Positivity: Family cat saves boy’s life
Posted at: 03/14/2011 11:07 AM | Updated at: 03/14/2011 5:43 PM
The family cat, a volunteer fire fighter and a miracle — that’s what a Brockport woman says saved her nine-year-old grandson. Their house caught fire this morning. Her 12-year-old daughter made it out okay but the nine-year-old was trapped inside.
Monday morning, Linda Pearl when went to an early morning doctors appointment she left her 12-year-old daughter and her nine-year-old grandson at home. She intended to be gone only 30 minutes but what happened in the next half hour left the family homeless and sent her grandson to the hospital.
“The whole street was just black. The whole sky was just black and fire trucks all over the place.” That’s what Linda Pearl saw as she got closer to the house where she and her six children and grandchildren have called home for three years. It was only minutes after her 12-year-old daughter Kristina called her this morning and said the house was on fire. “Forty-seven years of memories, all my pictures, my kids birth certificates, their baby pictures, everything it’s gone. It’s just gone.”
The damage to the house is extensive. The fire started in the kitchen. Pearl says her daughter forgot to turn off the stove after making some hash browns. “It was an accident but it was all about a hash brown, a hash brown. Because of a hash brown everything is gone, everything is gone.”
The fire could have been much more devastating. Pearl’s nine-year-old grandson Kendran Hall was upstairs and nobody knew it. “If the cat hadn’t woke him up, we wouldn’t have found out until it was too late that he was even in the house. He missed his bus and he never misses his bus.”
The cat died in the fire. “His cat Stitch died to save him, to wake him up.”
Kendran was able to break a window and hang out of it. The 12-year-old girl ran across the street to fire Lieutenant Tim Russell’s house. He didn’t have any breathing apparatus to go in and rescue the boy. His only hope was to jump. It was intense. “I just didn’t want him to panic and I didn’t want him to leave. There was a lot of smoke coming out the window and I was trying to get him to jump.”
The young boy landed in the arms of Russell and a police officer and despite losing so much and facing homelessness, Pearl says, “The kids made it out, even though nobody knew he was in that house, he still made it out alive and I’m grateful for the fact that everybody is alive.” …
Go here for the rest of the story.
