Immediately after a tornado demolished downstate Utica last spring, around 30 ambulances and fire trucks from across the state raced to the aid of the little town. Among them, a red-and-white 1975 Mack fire truck marked lost creek fire company eng. 886 stood out. Its driver stopped for directions at the North Aurora Fire Station, which had already dispatched a crew of emergency workers, then sped toward Utica. State police were manning a roadblock in front of a vehicle staging area set up about a mile north of town.
Some firefighters were amused by this work of fiction, but the brass wasn’t. Jay Reardon, chief of the Northbrook Fire Department, is president of MABAS. The Utica operation was the system’s largest mobilization to date–around 63 fire trucks, engines, ambulances, and heavy-rescue vehicles were put into action before the week was over. Over the past five years on Reardon’s watch MABAS has been overhauled, partly in response to the threat of terrorism. A breach of its protocols could put the lives of emergency personnel and civilians at risk.
Matta didn’t actually work for the Lake County sheriff, but for 11 years he was a volunteer in the sheriff’s reserve deputy unit. That’s a group of civilians who provide traffic and crowd control at public events, search for lost children and old folks, help police with evidence searches, and assist them at natural and man-made emergencies.
John Crilly is a sergeant in the Lake County sheriff’s marine unit, but for four years he supervised the reserve deputy unit, which put him in charge of interviewing potential recruits. Overall, he says, the reserve deputies under him were a solid group. But in a few cases he was forced to discipline or even fire someone.
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“I found people falling into three categories,” he says. Some were “people that had an interest in police work at one time in their life and life’s path took them somewhere else. These were guys that owned their own businesses–I had some attorneys, I had salesmen. Those are great people to have on board. The other group of people I ran into were people who want to be policemen and are using this as a stepping-stone. I loved to have guys like that. It was perfect. And the other group of people that would come out of the woodwork had no business being police. They would never be policemen; they’d never pass any of the testing to become policemen. These were the people we’d discourage from applying, and if some did get in, they became discipline issues. Because they can’t help themselves. They would just do strange things.”
Crilly occasionally ran into Matta, and though they remained cordial, the sergeant was keeping an eye on him. Matta had an emergency light bar mounted on top of his truck, and the letters LCS were stickered on the truck’s body. Once, Crilly says, he spotted Matta in Long Grove “dressed in a full uniform, minus a weapon. He had these fatigue pants on and a duty belt and a uniform shirt of some sort, and he had public safety written on his hat.”
The Long Grove public safety program was just a proposal, he says, and the village blew it out of proportion. In the summer of 2003 he and some friends with similar volunteer backgrounds had the idea of starting a group that would contract with municipalities to assist in the kind of traffic and crowd control Lake County’s reserve deputies do. “You look at the 9/11 stuff and the threat level,” says Larry Teschner, who worked with Matta in the reserve deputy unit and was one of his recruits. “I mean, when was the last time you saw it below yellow? Our initial thrust was to help out local communities.” Matta says they approached some towns in Lake County and a few liked the idea. He gathered a group of 13 or 14 guys, all with volunteer experience, some in fire, some in law enforcement.
