How a heroic deed done in Modesto left three women stained with blood and soot
Spotting smoke while out on a Thanksgiving grocery run in Modesto, three women made a detour that ended with them aiding a fire victim.
On Nov. 23, Johansen High School teacher Franny Hartley, sister Jocy Davison and their friend Katie Moody were driving to the Target store on Oakdale Road in Riverbank to buy sweet potatoes, marshmallows and brown sugar for Thanksgiving dinner.
Moody was driving toward Riverbank on Roselle Avenue, she said, and asked the sisters to look at what she thought was a control burn in an orchard. They could see it was a travel trailer on fire.
Moody, a Berkeley resident working on her PhD in clinical psychology at Palo Alto University, turned around and stopped at the front of the property. As she parked, Hartley called 911. It was 4:02 p.m.
Hartley and Davison, who’s a correctional sergeant at San Quentin State Prison, got out of the car and ran toward the house. If it was occupied, they wanted to warn the residents that the trailer out back was on fire.
The women encountered a neighboring resident, who told them the house was abandoned but the trailer was not, Moody said. The women then began spraying the fire with water from a hose.
Moody said the top of the trailer burned away and they saw a woman dive or fall out onto the ground. The woman, whom they estimated was middle-aged, was badly burned and delirious.
The heat was intense and the three women feared the trailer would blow up. The burned woman landed right next to the trailer, so Davison pulled her about 10 feet away from the fire, Moody said.
Moody and Hartley said the woman clearly was in great pain and not coherent. She kept asking for her cat, Bruno, as the three women tried to comfort her. Moody said they could tell her nothing about the cat’s fate.
Another driver stopped to help and began spraying the fire with a second hose. The friends said they called 911 a second time at 4:08 p.m. After firefighters and other responders arrived and assumed the care of the victim and the attack on the flames, the women went home covered with blood and soot, Moody said.
She said they cleaned up and then went to Target for the sweet potatoes, marshmallows and brown sugar.
A Modesto Fire Department spokesman, Deputy Chief Darin Jesberg, confirmed that the women helped at the scene. They “stopped, intervened and rendered some type of assistance,” he said.
The trailer fire was behind an abandoned house on the 3700 block of Roselle Avenue, north of Sylvan Avenue, Battalion Chief Doug Rice said in an earlier Bee report. He said the burned woman was taken to Memorial Medical Center for treatment.
Firefighters quickly put out the blaze, preventing it from spreading to the nearby home, Rice said. The Stanislaus Fire Investigation Unit and police are still investigating the cause and origin of the fire.
Because the incident remains under investigation, no information is being released on the identity of the woman or her condition.
Modesto City Schools has an MCS Hero award that celebrates employees who go above and beyond for, district spokeswoman Linda Mumma Solorio told The Bee, and Johansen High Principal Nathan Schar is looking forward to recognizing the heroic efforts of Hartley, who teaches art at the school.
