An Instant to Decide, a Lifetime to Regret: The Aftermath of Ambulance Accidents

Three years of informal probation and 500 hours of community service doesn’t sound like a punishment many would embrace. But for a California EMT who had faced up to 12 years in prison, it no doubt came as a tremendous relief.

That sentence was meted out to ambulance operator Matthew Swan for his role in a March 2003 accident in which an elderly motorist was killed. After originally facing a charge of felony vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, Swan, of Doctors Ambulance Service in Laguna Hills, pleaded guilty this past May to a reduced charge of misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter.

The crash resulted from a split-second decision that yielded horrible consequences. Swan, 22, was responding Code 3 to an injury accident. He encountered a traffic jam and veered around it, crossing a double yellow line into a lane used by oncoming traffic. At that moment, 77-year-old Ralph Bellville entered the same lane from the opposite direction. Talking on his cell phone, he didn’t notice the ambulance. The four-ton rig smashed into Bellville’s Mercedes Benz, blasting it 145 feet down the road. Bellville was killed instantly.

The criminal count didn’t come for almost a year. When it did, Swan became the first emergency-vehicle driver ever charged in Orange County Superior Court for a line-of-duty accident.

Beyond the criminal fallout, there were additional prices to pay for Swan, a straight-A student and Eagle Scout who had been interested in emergency medicine since age five. His back was injured—three bulging disks will prevent him from ever lifting a patient again. He endured more than a year of physical therapy, as well as counseling for depression and post-traumatic stress.

“Really,” Swan was quoted as saying in the Orange County Register, “my life stopped on that day.”

Serious Consequences

Life-altering disasters can come with no warning. The instantaneous decisions you make behind the wheel of an emergency vehicle have consequences far beyond you, your health and your career. But is jail something you have to worry about?

Ask Mike Montecalvo, an Ohio medic who, a decade and a half ago, was running hot on a call involving injured children. As he came to an intersection, every car but one stopped. That car’s driver, a pregnant woman, rolled into the crossroads squarely in front of Montecalvo’s rig, which broadsided it, killing her. Montecalvo was convicted of felony vehicular homicide and went to jail. He served, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, six months of a 2–10-year sentence.

“That,” says Skip Kirkwood, EMS chief in Wake County, NC, and a senior consultant with the Platte City, MO-based EMS consulting firm Fitch & Associates, “is the banner case for bad things that can happen to you.”

Most accidents EMS drivers get into aren’t fatal, but they can still bring serious consequences ranging from disciplinary actions to the grief and guilt of knowing someone’s been hurt or killed through your actions.

Generalization is hard, of course, because state laws vary and EMS organizations have their own policies and procedures. But there are some things you can probably expect if you get into an accident.

First, there’s dealing with the immediate aftermath. That’s simple enough if you scrape a pole or something minor, but in more-serious cases it could entail tending to injuries, exchanging information, notifying the appropriate bosses and determining if you can and should keep working.

“When one of our vehicles is involved in an accident, the operator immediately notifies dispatch of their ability to continue,” says John Nohr, safety officer for Portland (OR)?Fire &?Rescue, where all personnel are at least EMT-Bs. “Dispatch will then notify the on-duty fire investigator and the appropriate batallion chief. Also, if necessary, they’ll send police for traffic control. And if it generates injuries, they’ll send fire and EMS response.”