I got this article from my mom so unfortunately there is no linky and I'm not sure what paper it came out of. I think it is from The Westfield Evening News.
Quote:
New London, Conn. (AP) -- A paramedic using a defibrillator in an attempt to restart the heart of a New London woman instead set her on fire, police said.
A spark from the machine ignited the clothes of 47-year-old Brenda Jewett inside an ambulance Monday night, police said.
The chief medical examiner's office said Wednesday that Jewett was dead when the fire started. She died of natural causes and the fire did not contribut to her death, the agency said.
Jewett was pronounced dead at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital.
Neither the paramedic nor other members of the ambulance crew were injured by the flames, which were doused with a fire extinguisher.
Jewett's husband had called for the ambulance after finding his wife unconscious on their couch Monday evening.
The New London County state's attorney's office began an investigation, asking the State Police Major Crime Squad, state and ocal fire marshals and the state Office of Emergency Medical Services to examine the fire.
"I've been in this business 20 years and I've never heard of something like this," Leonard Guercia Jr., director of the state Emergency Medical Services, told The Day of New London.
Mary Newman, of the National Center of Early Defibrillation in Pittsburgh, said her group has never received a report of a defibrillator starting a fire. She said she doubted that it was the fire or the defibrillator that caused Jewett's death.
"When you defibrillate a person, they are already dead," she said. "The purpose of the defibrillator is to bring them back to life. So you can't make them any worse off than they are."
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I thought I'd pass this along as I found it humorous. I can almost picture the scene.
The only thing is that you don't use a defibrillator on dead people. You use it on a person with an arythmia not asystole.