New Hampshire heroes put others first

This year’s New Hampshire Hero Awards will honor 15 Granite Staters who risked their own lives to save others. They will be recognized at a ceremony Wednesday at the State House in Concord.

In ancient Greek and Roman myths, heroism was based on deeds, not necessarily character. Some heroes were downright scoundrels, who slayed monsters or pursued magical objects.

It’s different now, says Paul Robertson, lecturer in the department of Classics, Humanities and Italian Studies at the University of New Hampshire.

”When we think of a hero today, it’s typically someone who is moral, honorable, selfless,” he said.

”Heroes are what we aspire to be,” Robertson said. “We know what we should do or would want to do.

”But they’re the ones that do it.”

Marc Provencher was riding his wife’s Harley-Davidson motorcycle north on Interstate 93, heading to their home in Pittsburg last July 7. His wife, Suzanne, was following in their pickup truck, with their two King Charles Cavalier spaniels on board.

Suddenly something happened to the bike, pulling it left into the guardrail, scraping Provencher against the metal until the bike finally slowed and fell over.

“I got out of the truck and I screamed his name,” Suzanne said.

Lying on the highway, Provencher saw blood spurting from his shattered left arm. “I thought I was going to die,” he said. “My bike was plastered with blood.”

Then Christine Shaw appeared at his side.

Shaw was heading home to North Woodstock from her teaching job at Merrimack College in Massachusetts when she saw the traffic slowing ahead. An Advanced EMT for Linwood Ambulance Service, she stopped to help.

Shaw had only recently put a tourniquet in the first-aid kit she keeps in her car. When she saw the blood spurting from Provencher’s severed artery, she knew time was running out.

That’s when she looked up and saw a familiar face: A.J. Sousa, a fellow Advanced EMT at Linwood, who was driving home from Manchester when he came upon the scene.

All at once, Shaw said, she felt calm.

Suddenly, she said, “It wasn’t just me. It was we.”

As she applied the tourniquet to Provencher’s arm, she said, “In my head, I could hear all of the people who have taught me in the past. I could hear their voices: ‘Put it up high.’”

The tourniquet worked. She and Sousa set about stabilizing Provencher, attending to his multiple other injuries, until the ambulance arrived. Sousa was on the phone with the trauma team at Concord Hospital, relaying vitals, while Shaw stayed with Marc Provencher.

“I don’t think she left his side,” Suzanne Provencher said.

Shaw and Sousa will receive New Hampshire Hero Awards for what they did that day.

Shaw said she was amazed by Marc Provencher, who never lost consciousness through it all. “There he is lying on the ground, not knowing what’s going to happen next, and he was talking to people kindly, and he didn’t want his wife to worry,” she said.

That’s who her husband of 23 years has always been, Suzanne said. “I always say, to know Marc is to love Marc,” she said.

Provencher woke up in the hospital the next morning to have a nurse tell him that surgeons had amputated his left arm. “We both started crying,” he said.

It was Marc who reassured the nurse: “I’m going to get through it.”

Days later, a state trooper called Shaw to review the case. He told her that Provencher had survived. “That made me cry,” Shaw said. “Just because I was so glad.”

It’s been a long recovery, but Provencher, 65, doesn’t dwell on what he’s lost. “I’ve still got one arm and I’m still working,” he said. “It feels great to live.”

Jay Pichardo of Nashua had to work late at the auto dealership and was “driving a little bit spirited” on his way home, he remembers.

When a woman in an SUV flagged him down from her car window, Pichardo’s first thought was she was signaling him to slow down. Then, “As I’m going past, she’s pointing,” he said.

That’s when he saw the smoke coming from the windows of a house. “There’s somebody trapped in there. Can you help?” the woman asked.

Pichardo jumped out of his car and ran to the house, banging on the door. A neighbor told him an older woman was trapped inside.

“I could hear her voice,” he said.

Pichardo kicked in the door — a tactic he learned during his training as a master-at-arms in the Navy.

“The door swings open, and all this smoke comes out,” he said. “It’s really thick smoke.”

His military training also included drills for smoke-filled spaces. Because of the danger posed by a fire at sea, he said, “Everyone on a ship has to be trained to be a firefighter, no matter what your job is.”

So Pichardo knew what to do. He used his cell phone flashlight to find his way through the heavy smoke, following the woman’s voice calling: “I’m over here.”

“She was in the living room, sitting in her chair.”

Pichardo dragged the chair toward the front door.

That’s where another good Samaritan, Tom Kehoe, met him, and the two men carried the woman, chair and all, to safety across the street.

“She was very disoriented,” Pichardo recalled. “She had inhaled heavy smoke. You could see smoke marks on her face.”

The situation grew more tense when his fellow rescuer, Kehoe, collapsed and went into cardiac arrest. He was rushed to a hospital and underwent emergency bypass surgery that saved his life, Pichardo said.

The two men have met since and talked about what happened that day. Pichardo said Kehoe might never have known about his heart condition if he hadn’t stopped to help rescue the woman. “There were a lot of coincidences that day,” he said.

Both Pichardo and Kehoe are being honored with Hero Awards for their actions that October evening.

It was only after the crisis that Pichardo said the full impact hit him: “I went right into a building on fire.”

He thought about his 3-year-old daughter. “It was pretty emotional,” he said.

Pichardo was awarded the Carnegie Medal for his actions that day, North America’s highest award for civilian heroism. Now he’s getting a New Hampshire Hero Award.

But Pichardo doesn’t consider himself a hero.

“I did what the Navy trained me to do, and what was the right thing to do,” he said. “That’s how I look at it.”

In classics teacher Robertson’s view, heroism is not just about doing the right thing. “It’s doing something above and beyond,” he said.

“I think that we all recognize what the right thing is, or the brave thing is, but it’s easy to talk about. It is doing that thing when you’re faced with a challenge or faced with a fear,” he said.

“Talk is cheap, but the action is what makes one heroic.”

Jeff and Libby Neil of Exeter were flying home on a Sunday morning in March from Los Angeles, where they had gone to watch their son’s Clemson lacrosse team play UCLA.

Jeff was sitting on the aisle, his wife in the middle seat. They were about 45 minutes out from Boston’s Logan Airport when the commotion began.

A light indicated that someone had tried to open one of the exit doors near the front of the plane. Someone pointed out the passenger sitting directly in front of the Neils.

“They came up to him and asked him, ‘Sir, did you tamper with the exit door?’” Neil recalled. “And immediately that guy just went from zero to 60.”

As people tried to calm the man down, Neil said, “He only got more agitated and louder and more threatening.”

Clearly having a mental health crisis, the man was yelling that he was willing to die, that he was going to kill everyone, that he was waiting for the air marshals to stop him, Neil remembers.

Then the man stood up, declaring he was done talking: “I’m now going to take over the plane.”

That’s when Neil got up too. “I wanted to get between him and my wife,” he said. “He obviously was not going to calm down on his own.”

Neil said he was prepared for the moment. “I had folded up my computer and had taken my seatbelt off.”

He didn’t realize the passenger had a makeshift weapon in his hand until the man lunged at a male flight attendant and tried to stab him. “A bunch of us tackled him,” Neil said.

He recalls about a half-dozen men restrained the man, helping flight attendants get him in zip-tie handcuffs. They took turns guarding him, keeping him on the floor, until the plane landed safely and state troopers took the man into custody.

Neil’s efforts that day in March earned him an award from the Exeter Police Department last year, and now a New Hampshire Hero Award.

Neil, 53, an account executive for a company that creates software for the pharmaceutical industry, said he has “some level of guilt” about getting so much attention for what he did.

“I struggle with ‘hero,’ because I was not alone,” he said. “I was the first person, but I was not the only person that ended up tackling him and restraining him. It took a few of us.”

“I just happened to have a moment,” Neil said. “Teachers, firemen, police, frontline hospital (workers), they do it every day.”

Lt. Col. Tori Scearbo, a New Hampshire Air National Guardsman, noticed the vehicle driving on Route 33 in Greenland that day because it was going so slowly.

As she passed the car, she looked over and noticed the elderly couple inside.

When the next red light turned green, Scearbo glanced in her rear-view mirror in time to see the couple’s car drift into the oncoming traffic and crash head-on into another vehicle.

Scearbo, a registered nurse in the intensive care unit at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, didn’t hesitate.

“I blocked the traffic with my car and got out and ran over to the vehicle,” she said.

The female passenger was shaken but seemed OK, but the man in the driver’s seat was in trouble. “His eyes were open and he was breathing, but he wasn’t responding to me,” she said.

By then others had stopped, and they helped Scearbo get the man out of his car. As they laid him on the ground, Scearbo checked and found no pulse.

While someone called 911, she started chest compressions.

No one else who stopped to help that day knew CPR, Scearbo said.

“I’m just grateful that I was there,” she said. “Obviously it was meant to be.”

As she was working on the man, she got a message on her phone, asking people to report to the hospital to deal with an incoming patient in cardiac arrest.

She called in: “I can’t come in, but I can tell you the story.”

Scearbo wasn’t scheduled to work the next day, but she went to the hospital to check on the patient. “He was confused, but he was alive and awake and OK,” she said.

“I never even got his name.”

Scearbo, 46, is a bit nonplussed by news that she is getting a Hero Award for her actions that day. “I feel very grateful that somebody thought I should be recognized for this, but I also know that everybody that I work with would do it,” she said.

“So many people out there have done the same exact thing. I’m not really that special,” she said.

That’s one thing these individuals have in common: They all deny being heroes.

That makes sense to UNH’s Robertson.

”There is something special about them,” he said. “They say it’s what anyone would have done, and I think they believe that, but it’s not objectively true.

”The fact that they think it’s normal is what makes them different.”

Steve Lafontaine of Manchester was heading home from Derry on his motorcycle when he started feeling dizzy. “I knew I was going to pass out,” he said. “It was happening real fast.”

He tried to pull into a parking lot across the street but never made it that far. He blacked out and his motorcycle hit the median and crashed, leaving him lying on the opposite side of the busy road.

Jose Carrasquillo and his 18-year-old son Ben saw the crash and pulled over to help.

“I remember like it happened yesterday,” Carrasquillo said.

The father-son pair started diverting traffic away from the stricken man.

That’s when Tiffany White of Bedford, a former ICU nurse, arrived on the scene.

“I think God sent her to us in this situation,” Carrasquillo said.

White said that as she drove up, she saw the toppled bike and the man lying on the ground. “No one was tending to him,” she said.

As a nurse, she said, you expect a time will come when you’ll come upon an emergency scene. “You just wait for your day.”

When White got to Lafontaine, she said, “He wasn’t breathing, he had no pulse. He was just laying there, dead.”

She began performing chest compressions on Lafontaine. Long minutes later, Michelle Cleary, a nurse practitioner in Derry, stopped to help and took over CPR until the ambulance arrived.

The next thing Lafontaine remembers is the defibrillator re-starting his heart. “It felt like a lightning bolt hit me. Then I heard ‘Clear!’ and it dawned on me they were going to do it again,” he said.

Lafontaine survived his heart attack that day thanks to the quick response of these caring bystanders. Now White, Cleary and the Carrasquillos all will receive New Hampshire Hero Awards.

Jose Carrasquillo, a father of five, said he and his son are excited about the awards. But he said, “I don’t feel like a hero. I was just trying to help my fellow man.

“The way I was raised when I was a kid is you’ve got to help the next person,” he said. “Even if you don’t know them, you go out there and help them.

“All my kids know the same thing, too.”

Tiffany White was reluctant to accept the Hero Award. “I’m a critical care nurse,” she said. “It’s what I do.”

“I just feel like I’m not a hero for doing the right thing.”

But Lafontaine has no doubts. “She’s the one who basically kept me alive until the paramedics got there.”

He hopes to meet his rescuers at Wednesday’s awards ceremony.

“If it wasn’t for the boys, good chance I might have gotten run over,” he said. “If it wasn’t for Tiffany and Michelle keeping me alive ’til the paramedics got there, they might not have made it in time.”

Here’s what Lafontaine wants to say to them all:

“Thank you for taking the time and caring about another human being. You saved my life.”

Every day, when her husband leaves for work, Marina Kelley tells him the same thing: “Make sure you come back to me.”

Sgt. Jeffrey Kelley is a corrections officer at the state prison for men in Concord.

On Sept. 2, 2021, he had just gone on duty when the fire alarm sounded.

At shift change, the officers had been told that some inmates were upset about a search that took place on the previous shift. “Just something to be mindful of,” Kelley said.

Fifteen minutes later, inmates set clothing on fire in trash barrels, and smoke was filling the pod.

Kelley raced to the area and started putting out the flames; it took three fire extinguishers.

A fire in a prison is a dangerous situation.

“There were inmates on that pod that were basically trapped behind the smoke of the fire,” Kelley said. “There was heavy smoke from your chest up.”

He and another officer guided the trapped men to safety.

Kelley said he wasn’t afraid. “I remember acting on instinct,” he said. “I thought about just doing the job, keeping my other staff’s safety in mind and the inmates’ safety in mind.”

The unit houses about 275 inmates and it was open yard time, so they were all out in the unit, Kelley said. A few inmates were refusing the PA announcement to return to their cells.

Kelley and some of his fellow officers directed them to do so and eventually, “they did the right thing and returned to their cells,” he said.

“We work in that unit every day, and there’s a mutual respect between the regular officers and the vast majority of the inmates,” Kelley said.

His actions that day earned Kelley a letter of commendation from Helen Hanks, the commissioner of the Department of Corrections. Hanks thanked him “for your exceptional effort toward the preservation of life and the safety and security of the institution, even though your personal safety was put at risk.”

Kelley, 41, became a corrections officer four years ago after a career in auto sales. “I was looking for a job that allowed me to serve the community better,” he said.

A lot of the young men he sees in prison didn’t grow up with male role models or in stable homes, he said. He’s mindful of the fact that 90% of inmates will re-enter society at some point.

“You try to be a positive influence, an example for them of how to go about your life appropriately, and not end up back in prison,” he said.

Marina Kelley said her husband of seven years is her hero.

She still worries every time he leaves for work. “He will be the one running into the fire, into the problem, into the situation,” she said. “Which is his job and I’m so happy that he does it well. We need people like that.

“But I don’t need a hero,” she said. “I just need a husband.”

Jeff Kelley admits he thought about not telling his wife about the fire, knowing how she worries. “But you have to tell her something,” he said.

He’s proud to receive a Hero Award, Kelley said. “But I was really just doing my job.”

Robertson sees one similarity between the heroes of myth and those of modern times.

”What made a hero is they did something that normal people did not have the boldness, or creativity, or just the sheer capacity to do,” Robertson said.

It’s still true today, he said.

”What makes a person a hero is that they’re different in some way,” he said. “They do something that normal people wouldn’t have the capacity to do.”

One morning last May, Portsmouth Detective Rochelle Jones responded to a report of a despondent man threatening to jump from the Piscataqua River Bridge. Her actions that day saved his life — and changed her own.

People recognized her in the supermarket, around town, at community events. And invariably, people thanked her for what she did and told her about loved ones who struggle with mental health.

“It hit home and started conversations,” she said.

Jones said she thinks about that incident “every day.”

“And not in a bad way, but it’s certainly been a pivotal moment in my career.”

Jones now participates in monthly crisis intervention training offered by the New Hampshire chapter of the National Alliance for Mental Health, using what happened on the bridge as a teaching moment. She also was asked to talk about the incident when she attended the FBI Academy to become a crisis negotiator.

Now she’s getting a Hero Award.

On the bridge that day, Jones asked a colleague to hold onto her belt so she could lean down and hand the man the cigarette he had requested. It gave her the chance to make eye contact — and a human connection — with the man.

Minutes later, the man climbed up a ladder to the bridge deck and let Jones drive him to a hospital for care.

She has stayed in touch with him since.

“He is my person,” she said. “He is my community, and I’m his.”

Police work has changed, said Jones, a 20-year veteran of the force. “Social work is part of what we do now,” she said.

“We all took an oath to serve others. At the end of the day, you go back to why you became a police officer in the first place, and that’s to help people,” Jones said.

These days her job involves a lot of outreach — meeting with Girl Scouts, recovery centers, neighborhood watch groups and senior services. Born and raised in Portsmouth, Jones said she’s passionate about serving her community. “These are my people, and I’m theirs,” she said.

Jones is quick to share the credit for the positive outcome that day, from the supervisors who made the call to shut down the busy bridge between Maine and New Hampshire so negotiators could speak with the man, to the other officers who were up there for hours.

It’s like a baseball game, she said. “The closer comes in and throws three strikes, but they didn’t win the game,” she said. “It’s a total team effort.”

So, in a world far advanced from those ancient legends and myths, do we still need heroes?

”We will always need heroes,” Robertson said.

”There’s always going to be people that need help, and there’s always going to be people that step up and help them.”

It was lucky that Hampton Police Officer Haley Magee even saw the crash that night.

Magee was on patrol last May 25, nearing the end of her shift, when she heard the screech of tires.

Magee, who had graduated from the police academy a year earlier, got out of her cruiser and went to look for the vehicle. The car had struck a tree and was on its side.

Peering inside, she saw the driver in the back seat. “She was screaming,” she said.

Magee quickly realized the danger. “I saw heavy smoke coming from the front of the car,” she said. “Really, at any moment it could have caught fire.”

The car doors wouldn’t open, so Magee used her flashlight to smash the glass, and helped the driver get out of the car.

She was never afraid, she said.

“I didn’t really have time to think,” she said. “I just needed to get her out.”

The driver survived and was later charged with drunken driving.

Magee, 28, said the outcome could have been so much worse if she hadn’t happened by. “It’s not really a real busy road at that time of night,” she said. “That would have been a really terrible thing if no one was there…”

Magee said she’s surprised at the attention the incident has generated in the year since.

She was featured in the Dick Tracy comic strip, which periodically showcases a heroic law enforcement officer.

And Magee is getting a New Hampshire Hero Award.

“I never expected anything,” she said. “I was just doing my job.”

It’s why she became a police officer, she said. “I just like being in the community and trying to help out as best I can,” she said.

T wo Dover police officers also will be recognized Wednesday for their efforts to save the life of a distraught teenager.

Sgt. Juel Cooper and Detective Molly Martuscello could not be reached for comment last week, but their supervisor, Capt. David Terlemezian, said the honor is well deserved.

“They acted swiftly to keep this child safe and get him the help he needed,” Terlemezian said.

The two police officers were in the station when word came that someone was sitting on top of the parking garage next door.

The two officers were the first on the scene and managed to pull the 16-year-old boy off the edge of the wall. “He didn’t know they were there and they were able to grab a hold of him before he was aware of their presence,” Terlemezian said.

The boy tried to get back to the edge, but the officers were able to restrain him until help arrived.

Terlemezian said the two officers are reluctant to be called heroes. But he said, “I absolutely think that that was a heroic act, and I without a doubt think they saved him from either serious injury or death.”

Here’s a funny thing: When you ask heroes who their heroes are, many of them mention family members.

Portsmouth Detective Jones named her sister, Erica, who works for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“When we grew up, we didn’t have a lot. She was always my big, protective sister,” Jones said. “She was my first unconditional love.”

“My mom is my hero for sure,” said Officer Magee from Hampton. “She’s just always been there for me.”

Nashua’s Jay Pichardo? “My dad.”

“He’s no longer with us. I think a lot of the inspiration for doing the right thing definitely comes from my father,” Pichardo said.

UNH’s Robertson, too, said his hero is his dad.

“I’m successful in life because I won the parent lottery,” he said.

“He grew up one of nine children, and he grew up poor,” he said. “And then he decided he was going to be the best father ever.”

Lt. Col. Scearbo said her co-workers at the hospital are her heroes. “It’s not an easy job, and they’re the reason I show up to work every day,” she said.

The Provenchers have spoken with rescuer Christine Shaw by phone since the crash, but they’re all looking forward to meeting in person at the awards ceremony.

“The first thing I’m going to do is give her a big hug and a kiss and thank her for keeping my husband here,” Suzanne Provencher said.

Marc Provencher wants a hug too.

“I was going to die right there,” he said. “This girl pulled in and saved my life. A minute later probably could have been too late.”

He does plan to rib A.J. Sousa about the boots the EMT cut off him that day on the highway to tend to his injured legs. “I loved those boots,” he said, grinning.

Shaw says what happened that day “reminded me that I am just one piece of humanity.”

“We’re all part of something bigger,” Shaw said. “Being kind and helping each other out — maybe we should think more about that these days.

“Start the healing; stop the hurting.”

NH Heroes to be honored Wednesday The New Hampshire Hero Awards, sponsored by Citizens and presented by the New Hampshire Union Leader, will be presented in a 3 p.m. ceremony on Wednesday at the State House in Concord. The ceremony is open to the public.