I was huddled up in the closet that functioned as a radio room adjacent to the ambulance bay.  It was way passed the bedtime of responsible adults.  I was smoking a cheap cigar and playing ‘Roller Coaster Tycoon.’  I never was any good at that game.  I always spent hours trying to build the most ridiculous roller coaster ever conceived.  Meanwhile, all my patrons had nowhere to use the restroom and the ones that did ride the coaster got sick and vomited.  Their little icons looked green and their cheeks were full.  The tones dropped for a seizure, breaking my bid to be an amusement park mogul.

“Kickin’ chicken run!” my partner Bill was just making it down the stairs from the bedroom.  “Boppity, floppity. Oh yeah!”  Bill was always fun.  He was close to retiring from a neighboring fire department, and worked for us part-time to stack a little cash towards his state retirement.  We always called him the old man but he had more energy than most of us in the middle of the night.

We pulled out of the bay and sped into the darkness.  The house wasn’t very far away.  Just a few blocks from the firehouse dispatch advised us that the patient was now in full arrest and that they were giving CPR instructions on the phone.

“I guess she’s not kickin’ it anymore?” I glanced over just in time to catch my partner’s wry smile.

A paramedic that was working alone on a float car called that he was responding as well.  I knew Eric from several similar encounters and felt better knowing we were going to get quality help.  He was young and new, but he had a professional demeanor that was beyond his years. A few minutes later we pulled up in front of an old turn-of-the-century camelback house.  Just as we were walking up the lawn our back-up pulled in and Eric met us with a first-in bag.

A scrawny looking man in his mid 40’s answered the door and simply pointed down the hallway.  He didn’t say a word.  We got to the end of the hall and found a body in the bedroom on the left.  She was a bit younger than the man that answered the door.  She looked to be in her 30’s.  She was wet.  She was naked.

“Getting out of the shower I guess,” said Eric looking around.  She didn’t so much as have a towel around her.

Eric got to his airway bag before I could, “No you don’t,” he said, “I want another tube!”

“Easy there, Eric. Cool those jets. Take it if you want it, and I’ll grab a line.”  Bill had already started chest compressions.

I began looking over the patient.  She didn’t look ill.  Her skin was still pink.  She looked young and healthy.  I remembered the initial call-in was for seizures, but those are often mistaken.  I was starting to wonder if she had overdosed when Eric told me to push down on her trachea.  As I placed my hand on her neck I saw the man who had let us in step into the doorway.  I felt the tube slide down her trachea beneath my fingers.  “You’re in dude,” I said quietly to Eric and then I looked up and talked with a bit more volume, “Sir, did she have any medical problems?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, well what’s her name and how old is she?”

“I don’t know.”

At that point he disappeared from the doorway.

I looked at Bill, and then at Eric.  I silently mouthed the words, “What the fuck?”

“I’m not liking this,” Eric said looking around.  His back had been to the doorway since he had started working on the airway, and he no longer felt comfortable like this.  He moved to the side opposite Bill and started to bag her with the BVM I had just put together.

I had been looking for an IV site in between helping Eric, but now I just abandoned that effort and stood up so that I could see down the hall better and move if I had to.  I wasn’t sure if I should run down the hall after him, or stay where I was.  I was still deciding my next move when Bill said, “Buck, better look at this.”

I looked down and saw that Bill had momentarily stopped CPR and was pointing between her legs.  A small pool of blood had formed and was growing larger.  Bill said that it was getting bigger as he was pumping on her chest.  We all looked at each other for a long moment.

“What do we do?” asked Eric, his eyes wide.

“I don’t know about you two,” I said, “but I’m about to jump through that window over there.  I don’t know if that guy’s getting a gun or what.”

We all stopped working on the patient and stood up at once.  We were frantically looking around the room, trying to come up with an exit plan that didn’t include running back down the dark hallway towards the middle of the house.  When I first mentioned jumping through the window, it was half in jest, but now it looked like the best option we had and I was considering whether or not I should throw a chair through it first.

But I never had the chance to decide.  He had appeared back in the doorway again without a word.  I scanned him with my eyes as quick as I could to see if he had a weapon.  It didn’t look like he did, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Sir, don’t leave the room again,” I found myself speaking with authority even though I did not have the courage to back it up.  “Did you know her at all?”

“No,” now he was openly weeping.  “I don’t know her.  I don’t know what to do.”  He was also slurring his words and the way he was standing in the doorway suggested he was drunk.  He suddenly became frantic and started looking down the hallway again.

“Hey!  Don’t move!” Seeing as he was drunk and confused, I saw my opening and decided to get tough with him.  “Sit down on the floor right there and put your hands where I can see them!”  I had never told anyone to do that before.  Flashbacks from 70’s TV shows danced in my head.  He was hesitating and I had to follow it up with something serious. “Do it now, asshole!”  That last comment probably needed a gun as a prerequisite, but I was in uncharted territory and decided to go all-in.  He hesitated for a moment and glanced down the hallway again.  I decided that if I lost site of him again that I would be going head first through the window to my left.  But in the end, he sat down and put his hands in his lap.

I got on the radio and called for police.  We then turned our attention to the patient again and got a line started.  Eric left to go grab a backboard and came back with two cops who took the suspect off our hands.  A few minutes later we were headed down the road with our patient.  We never got her back.  The ER worked her for a while and called her while we were finishing paperwork.  For the first time in my career, a cop came and interviewed us before we had left the ER.  He told us that the two were performing some sort of sex act that involved of all things, a sports trophy.  It was unknown whether or not it was consensual.  She started to bleed and went unconscious.  Sometime after that he called 911 and the rest is history.

A simple seizure call had turned into a possible homicide sex crime.  It had never even occurred to me to ask for police backup since I had run hundreds of seizure calls in my career without needing such assistance.  If I can learn anything from hindsight, it might be that I should ask for police assistance on any full arrest no matter what circumstances appear to have led up to it.  In any event, I am glad he did not have a weapon.  I am happier still that I didn’t have to jump through a window.  The moral of our story is that no matter how mundane your call starts out to be, a homicidal sex crime involving a golf trophy cannot be ruled out based on dispatch information alone.  Proceed accordingly.