SAN DIEGO (KGTV) – Some people have unmistakable characteristics and features that stand out.
"One of the things that everybody's been remarking is the smile and that laugh,” Captain John Clingingsmith Jr. of Cal Fire Riverside County Fire said.
That beaming smile you couldn't forget Clingingsmith said belonged to Captain Rebecca Marodi.
"She was always positive. She was never rude, mean or grumpy to anyone in any situation at all,” Clingingsmith said.
One of those situations was the Eaton fire in Altadena.
Marodi recorded video and described what she was seeing in a YouTube video for the division while she was fighting the fire.
On Clingingsmith's first day in the office, from returning from the LA fires and other duties, he got hit with the news no one wants to hear.
"As my computer was firing up, (I) saw one of the other PIOs in the office here had a badge shourd on and I asked, 'Who we were shrouding for,' and that's when she told me that the email had come out and it was Becky,” Clingingsmith said.
Marodi served over 30 years with Cal Fire mainly in Riverside as well as San Bernadino and San Diego Counties.
The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office said Marodi was found dead in her Ramona home Monday after being stabbed multiple times.
As we reported, the Sheriff’s Office is investigating this as a potential domestic violence case as there’s a possibility that Marodi and the attacker knew each other.
“Any time we lose any of us it’s really hard,” Clingingsmith said.
Clingingsmith says he and Marodi had conversations about retirement, which she told him could be as early as this year.
She had worked on engines, the hazmat unit, dispatch center and peer support in her time with Cal Fire.
“About the first of the year, we had another member who had passed away. And she was there with peer support going around all the stations, just as our peer support is doing now,” Clingingsmith said. “That’s a tough one for a lot of our people to handle is they know that she would normally be the one at the station checking in on everyone, seeing how everyone was doing.”
A positive soul taken too soon and one not soon forgotten.
“With Becky’s case, you know, being so close to retirement and just the person that she was, I think is going to be one of the harder things to for people to take a litte longer to get over,” Clingingsmith said.
