Firefighter Woke Up After 10 Years and Asked One Question That Left Everyone in Tears

“How long have you been gone?”

“Quite a while, pal. Quite a while. 10. 10 years.”

On a brutally cold December morning in 1995, a 34-year-old firefighter from Buffalo, New York, kissed his wife goodbye and walked out the door to start his shift. He had no idea that in just a few hours his life would change forever. And that he wouldn’t truly speak to his family again for nearly a decade. What happened to Donald Herbert over the next 10 years is one of the most emotional and medically baffling stories in modern history. A story that would make international headlines, challenge everything doctors thought they knew about the human brain, and leave millions of people around the world in tears.

Donald Herbert grew up on Seneca Street in South Buffalo, New York. He didn’t go to college, but he was the kind of man who didn’t need a degree to prove his worth. He worked as a machinist at a Ryder manufacturing plant, cutting steel and fashioning parts for roughly $20,000 a year. But the work was brutally tedious, and Don knew it wasn’t what he was meant to do for the rest of his life. So when the opportunity came to join the Buffalo Fire Department, Don jumped at it. He took the written and physical tests, waited months for a slot, and endured eight difficult weeks at the fire academy. In late 1986, at the age of 25, Don put on his official uniform for the first time. Navy blue button-down shirt, navy blue pants, black dress shoes. He packed his old 1984 Chevette hatchback with his personal set of turnout gear and headed off for his first ever shift as a Buffalo firefighter. His wife Linda called out good luck from the front porch of their rickety duplex on Spalding Street, but the shouting of their three small sons drowned her out.

Don took to the job immediately. He was assigned to ladder six at a firehouse known as the hill, a century-old two-story red brick outpost on Buffalo’s east side. He set out for work more than an hour early every single time. Fire Commissioner Michael Lombardo, who knew Don personally, later said that Don would run into fires many times when others were running out. And that wasn’t an exaggeration. In May of 1990, Don entered a burning apartment on Jefferson Avenue and heard cries for help. He crawled under the smoke into the kitchen, where he found two adults and two small children trapped inside. Don snatched the children in his arms, carried them to safety, and then went back inside to lead one adult and carry the other out. That rescue earned him the 1991 Marine Corps League medal and the Erie County American Legion Public Safety Award, among other honors. He was later named Firefighter of the Year in 1996.

But Don wasn’t just a firefighter, he was a family man above all else. He and Linda now had four sons, Donald Jr., Thomas, Patrick, and Nicholas. He loved taking the boys hunting, fishing, and camping, and by all accounts, he was the kind of father who was always present, always involved, always there.

But on the morning of December 29th, 1995, Don’t presence was taken from his family in the most devastating way imaginable. The night before had already been brutal. Don’s crew had responded to the scene of a horrific car accident on the Kensington Expressway that killed two young nurses from Buffalo General Hospital. They caught only a few hours of sleep before another alarm went off at around 6:00 in the morning. A fire was tearing through a house on Inner Park Avenue on Buffalo’s East Side. When Don and his crew from Rescue 1 arrived, the house was already engulfed.

Don did what he always did. He went in to search for anyone who might still be trapped inside. He made his way up into the attic, but at approximately 6:54 in the morning, the roof, heavy with snow, collapsed on top of him. The debris pinned Don in a sitting position against the attic stairwell and crushed his oxygen mask. His air supply was cut off, and he was left without oxygen for somewhere between 6 and 12 minutes. His fellow firefighters stormed back into the burning building to find him and eventually pulled him out through an attic window. A local news camera captured the rescue on film.

Don was alive, but barely. He suffered cardiac arrest on the way to Erie County Medical Center and was placed on life support in the intensive care unit. By the time Linda and the boys arrived at the hospital, Don was already in a coma. He had suffered what doctors called severe anoxic brain injury. His brain had been starved of oxygen for so long that the damage was catastrophic. He was also left virtually blind. His four sons were 14, 13, 11, and 3 years old. The youngest, Nicholas, had just turned 4.

Linda later told Anderson Cooper on CBS 60 Minutes that she remembered pleading and begging with Don in the hospital when he was unresponsive. She said she kept telling him, “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave the kids. We need you.” She was looking for anything. A hand squeeze, a toe movement, any sign at all that her husband was still in there.

After about 2 and 1/2 months, Don emerged from his coma for the first time and there was a brief moment of hope. His speech was impaired and he couldn’t see, but he was determined to get better. A local reporter visited him in the hospital and filmed Don working on parallel bars in a rehabilitation room. Five months after the fire, Don’s family accepted honors on his behalf at a Buffalo Bisons baseball game. And his little son Nicholas threw out a ceremonial first pitch. Linda told reporters that she had told Don about the honor and he said it sounded like a good time. But his short-term memory came and went and his condition was fragile.

Then, slowly and cruelly, Don’s condition began to deteriorate. By 1997, he had slipped into what doctors call a minimally conscious state. He could respond to some stimuli and showed limited awareness, but he was otherwise unable to communicate. He was largely mute, showed little recognition of his surroundings, and could no longer interact with his family in any meaningful way. The man who once ran into burning buildings to save strangers was now lying in a bed unable to speak to his own children.

Doctors told Linda there was nothing more they could do. One neurologist she visited gave her an answer she would never forget.

I took him to one neurologist and I was basically begging him, you know, to tell me is he going to get better or isn’t he? And he just sort of said, “Well, look at him. What do you see? You see what I see. There’s nothing there.” And I was just devastated.

Linda later told Anderson Cooper that she took Don to the neurologist and basically begged him to tell her whether Don was going to get better or not, and the doctor just looked at her and said, “Well, look at him. What do you see? You see what I see. There’s nothing there.”

Linda was devastated, but she refused to accept it. She refused to give up on her husband. Don was moved to Father Baker Manor, a nursing home in Orchard Park, New York, where he was kept alive by a feeding tube and received constant care. Linda visited him regularly. She worked as a crossing guard at a local elementary school to support the family. She spent hours at the library scraping together whatever little information she could find about brain injuries because there wasn’t much guidance available for caregivers in her situation. She tried different therapies, different medications, different doctors, but nothing worked.

Year after year, Linda watched her sons grow up without their father. One of the boys later said it made him sick to his stomach to see his dad like that. Another said he never got used to it. Every visit was the same. They would walk into the room and say, “How are you, Dad?” and be met with silence. In 1999, Linda even had to fight a brief legal battle with Don’s own parents over who would have control of medical decisions. She won, but it was just another wound on top of everything else.

Through it all, Linda never stopped praying. She prayed to every saint and holy figure on record, according to the book written about the family. And she never stopped believing that somewhere inside that broken body, her husband was still there, still fighting.

Nearly 10 years passed. Then, in early 2005, Don’s physician, Dr. Jamil Ahmed of the University of Buffalo, decided to try something new. He prescribed Don an experimental cocktail of medications, drugs that were normally used to treat Parkinson’s disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and depression. The cocktail targeted chemicals in the brain like serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine meant to stimulate neurotransmitters, which are what brain cells use to communicate with one another. Dr. Ahmed had seen the drug show promise in more recently brain damaged patients, but no one could have predicted what would happen next.

On Saturday, April 30th, 2005, Don was sitting in his wheelchair in the hallway of Father Baker Manor when something happened that stunned everyone in the building. He looked out the window and began calling out for his wife. He asked where Linda was. It was the first meaningful thing he had said in nearly 10 years.

His son Patrick got a phone call from his mother, and the only words she said were, “Dad’s talking.”

Patrick rushed to the nursing home, and when he walked in, Don perked right up, looked around, and called out his son’s name. One of the nurses lent the family a video camera to record what was happening because no one could believe it. Family members and friends from the firehouse poured in. Don recognized every single person who walked through the door by their voice because he was still blind from the accident. He knew their names. He remembered details from his firefighting career. He specifically asked for Lieutenant Mike Miller by name. He remembered events leading up to the roof collapse in 1995 as if it had just happened.

But there was one person Don could not recognize. When his youngest son Nicholas spoke, Don was confused. He said, “That can’t be. He’s just a baby. He can’t talk.”

Nicholas was 3 years old when the accident happened and Don still thought of him as a toddler. Don reached his hand out low trying to feel how tall Nick was expecting to find a small child. The family kept telling him to raise his hand higher because Nicholas was now a teenager nearly 15 years old.

And then came the moment that broke everyone in the room. Don asked how long he had been gone. His uncle Simon Monka later told reporters that Don was under the impression he had only been away for about 3 months. When someone told him the truth that it had been nearly 10 years, Don broke into tears. He was devastated.

Anderson Cooper later said that when Don learns he’s been gone for 10 years, the sadness is palpable.

Linda said he felt so bad. He felt like he had abandoned his family. He felt terrible that he wasn’t there for the boys as they grew up.

For 16 straight hours, Don spoke nearly non-stop catching up with the four sons who had become men while he was gone and the wife who had never stopped fighting for him. Patrick introduced his future wife to his father for the first time and told Don about all of his accomplishments. Linda later called it a gift that continues to reveal itself because in those 16 hours the family learned that Don wasn’t suffering, that he didn’t remember the accident, and most importantly, that he had not forgotten them.

7 days later, on May 7th, 2005, the family celebrated Don’s 44th birthday. He sat in his wheelchair outside the nursing home throwing a football with his sons. His oldest son Don Jr. had just returned from overseas and was communicating with his father for the first time in years. Linda remembered it as a very good day. They had a party with a lot of family. Don was blind and in a wheelchair for muscular atrophy, but he was playing catch with his boys. And for a brief shining moment, it felt like he was back.

But Don never returned to the level of communication he had on that first day. He spoke only sporadically from then on. The window was closing. Then in late May, Don fell out of bed at the nursing home while trying to get out on his own. He hit his head and required nine stitches. The fall caused bleeding in his brain, and Dr. Ahmed later said the bleeding prevented the medications from working, making further progress extremely difficult.

Don’t condition deteriorated after the fall. He began to slip back into the silence that had defined the previous decade. Even so, he continued to interact with his family in small ways. As recently as the week before he died, he had been playing catch with his sons at the nursing home.

Fire Commissioner Lombardo later said, “Well, he was never as good as he was right after he woke up, but he was pretty good right up to the end.”

Then on the weekend of February 18th, 2006, Don developed pneumonia. He was admitted to Mercy Hospital and his temperature soared to 105 degrees. He was covered with ice and loaded with antibiotics, but he did not improve. His family knew the end was near, but Don kept fighting. His uncle Simon Monca said Don held on until his last son, a police officer in Atlanta, finally arrived at his bedside. Only then did Don let go.

He died at approximately 1:45 in the morning on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006, surrounded by his wife and all four of his sons. He was 44 years old.

Thousands of mourners packed Our Lady of Victory Basilica in Lackawanna for his funeral. Firefighters stood in stiff salute, two and three men deep in the blustering cold, as Don’s own firehouse truck, Rescue 1, led him home. And when it was over, two of his sons became Buffalo firefighters, and two became Buffalo police officers. His son Patrick was assigned to Rescue 1, the very same truck where his father served the night everything changed.

Patrick later said, “Well, we pretty much wouldn’t be where we’re at without him. So, I’m sure he’s more than pleased looking down on us.”