That’s the one thing that happens in small communities - you know, if you were delivering a baby in Los Angeles, you probably would never see that person again.
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“I was on another call 17 years later, and he happened to be driving by and stopped,” Fried said. He also remembers the first child he delivered - a boy - in the late 1980s. “We got him breathing by the time the ambulance got here,” he said. My own family lived in rural Rainbow for the first few years of my life, and for all I know, Fried could have been on duty early that morning in 1986, when my father rolled his green Plymouth Valiant on Rainbow Heights Road, or served on any number of medical calls to my grandparents’ house on the mountain.įried said he’ll never forget the time when an old man came to the door of the station cradling his lifeless, 18-month-old grandson. (Previously, the Rainbow station had been a county outpost in a much smaller Rainbow than exists today.)Īmong the people who know Fried are dozens of locals he has assisted following accidents and heart attacks. He also spent 12 years working for the Fallbrook-based fire agency, which absorbed the Rainbow department as part of a merger that created the North County Fire Protection District in 1987. This volunteer fire chief knows the codes as well as anybody: During the 20 years between 1991 and last May, Fried was a full-time emergency medical technician instructor at Palomar College.