There's yer answer fishbulb.
This stuff doesn't happen in flyover country.
My mother called today and asked if I’d heard about this story. It turns out that the man was the former pastor of an old family friend.
It appears that there was a rookie who didn’t know what to do and a lieutenant who should have known better. Many passersby tried to help, so your assumption that this is typical behavior of the type of people who live in Brookhaven (mostly black), is incorrect. The people helped as best they could. As usual, the government let them down.
If I'm reading the DC Fire Department locations right,the E26 station is on Rhode Island Avenue a few blocks east of the Rhode Island Avenue Metro Station, and right on the border of Brookland and Brentwood. It's a bit of a sketchy area. The last time it surfaced on FR was in connection with a mugging on the bike trail along the railroad corridor, which would have been just a few blocks down the street. Sketchy, but not scary; I personally would not hesitate to walk or bike through it, at least along the main roads. There are side streets I wouldn't go down, just because I don't know the area well enough to know when I might be walking into a project that might be a bit more robust than I had bargained for.
FWIW, the area is clinically interesting. Capitol Hill, a mile or more to the south, is expanding in all directions. The development wave is now pushing north of New York and towards Rhode Island; the location of this incident is a couple of neighborhoods north, but it is near enough to be affected. Brookland, further to the north, is also steadily improving. In between is a blighted wedge dominated by the Rhode Island and New York Avenue traffic nightmares, compounded by the rail yards and tracks bisecting the area along both a north-south and east-west axis. It's been a mess for a long time, and the turnaround that is starting to take hold is a neat thing to watch.
The Brookland identification took me by surprise; most people think of Brookland as the area a little further north, adjacent to Catholic University, with a very solid neighborhood main street along the shopping district centered around 13th and Monroe. Rhode Island Avenue is the borderlands. Brookland is an up and coming neighborhood.
At least the fireman didn't say "Your dad is across the street, so you have to go to the Brentwood station." He's probably in trouble with the union for failing to point that out.