You join the fire department, and you know there’s going to be some danger involved.
You’ll broil in the summer and freeze in the winter. You’re going to eat some smoke. Maybe help coax a cat out of a tree when things are slow. And every once in a great while — if you’re very lucky — save someone from a burning building.

You do not expect gunshots. Not early on a Monday morning on Zephyr Place in Maplewood.

The shooting death of rookie Maplewood firefighter Ryan Hummert is all the more shocking because of its utter senselessness. And because Mr. Hummert represented the best qualities in young people: a desire to help others when things get really bad.

We expect police officers to go into harm’s way. They do it in every corner of our region, every day. Two Maplewood police officers were wounded along with Mr. Hummert on Monday. St. Louis prays for their swift recovery.

Like cops, firemen are there to help, and they, too, go into harm’s way. But unlike cops, they don’t have to worry about people with weapons and hostile attitudes.

In addition to fighting fires, Mr. Hummert, 22, was a trained paramedic. He and his colleagues were there to put out the flames or — God forbid — race into a conflagration to assist someone trapped. Whatever beef the gunman had with anyone else, Mr. Hummert and his colleagues had no part of it.

In small towns, tragedy is magnified by familiarity. Mr. Hummert was the son of former Maplewood Mayor Andy Hummert. His family is well-known in the community.
But even those of us who didn’t know him could sense the loss. Not just the loss of a firefighter or a politician’s son, either.

Check out the link to Mr. Hummert’s Facebook profile. It shows a young man full of life and proud of his chosen profession, posing with pretty girls and relaxing with friends at home.

It also contains an album of pictures from the fire academy. There’s a shot of flames shooting into the night sky from a burning building and another of a firefighter-in-training tumbling head first out a smoky window. There’s a group shot posed in front of some flaming vehicles.

And there, seen from the back and framed by a burning doorway, is a picture of Ryan Hummert as he wanted to be regarded: a brave man with a hose preparing to step into a burning building to help someone he’d never met.

Ryan Hummert’s Facebook profile.