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The Westfield News Serving Westfield, Southwick, and the surrounding Hilltowns
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“Time is the Longest
distance between two places.” — Tennessee Williams
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2014
VOL. 83 NO. 300
75 cents
Southwick mother saves baby from fire
On December 17, the Class #50 Call/Volunteer Recruit Firefighter Training program graduated having completed 320 hours of training on nights and weekends. The 22 graduates, 19 men and 3 women, represent the 11 fire departments of: Belchertown, East Longmeadow, Easthampton, Hadley, Hampden, Rowe, South Hadley, Southampton, Wales, Ware, and Westhampton.
Southampton gets two new firefighters By CHRIS LINDAHL @cmlindahl Daily Hampshire Gazette WESTHAMPTON — Eleven fire departments in western Massachusetts have 22 newly certified volunteer firefighters who graduated from the Call/ Volunteer Firefighter Recruit Training program earlier this month. The program offers classes on nights and weekends to people already affiliated with a fire department, and is designed for those who are enrolled in school or work full time. Based in Stow, the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy also has a campus in Springfield. In order to graduate, firefighters completed 320 hours of training including lectures, exams and simulations of controlled fires and rescue drills. The graduation ceremony was held Dec. 17 at the Williston Northampton School in Easthampton. The 22 graduates included Eric Taylor Scalise from the Belchertown Fire Department; Kelly M. Stanton from the Easthampton Fire Department; Jeffrey J. Kristek from the Hadley Fire Department;
Joshua J. Rondeau, Nathan D. Ryan and Robert M. Ryan from South Hadley Fire District 2; Benjamin J. Hogan and Joseph A. Veale from the Southampton Fire Department; and Alexander D. Antosz, Katie M. Sobon and Matthew R. Campbell from the Westhampton Fire Department. Sobon was hired by the Westhampton Fire Department in March and began the program in July. She is also a full-time emergency medical technician at the American Medical Response ambulance company in Springfield and is a volunteer firefighter in Southampton, where she lives. While she said it was tough to balance all her obligations, the program offered a thorough overview of firefighting. “I went from knowing absolutely nothing to now being able to respond to calls on my own and feel confident about myself,” she said. Sobon has worked as an EMT for two years, which she said was a lifelong dream sparked by a family trauma when she was 5 years old. “My dad had a heart attack,” she said. “When I saw how he was See Firefighters, Page 3
By HOPE E. TREMBLAY Staff Writer SOUTHWICK – Three families were displaced Christmas Eve and narrowly escaped serious injury when a fire broke out in a Two States Avenue home on Congamond Lake. An infant boy was sleeping in the basement apartment of the three-family home and his parents were in the second floor apartment when smoke was seen coming from the basement window. The child’s mother acted quickly to get her son out and ran outside, smashed a window, crawled inside and grabbed the child, and crawled back out because there was no interior access between the apartments. She and the baby both suffered from smoke inhalation and the woman was also treated for leg lacerations from the broken window. The child’s father was also treated for smoke inhalation. The home’s two other occupants also escaped. Southwick Fire Chief Richard Anderson said all three family members were taken to Baystate Medical Center but the baby was transferred to Shriners Hospital for Children in
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See Mom Saves Baby, Page 3
Southwick mother saves baby from house fire. (WWLP.com)
Police making progress on car break-ins By PETER FRANCIS Staff Writer WESTFIELD – An officer in the Westfield Police Department’s Detective Bureau said Wednesday that progress is being made in tracking down the culprits responsible for a series of vehicle break-ins that occurred over the weekend in several locations throughout the city. Between Friday and Sunday, the Westfield Police Department logged almost 10 incidents of breaking and entering into locked and unlocked vehicles around town, with reports coming from Bates Road as well as Day and Holland Avenues and East Silver, Noble, Pearl, Pleasant and Yale Streets. Five break-ins were reported between the hours of 5 a.m. and 12 p.m. alone Sunday, with the thieves making off with a list of items from the vehicles, including a Yamaha keyboard, a set of strobe lights, $200 earbuds, a GPS unit and an iPod charger, along with numerous other Christmas gifts and even a debit card from one individual’s vehicle. Anyone with information related to these breakins should call the Westfield Police Department at (413) 562-5411. Police are encouraging residents to lock all of the doors and to remove all valuables from inside of their vehicles.
Boston. “We later got word that the baby wasn’t as bad off as we first thought, so that was good,” Anderson said. “It could have been much worse.” Anderson said Christmas Day that the department was still piecing together what happened with help from Trooper Michael Mazza of the state fire marshal’s office. “We know the parents had been at a Christmas party and when they got home they put the sleeping baby to bed and went to the upstairs apartment,” said Anderson. “We think the fire may have started in the basement.” The homeowners live on the first floor and were not home at the time. Anderson said seven people live in the home. They ran outside to rescue the baby because there was no internal access. “Someone on the second floor happened to go out on the deck for a cigarette and saw the smoke coming out the basement window,” Anderson said. Southwick Fire Department received the call around 11:45 p.m.
Good Samaritans WESTFIELD— Earlier this week a great event went on at Stop & Shop. A group of girls from Highland Elementary decided they wanted to give back to the community by helping people in need. They discussed in great length who they would like to help. They decided that they wanted to help people in Westfield, so a couple of the girls went over to the Samaritan Inn to learn more. They sat down and had a great conversation with the manager, Jennifer who enlightened and informed them of what the Samaritan Inn does for people. They help people that are ready to help themselves and change their lives, but need help. So this is where the Inn steps in they help people make the transition from being homeless to helping them get their feet Left to right are Aleksandra Hitchock, Zuzanna Hitchcock, Leah Urbanski, Ryan Lambert, Cara Urbanski, Anna Urbanski. (Photo
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submitted)
Massachusetts investigates Santander Bank BOSTON (AP) — The Massachusetts attorney general’s office is investigating Santander bank’s auto lending business over concerns that the company may be engaged in the type of predatory practices that, on a larger scale, led to the mortgage and financial crises. The office is looking at whether
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Santander lent to borrowers who were unlikely to repay the money and sold those loans to Wall Street, where they were packaged into securities and resold to investors. A spokesman for Attorney General Martha Coakley tells the Boston Globe (http://bit.ly/1x7nVis ) the office has sub-
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poenaed Santander’s U.S. auto finance company to produce related documents. Santander in a statement said it is cooperating with investigators and its policy is “to comply with all lending and loan servicing laws as well as the rules and guidance of our supervisors and regulators.”
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