Heroic cops, neighbors team up to save fire victims
Heroic cops, neighbors team up to save family from raging inferno
ASTON >> It was the screaming that woke him up.
Ed Young, 65, said all he could see were flames reflected in the windows across the street. In the yard next door, his neighbor’s son was screaming for help, standing before a pillar of flame that reached 40 feet into the air.
Young said he typically starts his days early, “I’m old, I’m up at all hours,” he said, but to hear the panicked screams he said was a “rude awaking.”
Looking out his home to find the origin of those screams at 4 a.m. Friday, Young said the young man was outside the burning home screaming for three family members still trapped inside.
“I yelled to the son, ‘Where’s your family?’” Young said he just pointed to the inferno, saying only, “‘They’re inside.’”
Aston police officers William Mack and Colleen Joyce were the first to arrive on the scene, needing only follow the orange glow. Joyce said she heard the screams of Young as she and her partner pulled up in separate cruisers.
“I heard a loud, boisterous cry for help,” Joyce said.
The right side of the home, where two vehicles and a carport was fully engulfed, blocked the gate to the backyard. Neighbors were signaling to police that a woman was trapped in a rear bedroom.
“I was the first guy out here. Everyone in the neighborhood was asleep” Young said. “I started screaming for people to come assist me.”
Climbing over a 6-foot fence, which Young said he dropped to his hands and knees to help an officer vault to the other side, Mack and Young sprung to action, shouting to the woman inside, whom they identified as Mary, keeping continuous contact while they worked to get her free.
Young had thrown a ladder over the fence to aid with the officers rescue attempt. They used it to get to her window and pull her down.
“I was yelling for a ladder and then it was right there,” Joyce said, adding that the quick thinking of neighbors saved lives.
“I could hear her cries for help,” Mack said. “We knocked out the windows and when I climbed up there it was just black, heavy smoke inside.
“I took one deep breath and went in.”
Stumbling through the pitch black and intense heat, Mack found the woman and carried her to the window where he handed her down to Joyce on ground level.
With no exit from the back yard, the three were trapped. Joyce said she was on the radio calling for firefighters to open up a safe exit for the two officers and resident to escape.
“Once we got her down we were stuck,” Joyce said. “All you could hear was pops and cracks, you could feel the heat, I definitely did not want to be trapped back there.”
Suppressed by the heat and flame, Joyce said she and Mack ran together at full speed trying to knock down the fence, but to no avail.
Out front, as more police and the Aston Fire Department began to arrive alongside numerous departments for the second alarm, Young said the other male resident had climbed out the front window with female resident following soon behind.
“There were streams of blood coming off his chest,” Young said about the cuts the man suffered from the glass. “He was in shock.”
Armed with an axe, firefighters hacked the rear fence and freed the two officers and resident from the backyard. The woman was immediately taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation. Additionally, firefighters managed to rescue a dog from inside the home.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Due to the quick thinking, police thanked neighbors for their assistance, while neighbors gave all the credit for bravery to the Aston police.
“This was a nasty fire. It was a killer,” Young said. “It’s incredible that no one was seriously hurt.”
For the police officers who sprung to action, neighbors are calling them heroes, but they’ll tell you that anyone at the department would have done the same thing.
“We were just the first in line,” Mack said. “I went from 0-to-60 in a second, my heart and mind were racing.”
Joyce too said the whole ordeal was still surreal.
“That’s just the nature of our job,” she said. “You have to be prepared for whatever comes your way.”