When your career involves saving lives, there’s no such thing as “off duty”.
A firefighter from the FDNY was hailed a hero after going above and beyond what is necessary.
He found himself capable of helping so he didn’t hesitate to jump into action.
Stefon Douglas lives on the same street as the house that caught on fire. He went inside to help even though he was “off-duty” that day.
Douglas was headed home that evening when he saw smoke.
He followed where it was coming from and saw that it was coming from the rear of a house. That’s when his firefighter instincts kicked in.
Douglas ran toward the house.
Then, as if in a crazy twist of fate, Douglas remembered that he had an oxygen mask and tank in the car.
He used the equipment recently when he showed them to the students for career day. What he intended as a prop became an essential tool for the off-duty firefighter.
Some protection, but not much
Other than the oxygen tank, he had little to protect him.
“I was just in a T-shirt, had shorts on and Crocs, and the heat was just way too much and the house was way too big to try to perform a search,” Douglas said as quoted by the NY Post.
That’s when he decided to run to the side of the house only to see someone already standing by the entrance. The said man was using a garden hose to fight the flames.
He took the garden hose from the man and stormed the house.
“I grabbed it from him,” Douglas said of the hose. “I asked him, ‘Do you think anyone’s in the house?’ He said, ‘There might be two people.’ ”
He held up the hose and doused the flames coming his way. His progress was slow but at least he’s already starting the search.
Then, he heard a noise.
“I’m hearing a little bit of a whimpering going on to the left of me,” he said to ABC7. “I was telling, ‘Please make more noise, make more noise,’ but they weren’t. It was getting more faint.”
Douglas followed the noise to the bathroom. Luckily, through the thick smoke, he managed to find the little girl in between the toilet and sink.
She quickly picked the girl up and handed her to the man by the door.
The man said “two” people, however, so Douglas went back inside to find the other person.
Unfortunately, the woman, who turns out to be the little girl’s mother, succumbed to the injuries she sustained from the blaze.
FDNY’s Ladder 159 eventually arrived.
“[Other firefighters] were looking at me pretty weird because they were like, ‘How does this guy have on a mask?’ ” Douglas said as quoted by the NY Post. “But they didn’t know me until I took off my mask, and they were like, ‘Whoa, Steph. What were you doing here?’ ”
The little girl was rushed to the hospital. Doctors are optimistic she’ll survive. Her mother was later found in the bedroom.
Douglas felt bad that he wasn’t able to save both but he also believed that divine intervention played a part in putting him in the right place at the right time with the right tools.
Watch how an off-duty firefighter saves the life of a little girl.
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
