He may be the regional battalion chief of EMS for Naval District of Washington Fire Department, drive emergency vehicles and be a paramedic, but Darius Hawkins is just heeding his parents’ advice.
“She [the late Johnnie Mae] and my dad [Raymond] were like, ‘Whatever you do, be the best you can at whatever you do,” Hawkins said during a telephone interview. Hawkins, who was a firefighter with Naval Air Station Patuxent River before being promoted to regional battalion chief in 2020, helps oversee several bases from his Southeast D.C. headquarters.
“Darius was always trying to get to that next step,” said Ridge VFD Life Member Eddie Raley. “He’s a go-getter. Any duties assigned to him he’s been good at that and he’s been good at taking on other duties. If he sees things that can help, he’ll jump in and say, ‘I have any idea.’ He’s always been that guy who’s looking ahead to things.”
Raley said Hawkins is an “outstanding” pump operator.
The 41-year-old Scotland resident is also an engineer at the Ridge Volunteer Fire Department, meaning it is Hawkins who operates the department’s boat and engines.
“They’re bigger than they seem,” he said of the department’s vehicles. “So it’s really all about knowing how that truck is going to react in rain, snow, all of that.”
But it still boggles his mind when drivers don’t get out of the way.
“I feel like if it was their family member we’re responding to they would,” he said. “In St. Mary’s we’re so rural we have just one hospital, so sometimes it might take 20, 30 minutes to get [there]. So seconds and minutes really count.”
In large part because a couple of friends were already members and small part to stay out of trouble, he joined the Ridge Volunteer Fire Department in 2000.
“It was something to do for fun, but I really got hooked on it right away,” said Hawkins, a lifelong St. Mary’s County resident who graduated from Great Mills High School in 1998. “Helping people is definitely one of the big things [I like about it]. The other is that no call is ever the same and you have to be constantly thinking on your feet all the time.”
After losing his job as a mechanic at a local car dealership, Hawkins joined the Ridge company full-time and climbed the ranks from firefighter/paramedic to sergeant to lieutenant to captain and finally to assistant fire chief.
“I kind of hopped in there just to give me something to do,” he said. “And I made a career out of it somehow.”
Hawkins is the first Black member at Ridge to hold many of these titles and in 2013 he became the first African American paramedic in St. Mary’s County, according to an article by Lt. Scot Best on the Ridge fire department website.
“I just feel like I’m just doing my job and helping other people,” he said when asked if he feels like a trailblazer. “I hope that I can inspire maybe a few more minorities because the fire service was mainly a white, male culture. But I hope that I can inspire not just Blacks but minorities in general, whether it’s women or other cultures.”
He said some calls still stay with him, especially those involving children, mostly because, “Kids really affect me more than anything,” he said, adding that much of that is because of the “trauma for the outcome of their life.”
He is also a counselor for critical incident stress management “to help my brothers and sisters,” and said he can “understand what they’re going through and provide the help they need or point them in the right direction to get them back on the street.”
“He was always pushing extra hard to get to that next level,” Raley said.
He’s received several commendations for life-saving, including one man who went into cardiac arrest on the base. The man was talking by the time he was in the ambulance and presented the citation to Hawkins himself.
“To me a life save is the best when that person can go back home to their family,” Hawkins said, and then added he doesn’t see himself as a hero. “I just try to do my best to help the next person out. I’ve been inspired by my friends and family who never once said I couldn’t do something. And I’ve had a really great support system.”
“His patient care is always top-notch and he has really good bedside manner,” Raley said. “He saw [being a paramedic] as his niche and ran with it.”
Hawkins said the best feeling is a positive outcome following an incident.
“What I love most is being in charge of a team, whether it’s on an ambulance or a fire truck and just making it happen, some how some way,” he said. “And having that feeling when we’re done whether it was a fire, a CPR call or a hazmat incident, knowing we made a difference.”
Twitter: @MichaelSoMdNews