Anna Sussman

So they stand there in their gear in the hot sun.

Draping the car means pinning up these big yellow sheets around the scene of the accident so passersby don't see something traumatizing and also to protect the dignity of the dead inside.

But this school bus was approaching down the highway and they realized they hadn't draped the car yet.

The scene was still totally exposed.

So Amika and the firefighters scrambled to quickly get the yellow sheets over the car, and they finished just as the school bus was approaching.

Like slow motion?

When the coroner came, Amika and her team began the work of extracting the woman from the car.

The firefighters gathered around quietly.

When the coroner got to work, the fire crew was dismissed.

They drove back to the station, and when they got there, they cleaned themselves up and washed down the truck.

And a few days later, a firefighter named Frankie came in.

Frankie was from a nearby firehouse and would come by a lot.

Frankie said he'd learned that the child of the woman who died in that car was on the school bus and had seen the accident.

Amika and the incarcerated responders at Station 5 almost never found out what happened to the people they treated, the people they pulled from cars or escorted out of fires.

They'd be with them in those life-and-death moments, and then they'd drive back to the prison.

And then something almost unheard of happened about 30 days later.

It wasn't a terrible accident.

Everyone was okay.

They were just a little shaken up.

So Amika took the kids and brought them over to the fire truck and sat them down.