Deaf Woman Found Burned On The Street

Deaf News: Police: Woman found burned on Dale Street in Rochester.

ROCHESTER, NY -- Rochester Police say that a woman was found burned on Dale Street on Sunday, and the incident is being investigated as a suicide attempt.

News10NBC does not normally report on suicides, but many people in the area had questions about what happened on Sunday in broad daylight.

Officers say they were called to a home on Dale Street around, where they found a woman on fire in a field located on a empty lot of the street.

The woman, reportedly somewhere between 40 and 50 years of age, was transported to Strong Memorial Hospital, where she is in guarded condition.

Tony Alonzo Thompson- a neighbor of the woman- was among those who found her. He was walking around the neighborhood when he found her, and immediately called 911.

"I'm trying to tell her, 'ma'am, it's gonna be alright.' I'm telling her it's gonna be alright. It's going to be alright.... but I'm crying because I knew her."

"She's looking right at," he said, "She's Deaf... and she pointed. She's naked, her pants are down to her ankles... and she was smoking."

Holly Mortensen, who lives across from the field where the woman was found, is still in shock over what happened.

"That's a little too close to home, that's my first reaction."

Mortensen was awakened by the police and firefighters that had arrived in the neighborhood, and when she looked outside, she saw one of her neighbors on fire.

"She wasn't moving, she was just laying there at the middle of the field," she recalls, "The EMTs put a respirator on her, or a resuscitator on her."

Fire and police have confirmed the event is now being investigated as a suicide attempt and that there is no danger to the public. Because of the sensitivity of the situation, News10NBC will not be releasing the name of the woman.

Deaf News: Deaf and dying: How a volunteer team brings palliative care comfort through communication in the capital of Canada.

OTTAWA -- Ottawa Citizen: The first experience Monica Elaine Campbell had with palliative care was helping a woman who had lost her ability to speak because of throat cancer.

Campbell, profoundly Deaf since birth, is an excellent lip reader and staff at an Ottawa Hospital asked if she could interpret the dying woman’s words. The woman had been communicating with paper and pen, but now was too weak even to do that.

“I was very hesitant. Then I thought, well, the least I could do is give it a try,” said Campbell, who is able to speak despite never having heard a word herself. “I put my hand on her right arm and said, ‘I’ve never done this before. I will try my best.”

WATCH: Video with CC - Ottawa Citizen.

Campbell leaned close as the woman mouthed her words. Campbell repeated it back and had the woman nod yes if she had understood correctly. She spent five hours with the woman, relaying messages between her and her family and the medical team. She was able to interpret about 85 per cent of what the woman told her.

“I came away a different person,” Campbell said. “I was very touched by the experience.”

The dying woman had not been Deaf, but the experience got Campbell thinking about the communication needs of people like herself: the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. A few years later, Campbell was asked to help a Deaf friend who was about to receive bad news about her cancer diagnosis.

“I didn’t know much about palliative care, but she was struggling with her terminal illness,” Campbell said. “I thought, my goodness, what if that was me? I thought, I should talk to my Deaf friends about death and dying and what our experiences have been.”

Those conversations led Campbell and her friend, sign language interpreter Christine Wilson, to start up the Ottawa Deaf Palliative Care Team, a group of volunteers that provide end-of-life care for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and their families. In 1999, she enrolled in palliative care courses at Algonquin College with two Deaf colleagues (the Deaf use a capital D to refer to the sub-culture of people who communicate with sign language; “Hard of Hearing” are those who have lost some or most of the hearing but can still use some speech, sometimes augmented with sign language; the “Deafened” or “Oral Deaf” have lost some or all of their hearing, but either learned to speak before their deafness or, like Campbell, learned to speak despite it.) Read More at Ottawa Citizen.