'God definitely put us there': Passing motorists rescue Jackson County woman, boy from inferno
Stephen Ford and his girlfriend Gabby Stanley were traveling through Jackson County on Saturday when they came upon the shocking sight of a home raging in fire.
They stopped. Another motorist also stopped.
What this trio didn’t immediately know was a family of three was inside the decades-old structure that was burning out of control. Ravenous yellow and red flames licked the house in a growing inferno.
“Me and the other dude that was there, we saw cars (parked outside the home) and thought there must be people here. We ran around the left side of the house and saw a kid leaning out the window,” Ford recalled Tuesday.
They could also make out a woman and it appeared she was trying to get the boy through the window.
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“They were like, 'Help! Help!' They couldn’t yell loud. I guess the smoke got to them,” Ford said about the mother and son trapped in the house off Nowhere Road east of Nicholson in Jackson County.
Ford, who lives in Athens, and the man, whom he remembered only as Tim, ran to a door at the rear of the house. The door would not open.
Ford said that while Tim held the screen door open, he kicked the main door in.
“The kid ran out. I went in and reached around because you couldn’t see nothing the smoke was so thick,” he recalled.
Finally, his hands found the woman and he pulled her out.
“I asked her if anybody else was in the house and she said something about her birds and dog and she said, ‘My dad is still in there,’” Ford said. “I said, ‘Where is he?’ And she said, ‘At the front.’”
But Ford said he knew that upon arriving at the house, the front section of the home was already engulfed in flames.
“I was trying to figure out if I should go back in, but there was no way,” he said. “There was no way I could get in there. You couldn’t see and you couldn’t breathe.”
While Ford and the other man were attempting to rescue the residents, Stanley called 911 for help.
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Stanley posted on Facebook that after the woman was rescued, she embraced the mother, who was now in tears.
“It was the saddest thing ever. Knowing the grandpa was inside in the front,” she wrote. “I’m so proud of my boyfriend Stephen.”
Stanley and Ford both marveled at the timing of their arrival.
“If we were five minutes later, those two folks could have died, too,” Ford said.
"God definitely put us there at the right moment," Stanley said.
The mother and her son were taken to a hospital following the fire, which was reported at 10:37 a.m.
Jackson County Deputy Coroner Dean Stringer said the woman remained in a hospital on Tuesday, but she was still too distraught to say much about the fire. The child has been released, he said.
Stringer said he couldn’t release the name of the man who died in the fire until after an autopsy positively identifies him. He said he spoke with a State Fire Marshal’s investigator on Tuesday and it appears the fire may have started through a space heater. No foul play is suspected, he said.
Stringer said he felt for the woman and her child.
“They will need some help. They lost everything,” he said.
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Man dies, but two rescued in fire that destroyed Jackson County home
