Chapter 1: How did Amika Mota's life change after the crash?
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It's a journey that brings us behind the walls of one of the largest women's prisons on earth and into the passenger seat of an all-female fire crew as they respond to real emergencies. It's a story of death, birth, and of a woman who stands at the gates to both. And it's a story that asks the question, what if we took society's villains and made them society's heroes?
Sensitive listeners are advised.
Okay, let's start with, tell me everything you remember about your first call.
It was fall during the really foggy, foggy season. And so the fog was really, really heavy. And so, you know, In the fire engine on the way to the call, we could hardly see. The fog was so thick. And we had heard that there was a cotton truck involved.
It was like a four-lane highway, and it was a cotton truck that had been rear-ended by somebody else and kind of spun out, and the cotton bales fell off onto the freeway.
The call came in to Madeira County Station 5. It sits in the flatlands of California's Central Valley, lined with rows and rows of aging almond trees. The firefighters at Station 5 were the closest to the scene.
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Chapter 2: What was Amika's experience as a firefighter in prison?
Saving the lives of their jailers and their families. When they ride past schoolyards with fire truck lights spinning, kids cheer. And then they drive into the prison gates. Before Amika was inmate X32168, she lived in the mountains of Kern County, California, in a three-bedroom house.
The front thing was a whole porch all the way around the front, like a wraparound porch. Yeah, it was really beautiful. I loved that house. It was kind of a dream house.
Amika was 29 years old and she had three kids. And she had just moved to the countryside to try to slow down and focus on her kids and focus on being a mom.
Yeah, so Tehachapi is just these high desert mountains, a lot of rolling hills, really beautiful. You can see the shadows on the hills from the clouds.
She'd walk her older kids to the school bus every morning, and on weekends, they'd go hunt for snakes or go to her son's football games.
I had big dreams of taking care of the home and having a garden and having nice meals and I tried. I liked the idea of it. I did. I had idealized the idea of living in a small town, taking care of my kids, taking care of my house.
And then, on a warm night in October 2008, driving down Lincoln Avenue in Cypress, California, everything changed.
I do remember approaching the light that I ran and like seeing the light. I don't remember if I saw it red, but I just, I like, I was going to burn through it. And it, I didn't see any other vehicles. And then that was when I hit Mr. Carp. it's like glimpses.
I remember glimpses of coming into the hospital and like waking up in between the surgery and like seeing, I remember the families I would see in the hallway and I remember waking up and that's like handcuffed to the bed. So there was sheriff deputies on, you know, one side of the bed and outside the door. So you could see two outside the door and one right next to me.
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Chapter 3: How did the crash impact Amika's family dynamics?
Fire Escape is a production of Snap Studios and Wondery. This series was created, written, and produced by me, Anna Sussman. And I want to thank Amika Moda for her help and generosity in sharing her story with us. For Snap Studios, our senior story editors are Mark Ristich and Nancy Lopez. Marissa Dodge is our director of production. Original music by Renzo Gorio and Doug Stewart.
Doug Stewart also created our theme song. Sound design and engineering by Miles Lassie. Our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Our development producer is Eliza Mills. Claire Chambers, Lauren Dee, and Mandy Gorenstein are our senior producers. And Sarah Mathis is our managing producer. Our executive producers for Snap Studios are Glenn Washington and Mark Ristich.
Executive producers for Wondery are Marshall Louie, Morgan Jones, George Lavender, and Jen Sargent. Special thanks to Adiza Egan, Catherine Steyer-Martinez, Pat Massidi-Miller, and the San Francisco Fire Department.
On Team Snap, the union represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communication Workers of America, AFL-CIO Local 51. Firescape, the full six-part series, is dropping weekly on the Snap Judgment feed. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts and on our website, snapjudgment.org.