UPDATE: This article has been updated to reflect a change in the location of Erik Steciak's funeral service and reception. According to a Facebook post by the Howard County Department of Fire and Rescue Services, the service on Jan. 18 will be held at Marriotts Ridge High School, instead of at the West Friendship Volunteer Fire Department, as previously announced. The date and time remain the same. The reception will be held at Turf Valley, not the James N. Robey Public Safety Training Center.
Erik Steciak was patient, enthusiastic and wanted to help people, according to some of the people who knew him best.
"He liked helping people, protecting them," his mother, Jennifer Steciak, said Thursday afternoon, where she spoke about her son surrounded by his friends and colleagues.
The 29-year-old from Columbia was a paid paramedic with the Bel Air Volunteer Fire Company who was killed in the line of duty Tuesday afternoon in an accident just down the street from the Patterson Mill Station where he worked since it opened in 2012. He had been with Bel Air since December 2009.
He was responding to a call to treat a woman who has been injured in a car accident on Patterson Mill Road and walked to a nearby house. He was hit by a four-wheel drive utility vehicle that slipped on the ice and snow and it moved down the driveway to reach the patient, according to an accident reported completed by the Harford County Sheriff's Office.
Besides working at Bel Air, he was a captain with the West Friendship Volunteer Fire Department in Howard County, which he joined in October 2005 as an EMT, according to West Friendship Volunteer Fire Department Chief Mickey Day.
That's where Capt. Steciak led the Thursday night duty crew, Day said.
Just recently, Steciak had been promoted to captain and was in charge of training new members – a role that came naturally for him, Day said.
"Erik had patience that I've never seen anybody else exhibit. He would sit down and talk with a new member until the wee hours of the morning; as long as they wanted to listen, he would tell them what they needed to know about being a volunteer firefighter," Day said. "You can ask any member here who joined over the past eight or nine years, and they will tell you that Erik did that for them."
"He was the very first person I talked to when I joined the station," said Kyle Fischer, a firefighter and EMT at the West Friendship station. The day Fischer came to turn in his application, "we sat in the back of an ambulance and talked for two hours," he said.
"His enthusiasm was so infectious," said Ashley Garrett, who recently started training as an EMT student. "I don't think that any of us will ever forget Erik – he was one of a kind."
Jennifer Steciak said her son had hoped to become an emergency management specialist, handling floods and other disasters.
In addition to working in Bel Air and volunteering in West Friendship, Erik also played in a band, repaired and built computers and was a competitive chess player, she said.
Howard County Fire Chief John Butler said he first met Capt. Steciak when he was 16 and training to be a paramedic. As his instructor, Butler said Steciak stood out right away.
"It didn't take long to figure out this gentleman marched to the beat of his own drum," he said. "Not in a rebellious way, but he brought a unique perspective."
A train fire on Marriottsville Road this fall showcased Capt. Steciak's problem-solving skills: when conventional methods failed to extinguish the blaze, fueled by gas leakage aboard the locomotive, Capt. Steciak and another volunteer started dropping "chimney bombs" – a fire extinguisher enclosed in a plastic bag – into the train's exhaust system. The strategy worked.
But Capt. Steciak was not one to let that kind of success get to his head: "He always thought out of the box, but he also realized he was part of a team," Day said. The West Friendship chief said that Capt. Steciak spent additional nights at the station this holiday season so volunteers with children could spend time at home with their families.
"Erik's one of those people that we are not even going to begin to understand what he did, what he meant to us, until the coming months," Day said.
West Friendship Assistant Chief Mark Miller said part of the tragedy of Capt. Steciak's death was "all the potential that was untapped."
"From the day I met him, I expected that he would whip through my life," said Butler, who said Capt. Steciak had become a close friend since his days as an EMT student. He remembered thinking,"If I have him for six months as an EMT, the next time I reconnect with him, he's going to be director of NASA. Some people you meet and you know they're going to go so fast."
Weather a factor
In the accident investigation report released Thursday, Harford County sheriff's deputies confirmed that the weather played a factor in the accident.
According to the report, the 2014 Chevy Silverado was going down a driveway to reach an accident victim. The woman had been injured in a crash on Patterson Mill Road and walked to the house in the 300 block where she knows the resident.
The vehicle "started to slide" and hit Capt. Steciak with the rear of the vehicle, according to the report, which indicated "the driveway was sloping downward and was snow-covered."
Capt. Steciak was treated by paramedics at the scene and taken to the University of Maryland Upper Chesapeake Medical Center in Bel Air, where he died of his injuries.
Funeral services will be at the end of next week.
The first of two viewings is scheduled for Friday, Jan. 16, from 6 to 9 p.m. at West Friendship Volunteer Fire Department, 12535 Old Frederick Road in Sykesville. The second is Saturday, Jan. 17, from 1 to 5 p.m. at Bel Air Volunteer Fire Company, 109 S. Hickory Ave. in Bel Air