The ballroom at the Mount Washington
Hotel filled last Friday evening with firefighters, police officers, emergency
first responders, and residents of communities throughout the region, all dressed
to the nines for the fifth annual awards dinner of the North Country Public
Safety Foundation.
The dinner is a way to thank
these professionals and volunteers – who are, essentially, always on duty – for
their service to the community. Throughout the evening a slideshow played
behind the stage, showing these folks at the work they do. One photo was of
Jose Pequeno, former police chief of Sugar Hill. He is smiling in the
photograph, sitting behind a desk, with photos of his family lining the wall. That
photo accompanied a 2005 article I wrote about Jose, then Sugar Hill’s only
police officer, just after he was called up by the National Guard for a tour of
duty in Iraq.
Jose had earned a reputation
as a good guy, quick to smile, always ready to offer a helping hand. The day I
took that photograph he was both apprehensive and happy. He worried about
leaving his wife and three young children (now teenagers) behind as he went
halfway across the world to war. He was proud to be fulfilling his duty as a
soldier. He was ready to serve and confident that he would return home safely.
There is no certainty in
life, even less in war. In March of 2006, about a year after I took that photo,
Jose was devastatingly injured in an explosion in Iraq. As news of his injuries
reached home, there was an immediate effort to “Bring Jose Home,” and from that
effort emerged the North Country Public Safety Foundation.
I was in the newsroom the day
word came from Iraq of the explosion that killed National Guardsman Christopher
Merchant of Vermont and injured Jose. Both men were 32 at the time, the same
age as me. Eventually we learned that Jose’s injuries were severe and included
a debilitating head injury from which he has never recovered.
A month after the explosion
in Iraq, as Jose remained at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington,
D.C., friends and neighbors gathered for a fundraising dinner and auction at
the Sugar Hill Meetinghouse to kick off the Bring Jose Home campaign. That
night, the community raised over $22,000 for their police chief and his family.
The effort eventually
garnered more than $120,000, enough to build the Pequeno family a wheelchair-accessible
home in Lisbon. “This has been a project that has meant a lot to a lot of
people,” Sugar Hill Fire Chief Allan Clark said the day the house was finished.
“It was more than helping our police chief, but a statement of helping those
who help others.”
For a series of complicated
reasons, Jose did not come home to New Hampshire. He lives in Florida with
other family and access to regular medical care. But the North Country Public
Safety Foundation has grown from the initial Bring Jose Home effort, raising
nearly $1 million in its six years, money that goes directly to helping those
who help others in our communities.
Throughout the ceremony last
week, speaker after speaker told of the cooperation and collaboration these
professionals and volunteers share, from community to community, between
departments, and across specific occupational lines. I was honored to share a
table with a few of these folks, including Sugar Hill Police Chief Dave
Wentworth and Assistant Fire Chief Doug Glover, who both worked with Jose, knew
him far better than I did, and surely think of him often as they do their work.
I imagine I’m not the only
person who wishes things had been different, that Jose and so many others did
not have to go to war, that we could again see the smile he had that day in the
photograph. We also hope that we will never need the services of firefighters or
EMTs, law enforcement officers or search and rescue volunteers. But it is a
comfort to know they are standing by, just in case.
