STATter 911

Shannon Halvorson was a 20-year-old volunteer with Crook County Fire & Rescue in Prineville, Oregon. She died while attending a conference of the Oregon Volunteer Firefighters Association in June of 2003. What happened that night and how her death was investigated is the subject of a five-part series by the editorial board of the The Oregonian newspaper.

Here is the beginning of Part 1:

Shannon Halvorson's fellow volunteer firefighters killed her.

They didn't mean to, but they killed her just the same. During a night of rowdy partying at an Albany motel five years ago, they got the underage woman so dangerously intoxicated she should have been hospitalized.

Instead, two inebriated male colleagues removed her from the party, according to police reports. She died as a result, and her grieving father has been fighting ever since for some measure of justice for the young son she left behind.

It's a disturbing story that says much about the exalted status of firefighters and a community's eagerness to close ranks around them. In America, firefighters are heroes, and deservedly so, but police reports and other public records indicate there were no heroes in the chaotic final hours of Shannon Halvorson's life.

Click here to read the rest of Part 1: Absence of heroes in room 209

Part 2: Calamity in the parking lot

Part 3: Cleaning up the mess

Part 4

Part 5

Watch video about the series

# posted by Dave Statter @ 12:08 AM