Mother and identical twin daughters all work for the same Jacksonville EMS company
(From left) Jacqueline, Angela and Abbigail Stuebs pose near a response vehicle at ECHO Response EMS.
Story and Photos By David Blanchette
Those who use ECHO Response EMS in Jacksonville may be seeing double or triple. But not to worry, your eyes aren’t deceiving you.
Angela Stuebs, an EMT-Paramedic (Emergency Medical Technician-Paramedic), shares emergency responder duties at ECHO with her 25-year-old identical twin daughters, EMTs Jacqueline Stuebs and Abbigail Stuebs. The trio frequently go on calls together, and the family resemblance occasionally causes some double-takes from the people they are serving.
All three Stuebs kin now work the same 48 hours on, 96 hours off shift, and Angela and Abbigail are actually partners in one ambulance. When Jacqueline and her partner’s ambulance also responds to the same call, mom and daughters can have some memorable experiences together.
“We all delivered a baby together in the spring and that was pretty special,” Abbigail said. “I think that was a big highlight of our careers.”
Jacqueline recalled another instance where the three Stuebs family members were able to save a life.
“We had a cardiac arrest, the three of us together, and we were able to save the person,” Jacqueline said. “Those moments make the job worth it and make us realize why we are doing this. Plus, we all trust each other and realize that we can back each other up.”
There is never any confusion when the Stuebs relatives are working. Even during the chaos of an emergency call, Mom is able to discern between her identical twin daughters.
“Sometimes, like any parent or grandparent knows, I call one of them by the other’s name but I can always tell them apart,” Angela said. “Even their voices on the phone, I know which is which.”
The Stuebs family’s joint EMT journey began when Angela, then a medical transcriptionist, had to deal with paramedics during her late husband’s battle with severe diabetes. Her husband died when she was 24 and the twin girls were four years old — and that’s when Angela found her calling.
“I always wanted to give back to the community because of the way the paramedics had helped us, so I decided to take the EMT class,” Angela said. “Plus I was getting migraines from being on the computer screen all of the time as a transcriptionist.”
Angela took the EMT class from Phil McCarty, who is now the Emergency Management Director for the City of Jacksonville, and upon completion of the class McCarty urged Angela to continue with her education and become a paramedic.
The Stuebs family lived at the time in the Menard County community of Athens, and Angela began using her EMT training by volunteering at the Athens Fire Department, something she has done for 14 years. Angela worked for EMS services in Mason and Menard counties before transferring to the ECHO crew in Jacksonville.
Angela, who now lives in Petersburg, and her daughters, who share a residence in Athens, commute to Jacksonville for their shifts at ECHO. Their career drives have also been shared.
“We had a house fire at a young age and when we saw the firefighters work, we knew that’s kind of what we wanted to do,” Jacqueline recalled. “We got on to the volunteer fire department, because that’s where our mom was, and then we realized we wanted to go further into the emergency responder field, so we worked with her at Menard County EMS as well.”
Both sisters graduated from Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2017 with landscape horticulture degrees and founded JAR Landscaping LLC in Athens, a business they continue to operate when they are not working at ECHO. But it’s their emergency services job that really stokes their passion.
“We just kind of wanted to follow in Mom’s footsteps,” Abbigail said. “We want to help everybody in the community.”
When the identical twin sisters work together, they always seem to be of the same mind.
“I think we’re always on the same wavelength,” Abbigail said. “We really don’t have to communicate verbally, we just kind of know what we are doing and flow off of that.”
Although the Angela-Abbigail team was initially on a different working shift than Jacqueline and her male partner, the two teams now share the same shift, which Abbigail feels is a good thing.
“It was worse when Jacqueline was on the other shift because we didn’t get to see her as much,” Abbigail said. “Now, all of us know her partner and we like working with them on the same shift, so that makes it better.”
Having your kids work in a high-stress and occasionally dangerous job might worry some parents, but Angela’s concerns are somewhat alleviated because mother and daughters work the same profession at the same time.
“To know that I am there and can kind of watch over them helps a lot,” Angela said. “We all help each other, especially when it’s chaotic, which it frequently is.” Angela is happy that she gets to work each day with her daughters in a career that all of them love.
“I couldn’t be more proud of them,” Angela said. “There aren’t words to describe it. Every day I get up and I can’t believe how proud I am of them.”
