The Justice Graham Hoffman Deserves

Note: the Kansas City Fire Department is soliciting donations for Huffman’s family through The Yard Foundation and selling his station T-shirt.

On Sunday morning, firefighter/paramedic Graham Hoffman of the Kansas City Fire Department responded to a fairly routine call: a law enforcement request to take a subject for medical evaluation. By the time he reached the ER, he’d be fighting for his own life: Shanetta Bosell, the patient, allegedly pulled a knife and stabbed him through the heart in the back of the ambulance. Huffman, 29, spent a few days in intensive care before passing away.

It’s an unspeakable tragedy for Hoffman’s family, friends, and KCFD. It’s also a sobering reminder that assaults on healthcare workers are high and rising both in the United States and globally. The conversation naturally turns to how to achieve justice for Hoffman, with Ed Kelly, president of the largest American firefighters’ union, calling for Bosell to “be prosecuted to the highest extent of the law” to combat “our firefighters and paramedics…being assaulted by individuals that quite frankly feel that they have entitlement to attack us.”

Kelly’s anger is warranted, but if what he’s saying is true, it means that Bosell and Hoffman met at the intersection of troubling national trends, and true justice for a fallen brother would mean not merely doling out punishment when we see it, but a comprehensive review of every factor that contributed to Hoffman’s death. And the fire service already provides a model of how we could do that.

Fatal Fire Investigations Are the Gold Standard for Systemic Change

If Hoffman had run out of air in a burning building, or if a roof had collapsed on him, the investigation would look very different. A team from NIOSH’s Fire Fighter Fatality Investigation and Prevention Program would descend on the scene, the department and the area, conducting an investigation that might last a year or more. This investigation wouldn’t replace any criminal or litigation-related probe, and would advise that its findings “should not be used for the purpose of litigation or the adjudication of any claim, because finding fault isn’t the point. Instead, every single possible contributor to Hoffman’s death (including any actions he might have taken) would be scrutinized, not to lay blame but to learn how to prevent future deaths.

Take, for instance, the South Shore laundromat fire in 2012, in which two firefighters died and 19 were injured when a notoriously disaster-prone style of roof, hidden under multiple rounds of renovations, collapsed underneath and on top of them. The final report, which took more than nine months to compile, with recommendations from a wide array of city departments and divisions. Code enforcement and dispatch could have collaborated to ensure the building’s condmenation was shared with responders; firefighters needed to better communicate interior conditions with command (and departments should have given all of them radios to do so); the department needed to update its training on fighting fire in dilapidated structures.

Many of the shortcomings in Hoffman’s death seem obvious at first. Why was a person out on bail for assaulting a first responder and known to be “a danger to the public“ allowed to be alone with him? Why on earth didn’t police, who initiated contact with Bosell, make sure she was cleared of weapons before she was placed in the ambulance? To be clear, local authorities are already investigating these important questions.

But as nationwide statistics show us, the problem runs deeper than one local government’s failures—and as the fatal fire investigation shows, the solution could, too. While we don’t yet know much about Bosell (and we’ll never learn anything that justifies her), I’m willing to wager a fair amount that she encountered more societal failures in her life than the one that should have kept her from stabbing Hoffman. What might NIOSH’s parent CDC, a world-leading epidemiological agency, accomplish were it allowed to advise all the agencies she interacted with about how they could have prevented his murder?

The Carceral System That Failed Graham Hoffman Might Be the Only Thing That Benefits from His Death

Sadly, there is no mechanism for investigating acts of violence to such a degree, and it’s unlikely Hoffman’s death will create one. To the extent that we’re willing to consider large-scale responses to healthcare-related tragedies, it’s usually to empower the government toward pre-existing objectives. The criminal justice system that allowed Bosell to get Hoffman alone while armed will likely be empowered to kill her, with “justice“ achieved and hands washed. Meanwhile, the presidential administration pushing for enhancement of the carceral state put the firefighter safety programs described here on life support, and the future of death benefits like those paid to Hoffman’s family is up in the air.

Shanetta Bosell deserves accountability, but the people who loved Graham Hoffman deserve far better than that: knowing that we’ve done everything we can to make sure this doesn’t happen again.