By Gene Warner
Buffalo News (New York)
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Buffalo Firefighter Mark P. Reed remains bitter toward the young arsonist who set the fire that sent about 800 pounds of brick chimney toppling onto Reed’s head and body almost two years ago.
But Reed, 38, prefers to look forward. While he doesn’t know what the future holds for him — as he continues to rehabilitate from injuries including the loss of his right leg — he knows one thing for sure:
Even though he can’t fight fires anymore, he always will be a Buffalo firefighter.
“When I do pass away, I’ll have my dress uniform on in the casket,” Reed said.
Reed suffered devastating injuries on the evening of June 10, 2007, as he tried to take a hose line through the side door of a vacant Wende Street house torched by a then-15-year-old youth.
Almost half a ton of bricks struck Reed on his fire helmet and along his right side, breaking 35 of the 206 bones in his body, including two in his back. He suffered a skull fracture, seven broken ribs, a punctured lung and a brain bleed. Reed was in a coma for 31 days, and when a systemic infection kept his body temperature consistently over 103 degrees, it was necessary for doctors to amputate his right leg nine days after the fire.
Pressure on brain
When surgeons took his leg, the comatose Reed had to be placed in a sitting position, to relieve the pressure on his brain.
Reed was given last rites three times, yet two years later, he is still here.
“God has more plans for me,” Reed said during a two-hour interview wrapped around one of his rehab workouts at AthletiCare at Kenmore Mercy Hospital. “There are other things that I’m meant to do. If [not], I possibly would be in the cemetery somewhere.”
Reed has plans. He hopes to volunteer, maybe 20 to 30 hours a week, as a dispatcher for the Lancaster Volunteer Ambulance Corps. He also would like to do more of something he has been dabbling in, giving inspirational talks to groups.
“If they say I’m an inspiration, and I can help people, I’ll do it.”
At the end of one of Reed’s two weekly rehab stints last week, a man rehabbing a serious rotator-cuff injury asked Reed for his autograph. Reed obliged proudly, making sure he put his Engine 3, his beloved “Eastside Express,” on the autograph.
“That is the fourth person who has asked me for my autograph,” Reed said. “I’m not a football player or a movie star. If people have read and heard my story, I hope they respect their fire department, whether it’s in Buffalo, Lancaster, Lockport or anywhere. They’re all doing their job, and they need your support.”
Fellow firefighters
Reed, a modest, self-effacing man, doesn’t mind being called a hero — as long as that label is affixed to his fellow firefighters, for the risks they take every day, every shift.
“Anyone in the Buffalo Fire Department could be sitting here talking to you,” he said. “It’s an injury that I suffered, but I am by no means special. It is nice to be called a hero, but everyone in the Fire Department is a hero.”
 I’m going to be a better person than he ever will be. He can’t take that away from me. Will anybody ever ask for his autograph?  | ||
| — Firefighter Mark Reed | ||
He misses the work as firefighter, helping people in distress, and he misses the Buffalo Fire Department, with its camaraderie.
“I miss the job so badly,” he said. “I would go back to it in a second, and I don’t even have to get paid. The Fire Department is a great family.
“It’s been an honor and a pleasure to work with all the men and women in the department. People can say what they want about firefighters and police officers, but it takes a very special person with a big heart to do those jobs.”
Physically, Reed never will be the same.
Besides the loss of his leg, he has lost much of his ability to smell and taste, vision in his left eye has been affected, and he takes medication six times a day, starting at 6 a.m. His continuing care includes anti-seizure medication, vitamins and pills that help stimulate the nerves that control smell and taste.
Reed uses a C-Leg, a computerized prosthesis that helps him with his walking.
“It reads the motion of my left leg, how your gait is, so it’s not going too fast or too slow,” he said. “It helps me walking, [especially] walking on hills and walking on ice.”
His physical therapist, Joe Baumgarden, manager of AthletiCare at Kenmore Mercy, said Reed has become much more confident in the last year and a half. “At first, he wasn’t sure what his prosthetic limb would allow him to do,” Baumgarden said. “A couple months after I started working with him, he was up on a ladder, cleaning the gutters.”
Reed also has a sense of humor about his leg. “I can bet people $50 that I can swing my leg all the way around,” he said before sitting and twirling the bottom half of his leg in a circle.
Reed remembers little about the fateful night other than getting to the burning house, getting off the rig and moving into the alley at the side. “My crew and all the other crews had to unpile all the bricks to get me out of there,” he said.
Life or limb
Reed was in a coma when doctors and Nancy Reed — his wife and best friend who has gotten him through this ordeal — had to make the decision to amputate his leg. It was a question of “life or limb,” he said.
“They made the right decision.”
His brush with near-death and his lengthy rehabilitation have made Reed a little calmer, a little more understanding and a little more appreciative of life — and of other people.
Except for one person.
Reed won’t mention the arsonist, Curtis Byers, by name.
“I am going to be bitter toward him every day until the day I die,” he said. “He doesn’t have to get up every day and put his leg on. He can smell breakfast. He has no vision problems, and he doesn’t go to therapy twice a week.
“But I’m going to be a better person than he ever will be. He can’t take that away from me. Will anybody ever ask for his autograph?”
More than that, Reed doesn’t think the teenager cares about what he did to him. He also doesn’t think the young man cares about the victims from two other cases on his criminal record, a pistol-whipping in a 2007 armed robbery in Buffalo and an assault on a Williamsville South High School classmate in March.
Sources have said that Byers was paid $500, in $20 bills, to set the fire, and that he used it to buy a pair of high-top sneakers.
The young man may need help for his problems, Reed said, but he wants him in jail.
“I will never forgive him, and I have no interest in sitting down and talking with him,” Reed said. “I wouldn’t be here, at therapy, if he hadn’t set the fire for a pair of sneakers.
“Isn’t my leg worth more than a pair of sneakers?”
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