They are being remembered as heroes but Andy Olesen, Karen Hollis and Jim Dillow were just doing their jobs, ones they loved despite the constant danger, their relatives said today.
Olesen, a combat pilot in Vietnam who was days from retirement, was at the controls of a medical helicopter with flight nurses Hollis and Dillow to pick up a patient from Manteno and return to Rockford Memorial Hospital. But he hit rough weather just 30 miles out and was turning back when the helicopter nosedived into a field Monday night.
All three were killed.
Olesen, 65, had spent 23 years in the Army before leaving and flying helicopters for hospitals. He was going to celebrate his retirement Saturday, then travel to Denmark, his father's birthplace. “He was full of life,’’ his wife Pat Olesen said.
Hollis, 48, was meticulous about her work and devoted to her two school-aged daughters. “For her, it was about her kids and raising them," her brother John Foley recalled.
Dillow, the father of two boys and two girls, was a devout Christian known for his sense of humor. “We could use him now,” said Dr. Robert Escarza, medical director of the Regional Emergency Acute Care Transport (REACT). “He would probably find all of this hullabaloo pretty annoying.”
The three grew up in the Rockford area, Olesen and Hollis in the city and Dillow on a farm to the west.
Pat Olesen, 64, said she met her husband when they were both students at South Dakota State University. He had served in the Vietnam War for about nine months and stayed in the Army for 23 years, leaving in 1993. He began flying medical helicopters for Saint Anthony Medical Center in Rockford, where he stayed for six or seven years before transferring to the Rockford hospital, his wife said.
He had four more shifts to go before he retired, Pat Olesen said. His niece was going to throw a party for him in Chicago.
He and his wife have two children who both live near Fort Hood, Texas. After he stopped working, they were going to move to Texas to be near them.
Hollis had worked at Rockford Memorial hospital for decades, her relatives said.
“She has given her life to this,” said her younger brother John Foley. “It’s tragic. She has probably been on thousands of these flights over the years.”
Hollis, one of six siblings, spent much of her time growing up in Rockford, where she attended Boylan High School.
After graduating from Northern Illinois University in the late 1980s, she became an intensive care nurse at Rockford Memorial Hospital, where she remained for the rest of her career. She soon began riding helicopters to pick up patients or deliver organs but the family did not worry about her safety, Foley said.
“It was something she would do. It’s part of your job. You don’t think about something like that,” he said.
“Nobody thinks about that. The dangers. . .You can’t comprehend that,” Foley said.
Relatives described Hollis as a caring and devoted mother of two school-aged daughters -- a 6th grader at Boylan High School and a freshman at Spectrum School. Foley said she volunteered at Spectrum and would often attend swim meets and take them on trips.
Dillow was a tall and strong man who had racked up more than 10 years in experience as a flight nurse, his relatives said. He grew up in Shannon, studied nursing at a Catholic school in Illinois and then moved to Greenville, S.C., where he met his wife Rachel of 18 years who was working as a nurse at a hospital there.
Dillow and his wife have four children together: Two boys, 9 and 11, and two girls, 7 and 12, said his sister-in-law Gina Walker. “When I think of Jim, I think of family,” White said. “That was the thing that was most important."
In 1996, he joined Rockford Memorial Hospital as as a flight nurse. "He was just proud of what he did. He was good at it,” said Walker. “He died doing what he loved to do.”
3 killed in medical copter crash remembered as heroes
This article
3 killed in medical copter crash remembered as heroes
can be opened in url
http://newscoming.blogspot.com/2012/12/3-killed-in-medical-copter-crash.html
3 killed in medical copter crash remembered as heroes
