Paramedics

Maybe they were desperate for Carolina-style pulled pork or St. Louis-style ribs. Or maybe they had heard about the 32 taps and the new bourbon bar inside Kloby's Smokehouse in Laurel. But at the exact moment Kloby's owners Michele and Steve Klobosits got the last of their approvals and were allowed to open their doors, a group of 40 people was waiting outside — one group of 40 people. The Klobositses were ready for them. It takes a lot to ruffle Michele Klobosits, who sounded serene and calm about opening her family's expanded barbecue restaurant on the Fourth of July weekend.

The mother of a 7-year-old boy killed while trying to cross Belair Road in Northeast Baltimore on his way home Friday afternoon said she rushed to the scene after her older son ran to tell her what happened, but it was too late. "His eyes were open" Shira Lee-Coates, the mother, said, as her son, Jayviahn Billinger of the 3100 block Mareco Ave. lay in the street. "He wasn't moving. No [paramedics] were there yet. I saw my son, lying in the street. I lay beside him" until Fire Department paramedics came, she said.

Lt. Larry Trump plans to retire this year after 41 years with the Baltimore County Fire Deparment, and on his way he's picking up a state award for his service as a paramedic. Trump, 62, who has served with both the county department and the Owings Mills Volunteer Fire Co., is receiving the Leon W. Hayes Award for Excellence in emergency medical services from the Maryland Institute for Emergency Medical Services Systems. He'll be receiving the award Thursday in Annapolis. A resident of Glyndon now assigned to the Garrison station, Trump became a paramedic in the 1970s.

In a broad effort to speed treatment of heart attack victims in Baltimore, five area hospitals are distributing hand-held devices to every paramedic unit in the city that can transmit patients' heart rhythms, or EKGs, to the hospital before they arrive. Doctors have 90 minutes to open an artery after someone shows symptoms of a serious heart attack before survival becomes far less assured. The hand-held units, which can send information straight to a cardiologist's smart phone, could speed up that treatment by as much as 15 minutes, research shows.

The daughter of a Prince George's County man who was mistakenly left for dead by paramedics Friday said she and her mother had already notified relatives when she learned from a medical examiner that he was, in fact, alive. George Waters, 70, ultimately died Saturday evening at Prince George's Hospital Center, according to his daughter, Laverne Waters. "Now I'm going through the emotions again," Waters said Saturday in a hospital hallway, hours before her father died. "I wouldn't wish that on anyone, to go through what I went through yesterday."

Two fire engines, including one just purchased for $600,000, two paramedic units, a brush truck and a U.S. Army Humvee were destroyed in an early morning fire at a Dundalk firehouse, according to a department spokesman. The two-alarm blaze that began shortly after 3 a.m. caused the roof to collapse at the Engine 6 building at Dunman Way and Merritt Boulevard, a block from the Dundalk Middle School. A cause of the fire remains under investigation, said spokesman Kyrle Preis. Officials said firefighters sleeping in the firehouse's living quarters, which is next to the fire engine bay, awoke to the sound of a fire alarm.

With mounds of snow making Baltimore sidewalks impassable Saturday, many pedestrians took to the middle of the streets, following paths carved by plows or trucks. And that drove Don Dziwulski a little nuts. A 12-year-veteran of the Baltimore Fire Department and one of its supervising paramedics, Dziwulski has about all he can handle on a normal day, when calls for assistance - and life-and-death decisions - come thick and fast. Saturday afternoon, driving an ambulance around the snow-covered city was made even tougher by having to slow down, and even stop, for pedestrians who just wouldn't get out of the way. "I'm trying to be a gentleman right now," Dziwulski said at the wheel of a red-and-white Ford F-450 truck, its siren blaring and lights flashing, as he carefully maneuvered his way around a man on Harford Road who appeared to be too busy talking on his cell phone to consider stepping aside.

Shooting and stabbing victims immobilized to protect their spines might be twice as likely to die because of the delay in transporting them to the hospital, Johns Hopkins researchers conclude in a new study that could trigger a review of treatment protocols used by Maryland paramedics. Immobilization is standard procedure for paramedics in Maryland and many communities across the country, and the study could have particular significance in Baltimore, where 218 people were fatally shot or stabbed last year.

A paramedic has been suspended without pay after an investigation into an incident in which a man shot by Baltimore police was mistakenly pronounced dead and left on a convenience store floor for 30 minutes. Fire Department spokesman Kevin Cartwright said the paramedic, whose name he declined to release on the grounds that it is a personnel matter, was suspended for 29 days without pay and will have to undergo retraining as a result of the Aug. 1 incident. Cartwright declined to discuss details of the investigation and suspension.

A man remains in serious condition after he was shot by Baltimore police officers while wielding a knifelike object that turned out to be a kitchen spatula, a city police spokesman said. The injured man, who has not been identified, called police and stated he wanted to kill himself but did not know how, said spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. He asked for a member of the clergy as well as his mother. Two police officers and paramedics responded to a parking lot in the 2400 block of Bridgehampton Drive just after 6 a.m., while it was still dark outside, Guglielmi said.