Fire Escape: Reckoning EP4

Amika and the Fire Girls are called to the scene of a terrible crash to rescue the passengers from the wreckage. Amika realizes the driver of the car is intoxicated. While saving his life, she reckons with lives lost and the harsh future awaiting the young patient. Back at the firehouse, Amika’s crew are called out to a Christmas Eve emergency. This episode contains strong language and graphic imagery. Sensitive listeners please be advised. Thank you, Amika Mota, for sharing your story with us! Fire Escape https://snapjudgment.org/fire-escape/, the 6-part series is dropping weekly on the Snap Judgment podcast feed. You can access the bonus episodes here https://wondery.com/shows/fire-escape/. Fire Escape is a production of Snap Studios https://snapjudgment.org/ at KQED https://www.kqed.org/, made in partnership with Audible (previously Wondery). This series was created, written and produced by Anna Sussman. Snap Senior story editors: Mark Ristich and Nancy López. Director of Production: Marisa Dodge. Original music by Renzo Gorrio and Doug Stuart. Doug Stuart also created the theme song. Sound design and engineering by Miles Lassi. Audible senior story editor: Phyllis Fletcher. Development producer: Eliza Mills. Senior Producers: Clare Chambers, Lauren Dee and Mandy Gorenstein. Managing Producer: Sarah Mathis. Executive producers: Glynn Washington, Mark Ristich, Marshall Lewy, Morgan Jones, George Lavender and Jen Sargent. Special thanks to Adizah Eghan, Kathryn Styer Martínez, Pat Mesiti-Miller, Allison MacAdam, Catherine Winter and the San Francisco Fire Department. Season 17 - Episode 20 Join Snap+ https://snap.supercast.com/if you aren't already a member! Get bonus eps, an ad-free stream and more. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:52Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back. We're bringing you episode four of our Fire Escape series. Sensitive listeners are advised.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Amika was sitting in the captain's office. She'd only been at the prison firehouse for a few months, and she'd already gotten reprimanded once. She was on very thin ice. If she got caught doing anything out of pocket again, she'd be sent back inside prison. The two fire captains looked at her and told her they'd been carefully watching her. And they said she was getting promoted to the top position at the firehouse: engineer.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  We knew that she had a medical background, and any time that we have somebody that comes out here with a medical background is very helpful. So, yeah, she was very good, all that stuff. All medical stuff, not just being a midwife delivering babies. But she was just bright. And it's a leadership role here in the house for the other inmates.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  You know, I was honored to be in that position. And I also shifted. I felt very responsible, and it felt important to me. And I didn't want to mess it up.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  As engineer, Amika now held the lives of the crew in her hands.

• 3:12Speaker 04

  You had to be really good at kind of learning about the incoming calls, catching what they said, because you have to be writing it down. That's my job, is to write down the incoming call and where we're going, and then navigating. And then the other thing that I had to learn is how to do all the controls, the control panels on the fire engine. So, because I was in charge of the water and the pressure and the, like, getting the girls what they needed and basically directing the whole fire scene you're watching for any kind of, like, approaching danger or any risk that your crew is in.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  She had to know every dial, every hose attachment, every protocol perfectly.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  It was a big, a big jump, you know, from being like a baby firefighter, just barely learning, to now running a crew. I had this big level of responsibility because if anything goes wrong, they look to you as to why it went wrong.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  From Wondry and Snap Studios at KQED, I'm Anna Sussman, and this is Fire Escape, the story of a woman whose world burned down, and then she learned to fight fire from behind bars. This is episode four, Reckoning.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  As engineer, Amika was training all day. When she wasn't training, she was working out. And she'd be sent out on multiple calls most days.

• 4:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's actually another call that I never talked about that is pretty big.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  The call came in at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and that timing would be important. The speaker mounted on the walls of the prison firehouse went off, and Amika and the other firefighters dropped what they were doing, jumped into their boots, and hopped on the truck. They rolled out of the prison, and as engineer, Amika navigated them to the scene.

• 5:04Speaker 04

  It was a back road, and we arrived at the call and could see a car on the side of the road that had smashed into a wooden utility pole. The airbag had been deployed, and you could tell that there was somebody in the car and nobody moving, right? So we pull up behind the vehicle, jump out.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  And right away, they can see that the driver, the only person in the car, has died. She's leaned over the airbag. Amika tells the other firefighters that they have to wait for the coroner to arrive before they can do much. So they stay in there in their gear, in the hot sun.

• 5:55Speaker 04

  It's like in the middle of, kind of, I would say, fields or something. There's like her personal belongings around, and so we're kind of trying to like look and see if we could see who she is. The most vivid memory is the heat, the smell, and the flies. It was this hot day.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  You know, like we're trying to like get the flies off of her, and you know. It didn't do much good. And it's always strange to like be looking at somebody that is not there anymore and like trying to determine if their spirit is there, if it's gone, and kind of like navigating, like dealing with a body.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  So it's in the afternoon. It's like 3 o'clock. School pickup time.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  And so we see this school bus approaching like from down the road because it's a country road. So we could see it a ways coming and we hadn't draped the car yet.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Draping the car means pinning up these big yellow sheets around the scene of the accident so passersby don't see something traumatizing and also to protect the dignity of the dead inside. But this school bus was approaching down the highway and they realized they hadn't draped the car yet. The scene was still totally exposed.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  It was like, oh God, like what if she has a baby on that bus? Can you imagine like these children rolling by and somebody recognizing a car that belonged to their mom?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  So Amika and the firefighters scrambled to quickly get the yellow sheets over the car and they finished just as the school bus was approaching.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  The school bus rolls by, the kids have their little hands and faces plastered to the window because everybody's looking out to see what just happened. You know, they see the fire truck and the lights and they see a vehicle run into a pool. And yeah, that vision is vivid and clear. I don't think I'll ever forget that.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Like slow motion?

• 8:05Speaker 04

  Slow motion.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  When the coroner came, Amika and her team began the work of extracting the woman from the car.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  Just it was so hot and we were in our full gear, you know? And so I remember pulling her, she was very heavy.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  The firefighters gathered around quietly.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  That was always something that was really beautiful to me about our crew. Was there was always something that was a little, we, we approached things just a little bit differently than the men. And I think we're able to hold space a little bit more for just the presence of death in, in, um, and what that meant to all of us.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  When the coroner got to work, the fire crew was dismissed. They drove back to the station. And when they got there, they cleaned themselves up and washed down the truck. And a few days later, a firefighter named Frankie came in. Frankie was from a nearby firehouse and would come by a lot. Frankie said he'd learned that the child of the woman who died in that car was on the school bus and had seen the accident.

• 9:16Speaker 04

  We're all envisioning what it would be like for our own children to, to roll by and see our car and then to have the news broken to that child that they lost their mom.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  And I'm grateful that we were able to cover,

• 9:33Speaker 04

  cover the car and drape it before the baby would have seen mom like that.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Amika and the incarcerated responders at Station 5 almost never found out what happened to the people they treated. The people they pulled from cars or escorted out of fires. They'd be with them in those life and death moments and then they'd drive back to the prison.

• 9:56Speaker 04

  And like, you feel deeply connected to someone and you have a job and you finish your job and you move on, right?

• 10:05Speaker 04

  I could love you up for in that minute and then be gone and like, I remember my midwife saying that too, like, midwives are fickle lovers, like, we love you and then we leave.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  And then something almost unheard of happened about 30 days later.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  We are at another car accident. Early morning car accident with a father and his two children.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  It wasn't a terrible accident. Everyone was OK. They were just a little shaken up. So Amika took the kids and brought them over to the fire truck and sat them down.

• 10:42Speaker 04

  Checking in, keeping them calm, keeping them comfortable. We would keep like little tiny bears in the truck to give to kids and things like that if, you know, just to keep them calm and warm and safe. And then, so I'm comforting the kids on this call and one of the babies starts crying and is like, "My mom is gone." I was like, "Oh." And then it all starts connecting. Those children, that was their mom. So 30 days before...

• 11:13Speaker 02

  The dad explained that these were the children of the woman whose body Amika had covered up in the car. The children who passed by on the school bus.

• 11:23Speaker 04

  We had tended to this little one's mama and we did that with like a lot of tenderness and grace. It was a really sad car accident. And then to be down the road, you know, like the arms of a child that's with you that doesn't have their mama anymore and you're connecting at all. It felt like there was this spiritual, beautiful thing that happened, right? I just, I felt right and I felt heartbroken all at the same time because it was painful and horrific and the moments are fleeting and any time we get to connect and just be

• 12:08Speaker 04

  there for each other as humans, like, that's a blessing. And I got to be me for that moment. I got to be loving and kind and nurturing and warm. And I got to be all the things that I wasn't anymore when I was in prison or away from my own kids.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Don't go anywhere. The story continues right after this break.

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• 14:02Speaker 02

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. This is Fire Escape, the story of a woman whose world burned down, and then she learned to fight fire from behind bars.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Figuring out how to be a mother to her own kids seemed almost impossible. Sometimes she'd find herself just staring at the payphone or avoiding it altogether. She said even more than the ongoing humiliation by guards or being punished arbitrarily, it was moments of trying to connect to home that were the hardest.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  It was the moments when my papa would be telling me about what happened with my kids, and I couldn't do a damn thing about it. Sometimes you don't even want to call home because it's just, that's too much, you know?

• 14:48Speaker 02

  She knew that she was missing milestones, and that year after year, she was missing their lives. Like, one time, it was her youngest daughter's birthday, Blossom, and Amika called home to wish her a happy birthday.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  And they had scheduled a birthday party for her. And...

• 15:07Speaker 04

  And so, you know, she had been excited telling me about this party. She really hadn't had a party forever. I was excited to have my little birthday party and

• 15:19Speaker 04

  it was gonna be like a sleepover, do little games, you know, have a summer party.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Blossom was six years old when Amika went to prison. Now she's grown.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  I, I remember loving to play that game where you put the donut on the string and you have to eat it, yeah, eat it with no hands.

• 15:40Speaker 04

  She never, my daughter was like super introverted and kind of, she just, uh, we were so connected. That baby was by my side all the time. I mean, she never knew a day away from me. She was like literally connected to me at all times. And so when I got locked up,

• 16:01Speaker 04

  she wouldn't let anybody hug her. She just wouldn't allow folks to connect with her. And so it was kind of a big deal that she had connected with some friends even, because she'd even with her peers and, you know, kids her age. She just was very distant and, and, uh, and so it was a big deal that she had connected with these other kids at school.

• 16:26Speaker 04

  I went to school with a, like, pretty bougie, white, you know, like nobody else's mom was in prison.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  One of the parents found out that I was incarcerated and found out about my crime and shared that with the other parents. And so, you know, the kids ever coming to her birthday party, they weren't allowed to come.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  And I remember being so mad, so mad.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  She wasn't mad at her mom. She said she was mad that other people had the chance to make her feel less than.

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Because this was my norm. My mom being locked up, that was my norm. Is that she wasn't in my life and she wasn't, she was away. You know, my daughter wore this coat around of like the girl whose mom was locked up. It was just like, what have I done? I think that that was a moment for me that I, you know, just wearing the shame of what I'd done to my, my kids.

• 17:35Speaker 04

  Was really, really present. I think it was a huge moment for me of needing to remind my kids about who I was.

• 17:48Speaker 04

  I remember being pretty little and no one really talked to me about it. I actually looked it up, I Googled it. It was tragic. I remember in the articles, like, his family was just so sad. I don't know what to think about that, because it's like my mom. From there, from this point of view, it's like this menace, crystal meth addict, you know, like, gets in a car crash and the man dies.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  I don't know, I see it from that side, but also it's like, oh, that's my mom.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Honestly, it was really hard for me, even now, to even relate that to my mom.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  And I loved getting letters from her and I loved her and she was always, it was different than anybody else, you know, it's your mom.

• 18:54Speaker 04

  It's like how to just reconcile this identity of who I was, like this good person in their life for a long time. And now I'm like this fucked up, you know, person with this stripe.

• 19:16Speaker 04

  It would take me a long time and a number of calls of responding to these car accidents at the firehouse before all of it started to kind of digest and the impact of what I had done really sat with me. And I would see it each accident.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Amika arrived at a cornfield. It was covered in mist and smoke, and the sun was just coming up.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  As the fire truck pulled up, we could see it was a really bad accident. I mean, you could tell that there was kind of the beginning of the cornplows were just kind of wiped out. And we saw an overturned vehicle. And then we saw folks coming out of the beginning of the cornfield. And that was the vision of that call that I'll remember because they were covered in blood and also covered in dust from the fields.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  The car had been headed to a party.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  So as we're walking towards the car, it's kind of the spiky, broken, you know, pieces of the cornfield.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  The car had flipped over, and one of the passengers had been thrown from the vehicle. Amika rushed to check on the driver, who was still in the upside-down car.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  And, you know, I do remember like kneeling down in kind of this, what was now muddy dirt, just kind of checking vitals and, you know, kind of assessing injuries that he had. You're gonna be okay. We're getting you out of here. You're gonna be good. You're gonna be good. You're all right.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  And while she was talking to the driver and holding him still, a helicopter came and landed in the corn. It was loading up the passenger who'd been ejected from the car. And it was clear to Amika that that passenger wasn't gonna make it. So she held the driver's head in her hands, and she smelled alcohol.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  But I just was thinking like, that's it. He's gone too. He's gone. Like, his life's over too, because he's going away. Like, he's going away for life, right? Because they are all drinking. It was this car full of people partying together, and it was like a boys and girls. And there were like, girls were sitting in the boys' lap in the back. And then, you know, but just having this feeling of like, he's gone too. He's gone.

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Not only are his friends injured, and one friend turns out to be dead, but that this man is about to head to prison. I was more and more aware of the harm I had done with like a split-second action.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  The story continues right after this break.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. My name is Anna Sussman. Today, we're listening to our series "Fire Escape Already in Progress."

• 22:47Speaker 02

  A lot of firefighters at Station 5 were incarcerated on DUI-related charges. Jody Veers was one of the firefighters on Amika's crew, and she was also locked up because of a car accident. She had actually been a firefighter before she was sent to prison, too.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  So, one of the hardest things about being an incarcerated first responder for me was reliving my crash from another perspective.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  After Jody got out, we were talking one time. She had her baby on her lap, and she described to me pulling up at the scene of an accident with two girls who had been killed by a man driving a truck, and how she felt she needed to volunteer to remove their bodies.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  I just, something deep inside me just really needed, really needed to do that. But I remember just looking at that man and feeling equally for him, knowing that he was probably a good person that made a bad mistake. And the cops were there, the firefighters were there, everyone, all the first responders were there.

• 24:00Speaker 04

  You know, they're talking about this person about what a piece of POS he was, you know, and ah, I mean, I agreed with them and I felt myself to be the same and but yet I had this just huge empathy for him too, like he didn't go out that day intending to end someone's life.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  When Jodi got back to the station, she found Amika.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  She had a lot of love to give to everyone and but she made you feel very very special and important.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Just that's part of her like motherly instinct, her her just intuitive love that she gives out and projects to the world. She was a midwife to the girls. She was a midwife to us. I mean, she's just, she would just be with you and make you feel okay, without even really saying a whole lot. I knew that Jodi and I had similar trauma and I knew how traumatic those first calls are. They're really hard to process. It brings up all your own shit like, um,

• 25:17Speaker 04

  and I was a go-to for Jodi because she could relate. She knew I could relate to her.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Jodi said Amika would talk to her about what it meant to forgive herself.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Just accepting, accepting yourself and she's a very forgiving and um, just grounded person and so she really, you know, gave a lot of self-love back to me.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  But of course, working on her own self-love, her own forgiveness, was harder. The accident she caused would creep up on her.

• 25:57Speaker 04

  You know, because I heard about the man that I had killed, but I never, I don't remember those moments and I don't, like it was a story told to me after the fact. It was this surrealness to it, like it just was so hard to believe. All it was, was a picture to me of a body.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Can I ask, does that, did your relationship to that grief,

• 26:28Speaker 02

  go through different stages or evolve?

• 26:32Speaker 04

  It did. It really shifted for me over the years.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  Initially, it was a lot of shock and grief, and a lot of pain, physical pain that I would feel in my heart, in my chest, in my body. And it evolved for me over the years.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  It was like there was different stages of it.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  It doesn't hurt in the same way that it used to.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  And I've had to do, you know, through each one of those stages, I have had to work on my own healing and figuring out what that means, right?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a hard question?

• 27:22Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  When you talk about your healing, when you make that turn in talking about grief for the loss of this man, and talk about your own healing, I am worried, it makes me nervous that people will be hostile or frustrated with those two things in the same sentence.

• 27:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I totally understand that.

• 27:52Speaker 04

  And what I can say to that is that, like, I'm no good to the world if I am not working on my own healing. The reason I got to that place in the first place, the reason I caused this harm, the reason I landed in prison, and the reason that most people end there, is because we have a lot of trauma and shit. Haven't worked through and we've harmed other people. Right. And I know that these people that want me to stay stuck in the pain and the grief. Um, and not move forward. Um.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Uh, like, I really don't believe that, even though that's like a knee jerk reaction from folks, right?

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Is it, is it a reaction that you, you feel from the world?

• 28:42Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think that's really clear. Like, it's really clear in the way that folks look at folks that are criminalized or have done time or caused harm. That we are now these non-deserving folks that are not. That like our own healing and growth and survival and even joy. Like, those are things that we should not be able to experience anymore. That we shouldn't be able to move on from the greatest harm that we've ever committed in our life. But I disagree with that. Like, I believe that we are responsible to heal ourselves. Because the healing is a ripple effect.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  And all I can say is that it's actually like it's. Um, my own taking responsibility for what happened and taking accountability. Um, I am not going to fit inside a box that somebody else wants me to, right? Because it's complex, like moving through your whole life with the harm that you have committed. That you can't fix for anybody else. Like, the only thing that I can do.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Is work on what I give to the world, right? Which is moving in love and integrity. Like, those, those are my types of commitments to the world, to his family and to my children. And I know it's not enough.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  But even though they felt so much hesitance toward anything that might look like moving on. Amika and the women inside would find little ways, year after year, to allow themselves happiness, to find joy.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  Christmas at the firehouse was like a little more kind of traditionally like Christmas, maybe you would have at home and they had a fake tree that they brought out. And it was right in the middle of our kitchen, living area. And we got to decorate the tree. We'd get a turkey once in a while, not from a state turkey, but like, you know, a store bought turkey. We had lights up outside the firehouse too, which was so cool. Like, we just loved that. I loved seeing the Christmas lights like on the window that framed the firehouse. And then riding in the truck at Christmas time was also super dope because we got to go see Christmas lights and, you know, things we hadn't seen for years.

• 31:20Speaker 04

  We loved that because it was kind of, it was novel. I mean, we were all just full of smiles. It made your heart feel some type of way, just kind of remembering what the outside world looks like during the holidays. We were getting a taste of something that we couldn't quite touch, but we were getting a taste. And then at the holidays, they would also do a crew picture and let us send them home to our families. I remember my girls just freaking out, like, "Mom." It was, we had like Santa hats on.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Do you remember sending the first one home to your family?

• 31:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  What do you remember about it?

• 32:00Speaker 04

  I remember calling home and just my daughter just like laughing, like, "Mom, you're the cutest firefighter I've ever seen. You're so little, but like, you're so big." I never saw my mom like that, you know? Like, I knew that she was a firefighter, I knew she did this and did that. And she lived in the firehouse, but like, I never saw her geared up or like in action. "Oh, she's a real firefighter." It's not just like, "She's playing firefighter in prison or something." It was legit, like, "Mom's a firefighter and she's next to the truck."

• 32:40Speaker 04

  Before, I would, I would tell people that she lived out of state or she lived out of town. But then when she was a firefighter, I got to be like, "My mom's a firefighter in Chisholm." I mean, they were proud of me. You know, they were proud of me.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  On Christmas Eve, typically the firefighters would open presents sent to them by women on the outside. But this one Christmas Eve, they got called to a house fire.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  When we roll up to the scene, there's smoke pouring out of the top of the house. And we could see that the back portion's on fire. So then we, you know, get our hoses out to the back. We start figuring out like the plan of attack for the fire. We always do a check to see if anybody's in the house during the fire. And so, you know, we knew there was nobody there.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  It was really smoky. Like when you have a fire that hits a roof, like the whole house will be smoked out. Like you can't actually, it doesn't really just stick to the one area where there's fire. I mean, the smoke kind of spreads throughout and you can kind of see that. So, a house fire is a combination of every of the worst smells that you can imagine. So it's like, it smells like electric fire, but it also smells like heavy wood and foam and materials. So it just smells very toxic.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  There was another fire crew on the scene when they got there, a civilian crew. And they were putting out the flames.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  And so, they're working on the fire in the back and we, you walk into the living room and there's, you know, TV, couches, and their huge tree with all the gifts under the tree.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  And so, we're like, oh, well, it's great. Like we gotta save Christmas for the kids. We're just thinking about the impact of the fact that the kids are gonna wake up and know that, um, they don't, that half of their house burned down on Christmas Eve.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  We had a chain going of us. It was this little chain.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  The firefighters lined up in the living room and out the front door to the lawn.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  We're tossing them, tossing them, tossing them. Long box and short box and small box and big, probably toy something. I remember that. It was really dark outside, even though we had the lights of the engine and things like that. But it was really dark. And we always had this level of, you know, we'd be on scene and be like, "Do they think we're gonna steal from them? Do they think we're gonna take their stuff or not?" And then we actually got the tree out and the family photos. And I don't think we realized that it was a correctional officer's house until that was happening. The family rolled up and a CO steps out.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  So the CO that owns the house that we're working on pulls up. And just the whole energy changes. I think that was when we realized whose house we were in. And it was like during that moment, we were in the line, bringing those presents out. And it was this, like, the look in his eyes was a look of, "What the fuck are you doing?"

• 36:33Speaker 02

  When the CO pulled up to his house on Christmas Eve and saw a bunch of incarcerated women removing gifts from his house, everything and everybody stopped.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Fire Escape is a production of Snap Studios and Wondry. This series was created, written, and produced by me, Anna Sussman. And I want to thank Amika Mota for her help and generosity in sharing her story with us. For Snap Studios, our senior story editors are Mark Ristich and Nancy Lopez. Marisa Dodge is our director of production. Original music by Renzo Gorrio and Doug Stewart. Doug Stewart also created our theme song. Sound design and engineering by Miles Lassi. For Wondry, our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Our development producer is Eliza Mills. Claire Chambers, Lauren D., and Mandy Gorenstein are our senior producers. And Sarah Mathis is our managing producer. Our executive producers for Snap Studios are Glynn Washington and Mark Ristich. Executive producers for Wondry are Marshall Louie, Morgan Jones, George Lavender, and

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Jen Sargent. On Team Snap, the union-represented producers, artists, editors, and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians, Communication Workers of America, AFL-CIO Local 51. Fire Escape, the full six-part series, is dropping weekly on the Snap Judgment feed. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts and on our website, snapjudgment.org.