Two fire departments are mourning the loss of Erik Shouse, a Mill Creek paramedic and a Camano Island fire commissioner who died this week.
Shouse served most of his 15-year career assigned to a medic unit at Station 76 in Mill Creek. He suffered a cardiac arrest at his home Sunday, according to Snohomish County Fire District 7. He was 40.
Shouse grew up in an Alaskan fishing town, in poverty, without the kind of stable background of many people who end up in the fire service, his friend Lt. James Hammeren, of Fire District 7, said Thursday.
He was certified as a paramedic at Central Washington University, and hired in Snohomish County early 2003. At the time he was living out of a beat-up Chevy Blazer.
Hammeren and Shouse were a two-man team aboard their rig for about four years in Mill Creek. They clicked and became close friends on and off the job, in part because they both had a rough upbringing, Hammeren said.