Six-Year-Old Hero Saves Family From Fire
Published: May 25, 2007
Chandler Hill has a great excuse for why his assignment was missing Thursday morning.
“All my homework burned up,” the first-grader at Cunningham School offered as the explanation why he wasn’t in class.
Instead of saving his papers, Chandler, 6, is credited with saving his family and the upstairs neighbors from a fire in the 1000 block of North Hickory Street.
While others inspected the damage Thursday afternoon, Chandler took a break from playing with a neighbor in his back yard to explain what happened around 6:45 a.m. as he and his 3-year-old sister, Serenity, slept in his mother’s bedroom.
“I woke up and felt fire right on top of my head, so I (ran out) and yelled to my mom, ‘Mom, wake up. There’s a fire in your room,’” Chandler said.
Chandler’s grandmother, Tammy Hill, who was also home, said her daughter, Kelly, said Chandler was very calm as he told her.
“There was fire on the wall, and the phone was on fire and the dresser,” he said.
Kelly Hill grabbed Serenity and began screaming for the rest of the family to wake up and get out of the house. The Hills also called 911 and alerted the two residents of the upstairs apartment.
Battalion Chief John Zagar said the fire caused moderate damage to the house.
“The fire appears to have started near the bedroom on the first floor,” he said. “One room and the area near it suffered severe damage and there’s smoke damage throughout the house.”
The cause of the fire was still under investigation Thursday evening.
Chandler lost his pet lizard in the blaze, but his warning kept everyone else safe.
“If there’s a fire or there’s danger, I’m supposed to let my mom know,” he said.
Firefighters arrived and spent about an hour putting the fire out. The house is uninhabitable but the Red Cross had found places for the family to stay Thursday night.
Chandler said firefighters congratulated him after they’d put the fire out.
“They said, ‘Thank you for saving everybody,’ and gave me a handshake. That’s what you do when you do a good job,” he said.
“The kid’s a hero in my book,” Zagar said. “What he did for his family probably saved their lives.”
Chandler said being thought of as a hero was “pretty fun” as he went back to playing with his neighbor.
If you enjoyed this good news Subscribe to Good News Blog
Share this
To share this simply copy and paste one of the below URL's: