Death of Kalle Heikki

Kalle Heikki died suddenly of a heart attack on a school renovation site in Kiiminki, on the northern edge of Oulu, at the age of fifty-nine. He had driven out from the firm's office that morning to inspect roof work that Heikki Construction crews were carrying out on the school's older wing, a routine visit of the kind he made to every active site several times a week.

Shortly after ten o'clock, standing in the school yard with the firm's longest-serving foreman, Veikko Laakso, he stopped speaking partway through a sentence, put a hand to his chest, and went down onto the asphalt. Laakso, who had worked under him for more than twenty years, began chest compressions within seconds. One of the roofers climbed down from the scaffold and called for an ambulance. Another fetched the site's first-aid kit, which held nothing that could help.

The ambulance reached the school in a little under fifteen minutes. The paramedics took over resuscitation in the yard and kept it up in the vehicle on the drive south into the city. Kalle did not regain consciousness. He was pronounced dead at Oulu University Hospital shortly before eleven. The cause was a heart attack.

The school's pupils had been kept inside throughout. Some of the older ones had watched from the classroom windows, and the staff spent the rest of the morning answering questions they had not expected to be asked.

Sari Heikki was teaching at her own school on the eastern side of the city when the head teacher came to her classroom door. She reached the hospital after her husband had already been pronounced dead. Aldo Heikki, who had been supervising a separate firm job across the city, arrived some twenty minutes after his mother, still in his site boots. Laakso, who had followed the ambulance in his own van, was waiting in the corridor and told them both what had happened in the yard.

Ella Heikki was in the south, at her studies, when her brother telephoned her early in the afternoon. She took the evening train north and arrived in Oulu after midnight. Aldo met her at the station.

Word reached the firm's other sites over the course of the afternoon, and several crews stopped work early. At Kiiminki the roofers stayed long enough to make safe the section of roof they had opened that morning, because rain was forecast, and then went home.

Kalle's van remained in the school yard until evening, his site folder on the passenger seat. Laakso drove it back to the firm's yard after dark and left the keys on the desk in the office.