908 AES members struggle to save murder victim just outside Maxwell AFB

  • Published
  • By Master Sgt. Christian Michael
  • 908th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, Ala. --  It wasn't on the sandy plains of Iraq or the mountains of Afghanistan that four Reservists encountered a man brutally attacked and left for dead. Instead, on a bend of Highway 31 between Montgomery and Prattville, Ala., May 12, four members of the 908th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron struggled to save a man found cut from ear to ear lying in traffic.

A convoy of four vehicles had left late after the May Saturday Unit Training Assembly for a get-together across town when traffic ahead of them slowed and began moving around something in the road. Seeing an injured man, the group pulled over and three moved to the victim while the fourth kept watch over their vehicles.

Aeromedical evacuation technician Tech. Sgt. Christopher Hines was first to leave his vehicle and reach the victim with his emergency bag, followed fast by technician Master Sgt. Jonathan Griswold, both of whom were accompanied by an unidentified civilian doctor on-scene.

"We originally thought it was a car accident," said Griswold, who helped Hines and the doctor begin an IV and apply pressure to the man's bleeding injures. "You think it's one thing. It turns out to be something else. That's why his injury didn't make any sense - his throat was cut."

The group had stumbled upon a secondary crime scene - a victim injured in one location and dumped away from the attack. As Griswold and Hines checked the man for injuries they initially believed came from a hit-and-run, Tech. Sgt. Sean Kassebaum, a Reserve aeromedical evacuation technician and civilian emergency medical technician, pulled on his official "Traffic Control" jacket he keeps in his car and began directing traffic.

As if on the job, the three fell into the natural roles of a first-responder medical team.

"We worked like the team that we are," said Kassebaum. "We got out and did exactly what I've seen every ambulance crew ever do."

Meanwhile, medical logistician Master Sgt. Judith Johnson remained by the vehicles and kept traffic moving. She said until they all sat down to debrief, she thought someone had been hit by a car, and intentional injury was "definitely not what I was expecting."

Back at the victim, the responders struggled to keep the man alive.

"We normally don't see (patients) in that condition," said Griswold, who said most of his military work comes after triage and Self Aid Buddy Care. "You don't expect to run into something like that on the side of the road."

Kassebaum has seen many such injuries in his work as an EMT, but not often by homicide.

"When you come up on a body on the side of a highway at night, generally it's a hit and run, not a murder," said Kassebaum. "So that was different."

After cleaning up and getting to the party, the group talked.

"We got back to the house and the four of us sat there and debriefed, which was really cool," said Kassebaum. "We started debriefing and it was like: well, there's no way that was an accident. That had to have been something deliberate."

Kassebaum praised the victim despite the grim outlook.

"He lived for another hour. I thought that was pretty awesome," he said. "I could tell by the way he was responding to the treatments ... that he was definitely a fighter. To hear that he lived for another hour, was testament to his will to live."

The situation gave a testament not only to the will of the victim, but the hope and commitment of the responders.

"I thought they did a fantastic job out there," said Maj. George Hilyard, 908th AES director of operations, who praised them for jumping unbeknownst into a crime scene without PPE to save a life. "It's not every day you come across something like that. They took all the training they've acquired over the years and did what was necessary."

Hilyard plans to submit the four for appropriate recognition for their bold response to a potentially dangerous situation, and ascribes them and the unit as a whole with high regard.

"I always knew that they would step up whenever they needed to, and that's exactly what they did," he said. "They are fantastic, just like the rest of this unit."