Jack Frost 2

Baby Jack "Frost" Returns to the Tolland Fire Department

It was 2 a.m. on Jan. 27 and to say it was snowing would be an understatement. Mother Nature had dealt Connecticut another blow and the snow was piling up waist deep outside the Mello residence.

Cynthia and her family were asleep then the excitement began. Cynthia, 9 months pregnant with her second child, went into labor. She woke up her husband Greg to tell him her water had just broken. Then she went to wake her daughter, Taylor Kilduff, a fourth grader at Tolland Intermediate School.

“It was all a blur,” Cynthia said recently recalling the night.

It quickly became clear after Greg’s failed attempt to shovel the driveway (there was just too much snow) that the Mellos would need assistance getting Cynthia to St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford to deliver her son; the family called 9-1-1.

On duty that night at the town fire stations were Dennis Carlson, Steve Pasek, Mark Morrison and Joe Duval. They were anticipating it would be a busy night, but even they were not expecting what unfolded next.

With help from plow truck drivers from the town’s highway and parks departments, the firefighters and ambulance crew had to literally plow their way to the Mello’s house and then blaze a trail through back roads and Interstate 84 to get Cynthia to the hospital, all the while unsure of when the baby boy, dubbed Jack Frost, would make his grand entrance.

“It was definitely a different experience,” Pasek, the ambulance technician, said recently.

On May 16, Cynthia, Taylor and baby Jack William Mello again called upon the Tolland Fire Department, but this time it was to offer a heartfelt thank you.

“Here he is,” Cynthia said, as she placed 3½-month-old Jack, snug in his car seat, on a table in the front of the fire department’s training room. “Here’s the guy that caused all the excitement.”

“I really can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you did. Without you we would have been stuck,” Cynthia told the group.

“It’s a good feeling. We don’t normally get to see the patient again after a call,” Morrison, the ambulance driver that night, said in May.

In the hallway outside the training room, Pasek, Morrison and Duval recalled the difficulties of the night.

That morning the snow was so deep the ambulance could not make it down the roads. The town road crew had been out plowing for a while, but the snow was falling fast and heavy. At the time of the call the town plows were on the other side of town, the firefighters said. Duval hopped in the department pickup truck that had a plow attachment and started clearing a path for the ambulance.

Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman (2000) (V ...

“In this sequel of the first Jack Frost movie, Sheriff Sam Tiler, his wife Anne, and Sam’s two deputies (also husband and wife) decide to go on a Caribbean vacation to take their minds off the traumatic events of the previous movie in a place with absolutely no snow. Their holiday will be short-lived, however, as the thawed murderer gets inadvertantly re-frozen and brought back to life. As if that weren’t bad enough, he now has the ability to remain frozen even in tropical temperatures, and he’s headed south to settle some old scores. Written by Jean-Marc Rocher <rocher@fiberbit.

Outing

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