Mark Ekstrom News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Okay. you are may have seen this outrageous headline today that a fire fighter refused to respond to last month's shooting rampage in tucson, a rampage that left six people dead, 13 wounded, including congresswoman gabrielle giffords. you know the story. she's currently undergoing rehab in texas. now this fire fighter, his name is mark ekstrom, he was not a first responder, his unit was not even called into action until a couple hours after that shooting. he allegedly refused to go because of political bantering with his crew, at least that's the phrase that the captain used in this memorandum...

About my country and was distraught over the magnitude of how this would affect our country. he goes on to say i became distracted to the point of not being able to perform my routine station duties to such an extent that i seriously doubted my ability to focus on an emergency call, so that's just part of his statement here. the whole thing, actually a whole page that we got from him. we wanted to get to the bottom of this and joining me now by phone is the assistant chief with the tucson fire department. i appreciate you coming on or calling in, because i want you to set the record straight. ...

Was it something about country? i'm confused. >> the problem is that mark ekstrom was not communicating very well with his captain this afternoon. he mention that had his decisions were based on the political events that were occurring with the shooting and that he, you know, these are the things that led him to be distracted and then fortunately he retired from the fire department the very next business day and we didn't have an opportunity to reach out to him and get his full story. >> let me get to that in a minute. let me press you a bit. i'm not a fire fighter, i don't know. do you take a...