![]() Pratt saw that the woman was not breathing, and had no pulse, just as he’d been advised by the 911 dispatcher-in fact, her heart had stopped, and her pupils were fixed and dilated. The firemen removed her from the bed and put her on the floor, where paramedics Ben Pratt and Manny Fuentes began resuscitation attempts. There, lying on her back in the bed, a woman in a tank top and pajama bottoms appeared to be dead. Braking to a stop, they rushed inside, where they encountered four firemen in a small master bedroom. The REMSA paramedics saw a man outside, waving them on. Within six minutes an emergency team from the Reno Fire Department had arrived at the house, followed seconds later by two paramedics from the Regional Emergency Medical Ser vices Authority, also known as REMSA. The telephone went silent-not disconnected, just put down unattended. She has a mitral valve prolapse, was feeling really stressed the last month or so." As far as Reade could tell, it didn’t sound as though Higgs was actually doing any CPR- usually he could hear callers gasping between delivering bits of needed information. I came back in the room and she was sleeping. ![]() "How long do you think you’re going to be?" Higgs asked. Higgs gave Reade detailed instructions on how to get to Otter Way-what streets to take, where to turn. She’s not breathing." He’d attempted CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, Higgs said, but he couldn’t get a pulse. "It’s my wife," Higgs told the 911 dispatcher, George Reade. The town that had begun 150 years before as a rickety bridge across a fast-running stream had turned into a fine place to live for more than 350,000 people.Īt 6:43, one of those people, William Charles Higgs, known to his wife, his friends and his co-workers as "Chaz," punched 911 on a telephone in the same Otter Way house, and calmly requested medical assistance. The Truckee River, the jewel of the Meadows, rushed down its gorge from Lake Tahoe through the city, rolling north to its disappearance in Pyramid Lake, sunk in the desolation of northern Nevada. To the west, the peaks of the Sierras towered over the city, clad with evergreens along the ridges, guarded by rocky spines higher up, already golden in the unfiltered glow from the east. By 6:30 the first rays of the morning sun were well over the rim of the Shadow Hills, the eastern, desert-starting side of the lush mountain valley known as Truckee Meadows.Īt 4,400 feet above sea level, the valley floor was still cool from the overnight chill, and as the early light crept up the eastern wall of the small house at 9673 Otter Way, it seemed like the dawn of just another beautiful summer day in the one-time "Biggest Little City in the World," Reno, Nevada.
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