Fire Escape: Release EP5

As wildland fires burn hotter and stronger across California, Amika and the incarcerated firefighters are put in extreme danger. At a massive, out of control fire, Amika must defy orders for the sake of the women on her crew. This episode contains 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 21 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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• 2:45Glynn Washington?

  Today on Snap Judgment, we're bringing you episode five of our Fire Escape series. Sensitive listeners are advised.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  On Christmas Eve, Amika and the incarcerated firefighting crew were called to a house fire. And they found a home fully engulfed in smoke and made their way inside.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  It's like a haze. We, you know, we all are fully geared up, which means we've got our SCBA. So we're breathing through our masks of air, right? So everything we see, it's smoky, it's hazy, it's dark. You know, the sounds are really muffled because we're all up in our gear. And yeah, visibility is not real good. And obviously, like, you know, on a house fire, all the electric is out. So we're pretty much in the dark, working with our lights.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  There were multiple crews on the scene. Amika's crew got to work removing the gifts from under the tree to save them from the water and the smoke. And as they were working, a corrections officer pulled into the driveway. It was his house. And he saw a bunch of incarcerated women removing Christmas gifts from his living room.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Like, kind of, I think he was shocked to see us pulling all of the presents out of the house. And it felt like his first assumption was that we were doing something wrong.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  And so that, you know, he kind of came with that energy, like, what are y'all doing? What's going on? What's happening? Like, why are you touching my shit? What, your house is on fire? We're trying to save your shit.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  The scene was kind of chaotic and also quiet. Amika says she watched the CO try to piece it all together.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  He was watching us and what we were doing. And then he saw the pile of gifts and photos and, and that shifted him. You know, it was like, oh, you know, wow, thank you, you know?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  It was a big house fire. Everything was smoked out or wet.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  There is another crew working on the fire. You know, there's, I think, multiple engines on site at this time. And so it's actually, it is absolutely other crews that are working on hitting the fire on the roof, right? Where we are in the front, just protecting property, basically. We go through and we're doing kind of like a final sweep before we wrap up to head out. And, uh, and yeah, I mean, and we just do a walkthrough. We feel real good about everything. We've gotten all the gifts, like, a lot of the electronics we knew were expensive, all that stuff.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Because other firefighters were going to continue to hose it down?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. They were staying on, staying on the work. And I don't know why that was. Usually, we're the ones that stay the longest and do the most of the grunt work. And I don't know. I don't know why that happened. But we did, we did head out, uh, from there, feeling like we had wrapped up, we'd done our job, everything was clear.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  I remember being kind of hyped about it, leaving, because it felt like we're actually like saving property. And then it was a CO's house. Like, it's not necessarily like pride for saving a CO's house, but there was just something about that dynamic. We had, we felt proud. We were, you know, we had done our best. We had kind of saved Christmas for this family.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  And we were proud of ourselves.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  The firefighters drove home through the Central California Christmas Eve night. They washed down the truck and went to sleep on the bunks that lined the walls of the bunker room. The next morning, when they woke up, they heard the captain. He was on the phone inside his office. He was talking to the CO from the house they had tended to the night before.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  The CO cussed out our captain and was like, "You ain't shit. This is a fake-ass fire department." Like, my house, it rekindled.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  That night, after all the firefighters either went home or back to the prison, the fire at the CO's house had rekindled in the attic, and the house kept burning.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  That's like a bad look for any fire department.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  There had been a few firefighting teams at the scene that night, and another team had been responsible for putting out the flames.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  And so, we were getting the blame for this fire reigniting, yet we weren't the ones up on the attic. The sentiment of the call was like, "Y'all fucked up, sloppy-ass firefighters," because we were the incarcerated firefighters that responded to the call, that apparently were not good enough for this correctional officer.

• 7:57Speaker 02

  I knew there would be some people that knew who I was as a human being, and then there's gonna be this other half of the population, I don't know, that just sees me as a piece of shit, you know? And just sees me as my crime.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  From Wondery 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 5, Release.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Before she was incarcerated, before she was called an inmate, Amika was used to being someone who was endowed with trust, even more trust than your average free person because of her work. And when something unexpected happened in her work as a midwife, the family she worked with tended to see not evil, or failure, or a crime, but a natural part of life because of this level of trust she enjoyed.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  And there's a few births that come to mind. One of them was baby Danisha.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  So there was, there was a couple we were working with, and they were just like the sweetest. They came to every prenatal visit. She just would always be in kind of the full garb of...

• 9:36Speaker 01

  They were from a nearby traditional religious community.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  And she always wore kind of the long skirts and little bonnet and just was always really covered up and modest. Just this really, really sweet couple. And we knew that they lived on a farm. Oh, the other thing about this couple was that they, one thing that they really wanted was, at their birth, was they wanted us to be singing hymns. And I was like, shoot, I don't know any hymns. And at that point in my life, I was definitely not Christian. And I was like, you know, I didn't know any hymns for damn sure. But I was gonna do it for sure, like, fully respect them. And I would always get down like that. Like, whatever families wanted, I could, you know, do. And at one of her very last prenatal visits,

• 10:21Speaker 02

  she came in with a clear water bottle, and it looked like there was tea in her water. And we were, asked her if she was drinking tea, and she said, "No, this is our well water." So that, I remember kind of being a little taken aback by the color of their well water at that prenatal. But, you know, just that was it. I just remember that moment. And they also really didn't want to do sonograms or any of the additional testing.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  When she would visit, Amika would listen to the baby's heart rate, measure the mother's belly. And when the mother went into labor, Amika and another midwife met her at a small wooden house.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  This is a little birth cottage on this woman's property. And so we're at their birth. When Donisha was born, her little head came out. You could see her little face. And she was like looking up, posterior baby. And then she slipped on out. And she did not have arms or legs. She had like three little fingers on... Like her little hands looked like wings, but they were kind of, you know, attached right to like where her shoulder would be. And she also did not have legs. And so when she was born, it was a total shock to all of us.

• 11:48Speaker 02

  But Donisha was born in mama's arms.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  And we all busted out in a hymn at that moment.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  "How great thou art."

• 12:05Speaker 02

  And it was crazy because I did not study those hymns, but I just knew every word to that hymn somehow.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  And I remember that Papa kind of looked at Mama and kissed her. And it was like that music was taking that empty space of this shock. And like, oh, my God, is my child. You know, like everything that a mother is processing at this moment.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, the room was just filled with us singing. And so I think it was, it carried her a little bit in that moment. So yeah, that's one of those ones I will never forget because it was a...

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Because it was everything in one. It was the shock of, you know, just being with the family when they go through that.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  She was bound in a circle of trust, a circle she found herself in all the time as a midwife. And then when she was imprisoned, that circle disappeared. Amika and I talked about the concept of trust more than 40 times in our conversations, how almost impossible she felt it was to ever be trusted again. And then she found firefighting.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  Part of me embodying this firefighter persona and this whole new version of me had a lot to do with that trust that was given to me inherently by anybody that we were responding on a call to. They looked to us to take care of them well, and they trusted us. So it was very similar in some ways to what it was like to be a midwife.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Amika had now been working as an incarcerated first responder for almost two years. And during her time in prison, during her time as an incarcerated firefighter, something was happening in California that impacted every firefighter.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  U.S. wildfire season is off to its worst start in a decade, especially out in California, where fires have already scorched three times more land.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  I just checked in with CAL FIRE to take a look at the numbers. And right now, we are seeing more acreage burned.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  Apocalyptic fire scenes are appearing more and more across the West.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  A dangerous fire climate was getting worse and worse every year. Wildfires were breaking out all over the state. Forests were going up in flames. Entire towns were burning down. And the state of California was calling up hundreds of incarcerated people to help fight the fires.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  They rely on incarcerated firefighters to make up, you know, almost half of the labor force in California that is fighting wildland fires. I think it's between 30 and 40% of incarcerated firefighters that are actually on the front lines fighting those fires.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  And what are those firefighters doing?

• 15:15Speaker 02

  The most dangerous work of all. We're on the front lines, cutting line or all up in the fire, yet the most dangerous work.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  By using incarcerated firefighters, the state saves millions of dollars a year. The firefighters at Station 5 didn't go out into the forests and stay at camps to fight wildfires, but they did respond to huge tinder fires that would break out in the valley.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  It's hot as hell in Chachala. We didn't have a lot of rain. There was a lot of kind of easy tinder. And it was scary. The biggest fires were the slough fires. Those were often the ones that were just massive in the way they looked and were also the hardest to contain.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  So a slough fire is a kind of agricultural wildfire. They ignite in the big ditches that crisscross California's Central Valley. So one day, when Namiko was lead engineer in charge of the engine and the hoses and the safety of her crew, she pulled up at what looked like a pretty big slough fire. She jumped down from the truck and started pulling hoses.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  I hope and pray my skills are good enough to get the job done. Like, I hope I remember the pattern I need to spray my nozzle at when I hit this type of fire.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  A slough fire can then spread, you know, there's the surrounding kind of like wildland areas and farmland, and then you have the trees above. And so there's like so many different ways that it just could really, really spread.

• 16:56Speaker 06

  That's the nature of fire. You can't really, we're not in control of it. We're trying to control it, but we can't. And we pulled up and the smoke, like, different fires have different smoke. And you're trying to just figure out, like, what do you need to do? And what do you need to do to help? And...

• 17:15Speaker 01

  This is Megan Peebles. She was a nozzle operator on Amika's crew at this slough fire.

• 17:20Speaker 06

  I think that was my first time that I realized that things could change super drastically.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  The ditch itself was full of smoldering debris, but Amika's firefighters had to cross the slough to some trees on the other side. So the captain, the correctional officer in charge of them, directed the women to lay their hoses across the hot ditch.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  I, I remember knowing that, like, that's a textbook no-no. We clearly have read and in our training as firefighters, even incarcerated firefighters, just study these books to get on the truck. Like, we know that's a textbook no-no. You don't bring your hoses across active burn.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  So it was like a red flag trigger. Like, I knew, seemed a little bit off, right?

• 18:22Speaker 06

  I think I, I was still really new. And I just was, whatever they told me to do, I did.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Amika was hesitant to tell her team to put these hoses across the slough like her captain was telling her. She was getting close to her release date, and she didn't want to make any trouble, but she knew this was a faulty order.

• 18:48Speaker 01

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

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• 20:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Amika was hesitant to tell her team to put these hoses across the slough like her captain was telling her. She was getting close to her release date and she didn't want to make any trouble, but she knew this was a faulty order.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Flames are literally above the treetops at this point. And this is your only defense against the flames is your hose. We knew that we were kind of being told to do something that didn't make sense, but we had to do it. It was our captain giving us orders.

• 21:36Speaker 06

  I think that all of us looked at it as, for sure, we don't have the authority to question a captain or the chief, but were we in the position to say anything? Ultimately, we are incarcerated individuals and it's not like we could go or do anything without our captain or our chief with us.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  So Amika instructed her crew to pull the hoses across the hot embers.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  I could see all of this unfolding right in front of me. And then the fire comes sweeping through.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  The fire kind of did this boom there and the trees caught the next trees and it's coming across the bank. All of it is so fast.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  The hoses are drawn out across the slough. You know the girls are going to lose their equipment. So I'm thinking of the girls. I'm thinking about protecting the truck and our water source. I'm thinking about our shitty ass radios that we can't like communicate well on.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  And then Amika looks at the smoldering debris in the ditch and sees...

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Smoke and flame in the area of where the hoses had been drawn across the slough.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  She realizes the hoses are burning up.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  That means that my sisters and firefighters on the other side of the slough had now no protection. And so, in the moment of like, a captain that didn't know what he was doing, and a dangerous situation, like, in all of that, like, all of the other shit kind of goes away, and in the moment, it's just about protecting our people. Like, we have each other to protect each other, that's it.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Because the hoses burnt up in the slough.

• 23:25Speaker 06

  I thought I understood how fire traveled, and then I realized that I had no idea.

• 23:34Speaker 06

  The flames were, they were over the fire truck, for sure. I would say probably 50 to 100, 100, 100 feet.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  I was hearing different pieces of radio traffic, and they were hearing different pieces, but I'm screaming at them and hollering, and you know, like, we're trying to get other firefighters to realize what just happened. And now, there's fire coming towards the truck. I was like, I'm losing vision, I cannot see the girls anymore.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  Smoky, hot, you know, we're in our wildland fire gear with just a bandana covering our mouth, and goggles, and so, but still, that smoke seeps through the goggles in your bandana, and you can barely breathe. Eyes pouring, snot pouring, and then not seeing them anymore was so scary, because there's not much you can do either, and you know they're on the other side, they have each other, but I'm here, and we can't hear each other anymore, we can't see each other anymore.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they shouldn't have been there in the first place.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  Then, Amika saw the fire coming directly for the fire engine.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  I mean, after, we lost hoses, and the fire was coming, it was clearly headed towards the engine, and, you know, our hoses are burned up, now this is all we got, which is the only thing that has water left on it, and so, it's literally like our lifeline. If we don't have our truck, we have no water, we have no defense.

• 25:09Speaker 01

  She climbed in the truck and tried to move it out of the path of the fire.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  To be rolling in that truck is our nicest fire engine on a fire. That was kind of unheard of. So it was a really big deal.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  And then she tried again to radio the women behind the fire line.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  I answered to a correctional officer and a captain, but I also had people that I was responsible for.

• 25:34Speaker 06

  Being an engineer for a fire crew, you're taking on the lives of four to five other people. And you're directing them and telling them what to do.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  I had to just override this captain and do what was safest for the crew.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  She called the women back from the front lines.

• 25:53Speaker 02

  I mean, the reality of overriding a captain on a fire ground is that you could get sent back in.

• 26:01Speaker 06

  That's why she was an engineer. She had that ability to direct and see situations and take control of them. I mean, I looked up to her for it.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  So like, fuck the captain and what he's saying, because that shit don't make no sense. And just as clearly and methodically and carefully as we can make decisions that will get us home safe,

• 26:28Speaker 02

  that's what that moment at the Blue Fire was.

• 26:34Speaker 02

  So like, informally, we were in charge.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  It's this dance that I have danced the whole time I was incarcerated. Like, we did it anyway in spite of all of the circumstances and the way things didn't line up for us. Or, you know, but we did it anyway.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Amika and the women had gotten themselves and their trucks out of the line of the fire and also helped to stop the spread of the fire. Then they safely handed off to the next crew.

• 27:13Speaker 02

  We are at the back of the fire truck where we could sit on the kind of gate. And we've stripped off half our gear. The gatorade is a little too sweet and makes you sick, but the water was the best, yeah. I mean, there's nothing like that ice chest after a fire.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  We are covered in soot and ash, eyes burning, red, nose pouring, everything kind of running from the smoke, like your eyes and your nose.

• 27:46Speaker 06

  You want to follow her because you know that she's, you know, she's, I would have followed her into any fire.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  We handled that call like bosses. We did. And, you know, all the labels we have, addicts, fucking, I don't know,

• 28:11Speaker 02

  shitty mothers, criminals, not worthy of being part of society, kicked out of the world.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  That was who we were, but who we were that day is badasses. We were a badass team of female firefighters that handled business. Nobody can touch it. Nobody can claim it. It's like, that was ours. That's ours.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  When they got back to the fire station, nobody said anything. No reports were filed because it would have made the captain look bad.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  They are not going to write up an area where they went wrong, for sure. And if they did, it would not be in that. That's not how it would get written up.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  So was that like a tacit acknowledgement that you all did the right thing and we're just going to keep moving?

• 29:03Speaker 02

  100%.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  When the year countdown began to Amika's freedom, she started clicking off milestones. Her last birthday in prison, her last Thanksgiving in prison, as her release date drew closer.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  I knew it. It was March 15th. That date had been in my mind for years and, you know, creeping up to that date, you're going through a million different things.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  When you were getting ready to be released, were you scared about being alone out there?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, well, what I was mostly afraid about, I wouldn't say alone in a relationship context initially, but it was, I had lived with women. I had always had eight people in a cell with me, or, you know, I always had people around me. I was worried about being lonely. You know, but there was a man that I was in love with, right? And he was incarcerated as well.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  His name was Jose, and they'd met before each of them went to prison. They'd been writing back and forth the whole time she'd been incarcerated.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  I think that the conversations that I really had with him, like gearing up towards me coming home, were really about telling him where I was at, you know, which is, this is what I want for my future, this is what I want moving forward. And I wasn't fully sure if he was there or not. I just was really skeptical because I feel like all of that is like, even on my end, it's like jail talk. I mean, you hear that all the time, like, oh, it's just jail talk, right? Like, you kind of don't know until you are out there living a real life with somebody to figure out what their priorities are. Yeah.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  That's interesting. So part of you knew, oh, everybody thinks they're gonna be a certain person when they get out, and it might, it might not be, it might not work.

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Oh, 100%. Because at the time, it's like, everything that I tell myself, it's a story, and it's from one lens and one perspective in this container of a cage. It's literally that. Like, you don't know until you're out there.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  But you knew you didn't know.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  I knew I didn't know. And I knew that all the plans in the world, like, were just that. They were just, you know, but I would face it all when I got home.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  His release date was a year later than hers. They didn't know what their life might look like together. There were so many unknowns. But they knew they were going to try to make it work. And he was going to call her as often as he could. But as she neared her release date, all sorts of fears of living outside the wall started to creep in.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  The idea of who I had been before was wiped out. It was wiped out. And I actually remember thinking about the crime scene. And when you see pictures of the crime scene, it's like my truck basically blown up with my whole, my family photos scattered across the ground, like lost. And it felt so symbolic because it was like, that's literally what happened. Like, that moment wiped out. Everything before then.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  What were you hoping for in your relationship with your mom when you got home?

• 32:47Speaker 02

  I felt a lot more love for my mom than I had in the years previous.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  When, as a...

• 32:54Speaker 02

  When I was in prison and when I was coming home.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Over Amika's time in prison, her mom, Joni, had always, year after year, sent her articles about reentry, brought her visitors who worked in criminal justice reform. She was laying the groundwork for her transition to the free world.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Because my mom had showed up for me in a way that reminded me how much I loved my mom. And we had had a really hard, like, years and years of a really hard relationship.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  The plan was to live on the patio attached to her dad's garage until she got a job. And she knew she was gonna have to be a mom to three growing kids who she hadn't lived with for years.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  I also knew that they weren't gonna trust me. You know, that I would come home and that they were always gonna be wondering if I was gonna leave again or if I was gonna get high again. Because I had two strikes. And so my kids were walking around this fear of like, God forbid, Mom does something else and strikes out.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  The accident gave her two strikes: gross bodily harm and manslaughter. A third strike would be a mandatory life sentence.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  My nine-year-old and my 12-year-old are discussing these things. Like, we have to leave this state because what if Mom fucks up again? And so I think that I just had to get ready. I had to get ready for all of it.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  I think this one's from Blossom.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  And this is when I was in the firehouse. This is 2012.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  "Hi, my beautiful Mama. I miss you so much and I want you to come out already. I want to know exactly what you had for your birthday dinner and Thanksgiving dinner inside. I think we're gonna see you in two weeks." When I was writing this letter, I was listening to "I'm Coming Home." "Love, Blossom."

• 35:04Speaker 02

  I used to play that song a lot.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  She'd been gone the better half of a decade, and her release date was just a few months away. She had no career, no money, no house, and she was terrified of being a mother to her soon-to-be 13-year-old.

• 35:28Speaker 07

  You know, when I think about it, what comes to mind is like all the things that we would talk about when she was inside, like all of our plans that we had when she was gonna get out. Like mom and daughter thing, painting our nails together, going on trips together, watching movies, showing our music, listening to music together. I wanted a mom, but what happened when she came home, I didn't expect that.

• 36:21Speaker 01

  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 Lassie. For Wondry, our senior story editor is Phyllis Fletcher. Our development producer is Eliza Mills. Claire Chambers, Lauren D., and Mandy Gorstein 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

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Wondry are Marshall Louie, Morgan Jones, George Lavender, and 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.

• 37:35Speaker 08

  This show is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at O D O O dot com. That's O D O O dot com.