Police officers’ mettle praised

MILLINOCKET – Aaron Brooker didn’t think it was special, but the Millinocket Town Council disagrees.

That’s why councilors voted 7-0 recently to recognize Brooker and Kevin Ingersoll, fellow police officer, for helping a man escape the flames that eventually destroyed his home late last month, council Chairman David Nelson said Tuesday.

“We hopefully won’t see fires every day in our community, and when they come up, there is the expectation that our fire and safety professionals will rise to the occasion,” Nelson said Tuesday. “It’s not every day that we see our police officers risk their own lives to help someone get out of a fire. That’s what the officers did, and we saw that as an opportunity to commend them for a job well-done.

“Property can be replaced. Lives cannot,” Nelson added.

According to firefighters, homeowner James Legassey was becoming disoriented by heat and heavy smoke as the fire started to surge through his house at 434 Aroostook Ave. when Officers Aaron Brooker and Kevin Ingersoll arrived in the early hours of Feb. 19. The officers got about six feet inside the front doorway before heavy smoke stopped them.

They crouched, trained their flashlights in the house and yelled to the occupant, who came to them, Brooker has said.

“This is really on him. I’d love to say that we made our way through a burning building and rescued him, but that really wasn’t the case. He made his way to us,” Brooker has said of Legassey after the fire. “We didn’t go traipsing through the building. We knew our limitations and stayed with that.”

Brooker and Ingersoll could not be reached on Tuesday.

The commendation was the second the council has awarded to police officers since June 14, 2006. That was the night that Sgt. Jerry Cox, Ingersoll, Reserve Officer Bradley Fitzgerald, Detective Jon Glidden, Officer Steve Perrault and Reserve Officer Janet Theriault established a security perimeter around a house, evacuated surrounding neighbors, and talked the woman who lived there out of killing herself with a 20-gauge shotgun.

The negotiation lasted about two hours.