Mat-Su area responders on national memorial

MAT-SU — Even after her husband, Tim McKeown, died working as an emergency medical technician in September 2006, Virgie Hartley said it wasn’t difficult getting back into the swing of ambulance work.

She’s also an EMT.

“He died the way he wanted to, would have wanted to, I think. And that was doing his job and being there for someone else,” Hartley said.

She took another ambulance call the week after her husband died and hasn’t stopped doing what the two of them did together. Only now she does it alone.

“They’ve been active, oh, gosh, I don’t know how long — a decade or more, in the Willow community and the Sunshine community both,” said Clint Vardeman, deputy director of emergency services for the Mat-Su Borough. “They were always there. Virgie still is.”

Last month, McKeown was inducted into the National EMS Memorial, his name enshrined on a bronze oak leaf to be placed on the memorial’s Tree of Life. Hartley went to Roanoke, Va., for the ceremony, with her travel expenses shared between the Borough and the national memorial organization.

Also at the ceremony were the families of a pilot and two medics who died when a Lifeguard Alaska helicopter went down in Cook Inlet late last year, Hartley said.

That flight contained another name familiar in the Mat-Su emergency response community — Cameron Carter, 24, who got his start as a medic with the Butte Fire Department. Carter, pilot Lance Brabham, 42, of Soldotna and crewman John Stumpff, 47, of Sterling were flying patient Gayle McDowell from Cordova to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage when their chopper went down in December.

Hartley said the ceremony was excellently done and that she got to meet numerous people from across the country with stories similar to her own.

“Everyone there had lost someone,” Hartley said. “I met two women who lost their only children.”

As far as Vardeman and Hartley can recall, McKeown is the only Borough medic to die in the line of duty.

Hartley said the night McKeown died, she and her husband had responded to a call at a bed and breakfast across the highway from their home at Mile 97 Parks Highway. They were the first on scene, arriving before the ambulance. When McKeown suffered his fatal heart attack while responding, Hartley said she “initiated a code” and ambulance driver Robert Moore, who brought the Sunshine ambulance to the scene, started CPR.

“Without him I don’t know what I would have done,” Hartley said of Moore’s actions that night. “I paged for ‘medic down’ and I had all the help I needed,” Hartley said.

The patient they went to help, she said, was up and walking around that night.

Although McKeown was always a dedicated responder, Hartley said she got him into the business.

“I’ve been in the emergency business since ’68,” Hartley said. She used to do medic work, starting in California and working as an EMT in Oregon.

“We got up here and it was like he didn’t want me to go out on some of those night calls by myself because we were first responders and we’d get there before the ambulance would,” Hartley said.

After he joined up, McKeown could rarely be spotted dressed in anything but his uniform.

“He was very dedicated,” Hartley said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiers-man.com or 352-2270.