Three young heroes save man from fire
Published: January 15, 2007
THREE passersby entered a burning house last night to rescue a semi-conscious stranger.
Troy Linklater, 23, of Winnipeg, and his cousins, 19-year-old Devin and 14-year-old Mitchell Spence of Leaf Rapids, happened to be walking past 611 Maryland St. about 9 p.m. when they saw smoke coming from the house.
“There was no fire engine or nothing there,” Linklater, the man who led the trio into the burning building, said afterward.
“There was nobody around,” he added. “So we figured there might be somebody in there. And there was a girl saying, ‘Help me, help me. My uncle. I can’t get him up.’ ”
Linklater and the Spences climbed stairs through increasingly dense smoke to find a semi-conscious man on the second floor of the three-storey house.
“I thought he was dead,” Linklater said.
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Linklater said the man was in his 40s and heavy-set, and it took the combined efforts of Linklater and his cousins to carry him out.
“He was a pretty big guy,” Linklater said. “I’m 200 pounds and he must have been at least 250.”
Shortly after they had brought the man outside, smoke spewing from the house turned black and thick, Linklater said.
Firefighters and paramedics treated the man, but didn’t take him to hospital.
When they came across the fire, Linklater and his cousins had been walking home after visiting the Spences’ mother at the Health Sciences Centre.
Linklater saw a glow in the window of a second-floor room in the Maryland Street house, which was beginning to spew smoke.
“I’m a Christian,” Linklater said, when asked what motivated him to take the action he did. “I was always brought up to help people out and it’ll come back (to you). I’m in shock.”
Late last night, fire officials were still fighting the fire and had not yet interviewed the three rescuers.
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