When a 7-year-old girl was hit by a car one day in 1988 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, it took more than 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. When it did, her uncle, James Robinson Jr., climbed in for the ride to the hospital.

The ambulance was equipped with lifesaving equipment, he said, but “the attendant didn’t even know how to turn on the oxygen.” His niece, Cynthia Lomax, died along the way.

The incident prompted Mr. Robinson to start a volunteer ambulance corps in Bedford-Stuyvesant that has answered calls ever since, cutting response times to only a few minutes. The group, one of more than 30 volunteer emergency service agencies in New York City today and one of nearly that many certified to give basic life support, has also trained more than 1,000 emergency medical technicians.

Mr. Robinson, who was known as Rocky, died on Friday at 79. The cause was heart failure, said a son, Antoine Robinson.