Strangers saved elderly couple from fire
Published: December 30, 2004
One man had finished watching a football game on TV, and the other man was taking his daughter sledding.
Their lives, along with the lives of a Northside couple, intersected at the flames that engulfed the couple’s home at 49th Street and Cornelius Avenue on Sunday afternoon. Indianapolis firefighters credited Steve Foster, who lives next door to the burning house, with rushing into the structure and launching the rescue. Timothy O’Brien, the passerby, stopped and joined in the effort to get the two people out of the house.
“A neighbor needed help, so I went over and helped them,” said Foster. “I’ve been to the house, so it was easy for me to go over there and help.”
The two men who pulled two people from their burning Northside home on Sunday returned to the scene of the rescue today. Foster had needed some treatment when he inhaled searing-hot air during the rescue.
Foster had just finished watching the Colts-Chargers football game when he heard a “boom” from the house next door, then saw a fire. He rushed to the house and found Hilda Frazier, 72, and her husband, Robert Leech, 92, trying to get out through the kitchen. He grabbed Leech and extracted him through the front door, then went back for the woman. “It was getting too black and I couldn’t see anything. I was kind of grabbing and I could feel her — she had worked her way into a hallway, and it was enough for me to grab her and get her out.”
O’Brien was driving with his wife and daughter to the Butler sledding hill on 52nd Street when he spotted the fire, turned around and rushed to the rescue. He went to the house, started beating on windows and saw Frazier sit up on her bed. “I yelled at her to go to the front door and unlock the front door,” O’Brien said. Running back to the front porch, O’Brien helped Foster get Leech out — and was amazed when Foster went back in the burning house to get Frazier. “This guy is the man — he’s the hero,” O’Brien said of Foster.
Frazier, 72, remained in critical condition at Wishard Memorial Hospital, and Leech, 92, was still in serious condition at the same hospital, said IFD spokesman Capt. Gregg Harris.
The damage to the single-story wood frame house made it obvious that the fire began in an attached garage, which was destroyed, then spread to the rest of the house. The cause of the fire was still under investigation, firefighters said.
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