Carbon monoxide leak put 3 in hospital

SAINT JOHN, N.B. (CP) — A woman says her public housing unit no longer feels like home after her daughter, sister and their caretaker were released from hospital having suffered carbon monoxide poisoning.

Jessica Sypher said the two girls and a family friend were sent to hospital in critical condition after a carbon monoxide leak at her home in Saint John on Friday night.

Sypher, 21, said she and her mother had left her four-year-old daughter and 11year-old sister with friend Kenneth Naves, whom the children call “papa.”

Sypher said they returned home, and having left her key inside, she knocked on the door for Naves to let her in.

When there was no answer, she said she knocked again, louder, and peered through the window to see the 53-year-old man stumbling in the stairway.

“He was kind of shaken, and he said, ‘I don’t know what to do,”’ Sypher said in an interview on Monday. “I thought he was going to faint, so I told him to sit down ... and it almost looked like he was choking to death.”

Panicked, Sypher said she called 911 as she and her mother tried to kick down the doors.

Having heard them screaming, her neighbour came down to deliver the decisive blows, she said, and they burst into their home to find both girls unconscious.

She said she heard an alarm beeping in the background, but she couldn’t pinpoint what the threat was.

“It almost sounded like a battery dying, like for a smoke detector,” she said.

She said she grabbed her daughter off the couch and ran out of the house, while emergency workers arrived on scene to rescue Naves and her sister.

About 30 residents were evacuated from the complex, said a platoon chief with the Saint John fire department.

Sypher said her loved ones were rushed to a Saint John hospital in critical condition and later airlifted to a Halifax hospital, where they were treated in hyperbaric chambers to replenish their oxygen levels.

I thought he was going to faint, so I told him to sit down ... and it almost looked like he was choking to death.

Jessica Sypher