Published Feb. 5, 1983 in the Louisville Times

Death on the run
EMS technician had heart problem, but it didn't affect his unselfishness

Rick Vinzant died on the run -- a run.

A man had been shot in the leg at 21st Street and Broadway Thursday night. An Emergency Medical Services unit on the scene called for a backup.

It called for Vinzant, an EMS technician.

The shooting victim survived. Vinzant, who had had heart trouble since youth, died of a heart attack. He was 28.

The fact was Vinzant knew he was going to die, friends said yesterday. It was just a matter of time.

"If he ever had to pick his time, this was it," said Terry Lawrence, a technician and former EMS partner of Vinzant's. "One of his favorite runs was a shooting because you really have the [chance] to give immediate help. It was an exciting run. He enjoyed the excitement of it.

"I'm sure that's the way he wanted it."

Vinzant, of 536 Baxter Ave., had always wanted to be an EMS technician, even when he worked as an orderly in the emergency room at SS. Mary & Elizabeth Hospital or for Yellow Cab Ambulance Service. He got his wish in 1979.

Friends and fellow workers said he was a survivor, a free spirit, a volunteer.

His friendships spanned Louisville's medical community because he spent time in virtually every hospital.

Barbara Velten, a nurse who struck up a friendship with Rick when they both worked at SS. Mary & Elizabeth, said Vinzant knew he would die young. But, even so, she said, "he'd literally give the shirt off his back to someone he thought needed it more."

Yet sometimes he as "kind of a loner," she said. "He'd like to take a lot of long walks and think."

As a child, Vinzant had rheumatic fever, and, in his late teens, he had two heart valves implanted. Both were replaced in 1981 during an operation in Columbus, Ohio.

He suffered a heart attack in December and was in Norton Hospital until the end of the month.

Last week he returned to Louisville from a trip to the University of Alabama hospital in Birmingham, where he was being considered for a heart transplant. Even then, the prognosis wasn't good -- two or three years to live or a heart transplant.

In between trips to the hospital, Vinzant seemed to spend his time helping others.

He was a volunteer firefighter for Dixie Suburban Volunteer Fire Department, driving the fire truck for the group between 1974 and March 1981, when he had to have the heart valves replaced. And he became a familiar face around the nursery for Project Find at Kosair-Children's Hospital.

"He was a kind of caring guy. The most wonderful thing was his attitude," said Lillian McGuigan, supervisor of the Project Find nursery. "He'd walk in and, if a child in the crisis nursery was feeling down and unhappy and scared, he would walk right in an cheer him up."

Sgt. Kevin Johnson of the Dixie fire department said, "It seemed like he was always there when you needed him."

Besides being a dispatcher and technician for Louisville EMS and sergeant-at-arms for the Emergency Medical Services Employee Association, he was a member of the Kentucky Rescue Association and attended Walnut Street Baptist Church.

But EMS was Vinzant's life and his "family," Lawrence said.

"I've got my suspicion that this job was his last foothold on life," Lawrence said. "A lot of people had been on him for a year or so to go on medical disability ... When he wasn't in the hospital, he was at work."

Vinzant's funeral will be at 1 p.m. tomorrow at Nunnelley Funeral Home, 4327 Taylor Blvd., with burial in New Hope North Cemetery in Falkville, Ala.

Visitation will be at the funeral home from 2 to 9 p.m. today and from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. tomorrow, when the body will be taken to Peck Funeral Home in Hartsell, Ala.

The family requests that expressions of sympathy take the form of contributions to the American Heart Association or Kosair-Children's Hospital.

Survivors include his father, Roy W. Vinzant of Hartsell, Ala.; his mother, Mrs. Helen Vinzant of Battle Creek, Mich.; three brothers, David, D., Terry D. and Timothy Vinzant, all of Battle Creek; two sisters, Mrs. Sharon L. Myers and Treasa Vinzant, both of Battle Creek; and a grandparent, Mrs. Berttie Vinzant of Hartsell.

KENTUCKY EMS MEMORIAL

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