Gary Fratus, who celebrated his 52nd birthday last week, was loading trucks for his North Main Street heating and air conditioning business around 8 a.m. July 1 when he collapsed because of a cardiac arrhythmia.
His son, Scott, ran next door to the North Randolph fire station for help.
The shift was changing at the time, and the five firefighters inside rushed to the man’s aid, grabbing the emergency medical equipment from the department’s Engine 4.
Firefighter/paramedic Thomas Binnall, the department’s emergency medical coordinator, said when firefighters reached the elder Fratus, he “was not breathing and had no pulse.”
Gary Fratus said he was told “I was clinically dead.”
Binnall said firefighters used a defibrillator to administer a single shock, restoring Fratus’ pulse before the ambulance arrived to take him to Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton.
“It’s a miracle that it happened,” Scott Fratus said. “Every single doctor said the same thing, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are.’”
