It was cold and nearing midnight Monday as Alexandria firefighter Tom Wheatley stood in the bow of the rescue boat, scanning the Potomac River with a hand-held light, searching for signs of life.
What he detected was an odor of fuel that seemed to dissipate as the boat neared the Woodrow Wilson Bridge -- a clue that would help the department's Marine Operations team find the helicopter that was reported down.
Turning north, the team followed a fuel slick until it could make out the aircraft's shape. "Then we saw the EMS insignia," Wheatley recalled yesterday, "and we knew it was a medevac.
"Here these people are saving lives all the time," he said, his voice choked with emotion. "And now it's our turn to save theirs."
The fuselage was crushed. Panning the wreckage with their lights, they spotted a man -- later identified as flight nurse Jonathan Godfrey -- clinging to the helicopter's tail.
"We were going to throw him a lifeline, but he said not to, that he was hurt," Wheatley said. Team member Tina Earley, clad in a drysuit, jumped into the water -- as shallow as 1 1/2 feet near the wreckage -- and used a rescue ring to help Godfrey to the boat.
"The victim was hollering," Wheatley said. "He was . . . trying to tell us that there were other crew members on board."
Rescuers could not save Nicole Kielar, 29, the flight paramedic, and last night they had not yet found the pilot, Joseph E. Schaefer III of Sterling.
Wheatley said Godfrey told them that the helicopter had dropped off a patient at a D.C. hospital and was returning to Stafford when the crash occurred.
"He said they hit something," Wheatley said. "They didn't know what it was."
Godfrey was taken to Belle Haven Marina for transport to Washington Hospital Center. Wheatley said a crew member heard him quip, "Don't . . . put me on a helicopter."
Godfrey's injuries included a broken arm, leg and sternum.
Returning to the crash site, Wheatley said the scene was surreal as search helicopters churned the shallow water and dive teams worked to recover Kielar's body from beneath the wreckage.
Kielar, who grew up in Fairfax County and lived in Richmond, had climbed "amazingly high" in her four years as a flight paramedic, college friend Matt Payne said, getting her master's degree and teaching emergency workers across Virginia and Pennsylvania.
"She was wound up tight, like the Energizer Bunny. Just her coming into the room, you better have a coffee in hand to keep up," said Payne, who said they met as emergency room medics at the University of Virginia and worked as flight paramedics in Richmond before Payne took a job in Stafford a few months ago.
The helicopter's owner, Air Methods Corp., temporarily halted operations out of Stafford and Richmond -- its D.C. area sites -- for a "stress debriefing," Payne said. "It's hit us hard."
Close to 5:30 a.m. yesterday, Wheatley said, rescuers flipped the helicopter on a rising tide, hoping to find the pilot.
Schaefer's wife, Mary Cecelia, said he loved flying and had logged 4,000 hours piloting helicopters, including two tours in Vietnam.
"I want people to know he has all these medals from Vietnam. He was shot down there, rescued tons of people. "To us," she said of herself and their three sons, "he's a hero."
"I just don't know what happened here."
