Milan or Hartford? That was the choice Reginald Freeman was faced with when the job of Hartford fire chief was offered to him more than a year ago.
"I was poised to go to Italy for 14 months," said Freeman, who was the fire chief of Lockheed Martin's aeronautic headquarters in Ft. Worth, Texas, at the time.
But the lure of helping restore a once-respected fire department to its former status and ending the cratering morale brought on by the string of public embarrassments and the first line-of- duty firefighter death in 40 years won out. "That was my motivation," said Freeman, who kept tabs on the department after he left his position as an assistant chief in 2013 and went to Texas.
"I cared, and to me it was evident that the department was much better than it was being portrayed in public," he said.