AUBURN — It was the last day of a weeklong vacation and dad Billy Sawtelle’s 53rd birthday. The family had driven up Mount Washington in the morning, wife Kim scared of the height. On the way back home to Waterville, the family stopped to grab dinner at Thatcher’s restaurant in the Auburn Mall. They’d been at the table 10 minutes when Billy collapsed.

Firefighters responded to what came in to 911 as a seizure call. When they got there, it was much worse. Heart attack. Billy Sawtelle wasn’t breathing. He’d turned blue.

They brought him back.

Sawtelle came by the Center Street station Tuesday with thank-yous. His family, firefighters and United Ambulance paramedics traded handshakes and hugs.

“We did lose him (that day,)” Kim said. “We’re very thankful; grateful.”

The Sawtelles have been together 10 years, married four. Their 8-year-old son, Logan, was at the restaurant with them when it happened, around 7:40 p.m. on July 7.

After responding to the call, firefighter and paramedic Eric Saunders, acting lieutenant on Engine 5, tore Sawtelle’s shirt to get better access for a defibrillator while firefighter and EMT Dan Beaule started compressions. They did CPR and shocked him twice. With the help of other firefighters and United, by the time Sawtelle was en route to Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston, he was breathing on his own.

At the hospital, “The little guy reminded me that he and his dad did have matching T-shirts until I ripped it off,” Saunders said.

On Tuesday, firefighters gave Sawtelle a new matching shirt from the Mount Washington gift shop.

Saunders and other crew members had visited Sawtelle once during his stay in the Intensive Care Unit. Eleven years ago, fellow firefighters saved Saunders during a cardiac arrest at the Central Station firehouse. He said he doesn’t talk about it much. He’d eaten quickly and written off his initial pains as heartburn. Instead of letting him drive home, Lt. Matt Fifield had insisted on checking him out. In the midst of getting his vitals, Saunders went into arrest.

“If it hadn’t been for Matt, I would have been on my way home, instead of surrounded by firefighters,” Saunders, 43, said.

He calls Fifield every Dec. 14, the anniversary of that day, to thank him. Not too many people walk away from a heart attack relatively unscathed, Saunders said, a fact he knows from his line of work.

Sawtelle, a painter at Cianbro, has started rehab three times a week. He’s quit smoking after 30 years. He feels good, though a little sore still from Beaule’s chest compressions. He doesn’t remember much from that day, after leaving the mountain.

“They’re heroes; they saved my life,” Sawtelle said. “If it weren’t for them, who knows what would have happened.”

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