Teenage hero saves disabled neighbour from blaze
Published: October 27, 2006
AN HEROIC teenager’s quick-thinking has helped a disabled man escape a potentially fatal fire.
Perry Whiston, 15, leapt into action when he saw a dumped mattress had been deliberately set alight right outside Tony Jones’s front door, on the Roundshaw Estate.
Realising the blaze was about to spread to the house he called the fire brigade and then ran to the back of his neighbour’s house to get him out.
Speaking after the fire, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, Perry said: “I was about to go to bed when I heard some crackling outside.
“I thought it was somebody spray painting so I had a look out the window, but I saw a mattress burning outside the door.
“Me and my mum were trying to work out who it was that lives there and we thought ‘hang on a minute,it’s the man with one and a half leg’.
“I knew for a fact he had to come out and my mum wanted him to go through the front door, but the flames would have gone in his face if he had done that.
“So I jumped over the fence into his back garden and started banging on the window to get his attention.”
Having been alerted to the blaze,Tony,56, was able to get out of the house, but he is sure he would be dead if it wasn’t for his brave neighbour.
He said: “My three dogs woke me up first by barking and I thought there might be an intruder in the house.
“But when I got downstairs I could smell the smoke and that’s when I heard Perry banging on the window and telling me to come out the back door.
“I got outside in my wheelchair. I was just in my briefs, but I knew I had to get out quick.
“If I had gone to the front door, the back-draft would have got me and I wouldn’t be here telling you this now.”
Police, paramedics and two fire engines were called to the house in Olley Close.
Tony, who had one of his legs amputated because of his diabetes earlier this year, says he is “eternally grateful” to Perry.
He added: “Young people get such a bad press,what with hoodies and the like,so I’m very impressed someone so young came to help me.”
And Perry’s mum Sarah, 36, was full of praise too.
She said: “I’m just so proud of my son, he did so well to save that man.”
But Perry, who goes to Stanley Park High School, remains modest about his actions.
He said: “I just did what anyone else would have done because you couldn’t live with yourself if anything bad happened.
“My five-year-old sister Emily keeps calling me Fireman Sam.
“I think the people that did this are seriously unwell, Tony could have been killed.”
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