KOOTENAI COUNTY, Idaho — The ambush on Canfield Mountain that killed two Kootenai County fire battalion chiefs in 2025 pushed the region’s long-standing peer support networks to the forefront of first responder mental health care.
Battalion Chiefs John Morrison and Frank Harwood were shot and killed on June 29, 2025, while responding to a wildfire on Canfield Mountain. Fire Engineer Dave Tysdal was gravely injured in the attack. The ambush sent shockwaves through the region’s first responder community during one of the most demanding stretches of the fire season.
In the days and weeks that followed, peer support teams and mental health clinicians worked around the clock to connect first responders with the resources they needed.
For retired Kootenai County Fire and Rescue firefighter Kenny Peterson, that meant coming out of retirement to serve full time on the department’s peer support team.
“They needed a role to fill and I was it,” Peterson said. “[It was a] horrible tragedy, but calls still come in. The world doesn’t stop. And so, all of our peer support team members were either on duty or working overtime.”
Peterson retired from KCFR in 2023 after a 32-year career. He remains an active member of the department’s peer support team; a group of firefighters trained to check in on their colleagues and connect them with professional resources.
It is a role that did not always exist in the culture of first response. For decades, Peterson says, the expectation was to push through — and stay quiet.
“I had a captain tell me in my first early on career years that you would get one feeling a day. Use it wisely,” Peterson said. “We’ve come a long way from that.”
Peterson credits that shift in part to the growth of these peer support programs, which have evolved from informal, grassroots efforts into essential components of fire department operations. But peer mentors like Peterson are not counselors. When firefighters needed more than a conversation, he referred them to professionals like Nicole Nestor-Gray, a clinician trained specifically to support first responders.
“I think the number is somewhere around 300 people [that] we debriefed within the first couple of weeks, which meant 300 people started their healing process,” Nestor-Gray said.
Peterson admits he was healing himself, as he had worked alongside Morrison and Harwood for years.
“There’s a call on every corner that you’ve been to with those guys,” Peterson said. “So yeah, it’s a constant reflection for sure.”
He found his own space to process during the long drives to and from the station.
“I had about — we’ll just say about two hours every day — to process, to cope, to hope, to heal,” he said.
Nestor-Gray says the ambush accelerated a broader cultural shift already underway in North Idaho’s first responder community.
“I can confidently say that the first responder leaders — department heads, fire and law, even EMS — are now recognizing that mental health is an important piece of how to take care of their people,” she said.
Since the ambush, Nestor-Gray has expanded her clinical team and is now working to extend their reach across the region. Her team conducts regular station visits to maintain ongoing relationships with active first responders and keep mental health conversations part of the routine.
“This community is coming together for the greater good,” she said.
As for Peterson, he has no plans to step away from the peer support team.
“These are my family. I love these guys. And I just — I don’t ever want to not be a part of it,” he said.
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