One of Rodney Deese’s favorite parts of his job is the moment he goes over the edge of a building and his fellow firefighters take over holding him up as he repels down to a victim.

“That’s the best part to me: Getting that rush of being in someone else’s hands,” Deese, 29, said. “My crew actually lowered me down on the rope, which means I have no control over how fast I go down the rope.”

For six and a half years, the lifelong Carrollton resident has been an Atlanta firefighter, and although he’s been trained in many extreme rescue situations, a call that came in at 11 p.m. Wednesday was a first for him.

Dispatchers radioed the Special Operations Battalion telling them a car had driven off a parking deck.

“We’re sitting around at the firehouse, and that call came in and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh’” Deese said. “Either the patient will have freed himself or the car would fall. We didn’t know what to expect until we got there. We have had cars run off parking decks before; however, we’ve never had one actually being held in the air by two cables. We were even more shocked to know we had a patient inside that vehicle.”

Deese and the other firefighters in his unit go through year-round training to respond to technically challenging scenes.

“We are all trained in rope rescue, confined space rescue, trench rescue, structural collapse, and HAZMAT. We only respond to calls that need technically trained personnel at those scenes,” he said. “It’s not every day that we do a call like that. It is something that we train for year-round. When we’re not on the technical type calls we’re fighting fires; we’re running EMS calls. We kind of have the double duty.”

When firefighters arrived at a downtown parking deck, they found Richard Sisson, 36, trapped in his car, which was suspended by two cables above the street. Before attempting a rescue, Deese said the car was hooked up to chains and a few tow trucks, making it slightly more secure. Once the car was strapped in, Deese went over the edge of the parking deck above and repelled down.

When he reached the car, Sisson was unconscious, which made putting a harness on him more difficult, Deese said.

“He was actually pinned against the windshield, the driver’s side door and the wheel. It was very hard getting a harness on him,” Deese said. “In a way, that (the patient being unconscious) helps out too. If you have someone that is alert, they’re going to panic, and they’ll be really anxious to get out of the vehicle.”

Sisson was later charged with driving under the influence and damage to property.

Although it was Deese who repelled down the parking deck and pulled Sisson from his car, he said he feels like he only had a small part in the rescue.

“There were probably 20 special ops firefighters on that scene,” he said. “We each have a certain job that we each must do to have the operation be a success. It’s all a group effort. It takes a lot of highly trained guys to pull a car like that off.”

Since Wednesday night, Deese has been getting a lot of calls from reporters asking him about the rescue.

“I’m a very shy person, a very quiet person,” he said. “All this attention from all the news networks and newspapers has been very overwhelming.”

The Associated Press contributed to this article.