Firefighter: Luck Saved Him From a Serious Injury

“Just call me lucky,” Santa Ana firefighter Lenny Edelman told his buddies Thursday after he learned that the jolting gunshot in the thigh he received while fighting fires in Los Angeles was only a gaping flesh wound.

Late in the night Edelman, walking on crutches, was waiting at Station 2 in Santa Ana for his girlfriend and sister to drive him to his home in Fallbrook. He had become the first gunshot victim among the scores of firefighters that Orange County had sent north to help their overwhelmed colleagues in Los Angeles.

In retrospect, Edelman said, he has no doubt that the assailant meant to kill him. “I think this guy wanted to kill somebody to make a name for himself. To be a big man,” he said.

Edelman said he was hauling hose to douse a blaze that had engulfed a furniture store at 98th Street and Vermont Avenue when he heard several loud noises and fell.

“I felt like someone had hit me with a baseball bat,” he said. Then, he said, he felt a burning sensation “like a hot poker” high on his left thigh.

After paramedics transported him to Robert F. Kennedy Hospital in Hawthorne, he said, he discovered that a bullet “blew a hole (in his thigh) the size of a quarter.” However, it stopped short of breaking any bones or major blood vessels and fell out of the wound. Edelman believes that his thick firefighting jacket and pants slowed the bullet’s momentum.

While Edelman said he did not see a gun being fired, he was told by his colleagues that it was one of three men who had been walking up and down the fire lines, swaggering and cursing at the firefighters.

“I did absolutely nothing to provoke him,” Edelman said. “I avoided eye contact and was trying extra hard to be a nice guy.”

About his experience in Los Angeles, Edelmen said: “It is probably the most unfortunate thing I’ve ever seen. It is unreal. Going there is like being in a bad dream.”

He does not blame the residents of Los Angeles for his injury. “It looked like these men were a few bad apples running around the city making others look bad,” he said.

As casualties go, Edelman was lucky. He said he will be back on the job in just a couple of weeks. But he added that he is worried about his co-workers in days ahead.

Edelman, 32, is a six-year veteran of the Santa Ana Fire Department. He grew up in Stanton and graduated from Western High School. He now lives in Fallbrook in north San Diego County with his 3-year-old son, he said, following the death of his wife in an automobile accident a year and a half ago.

Edelman was sent to Los Angeles Thursday morning in a strike team made up of firefighting agencies in central Orange County. He normally works at Station 2 on East 4th Street in Santa Ana.

Santa Ana Battalion Chief Jim Dalton described Edelman as “an aggressive firefighter.”