A man from Yuma, Arizona bravely jumped into action and saved both a two-year-old and a three-year-old from a burning car on a remote stretch of Arizona highway on the Navajo reservation Thursday night.
The 30-year-old man, Sam Heiler said that he was driving with his wife to a Memorial Day Weekend event on Thursday evening when he saw the engine of the car in front of them caught on fire. Seeing that, he pulled over to help.
He then said that when the parents of that car got out, the doors of the car locked and they couldn’t get to the girls in the backseat. Speaking about that terrifying moment to Fox News Digital, Heiler said, “The parents were freaking out, screaming and punching the windows with their bare hands, both the back windows in front of the babies.”
“They had about 20 more seconds until the fire spread from the engine block to the cab. The girls were screaming, the parents were screaming, my wife was screaming—it was bad. When the fire hit the fuel tank it made a legitimate fireball explosion,” he added.
“Dad followed suit, but from the panic, attempted to throw rocks at the back windows where the girls would have been covered with glass and a heavy rock had it broken through. All the while, the flames had now spread to completely covering the front hood of the car, and the two- and three-year old are screaming,” Sam’s wife said.
“Once the doors were open, Sam helped unbuckle them from their seatbelts, help Mom and Dad remove them from the car, and bring them up to where we pulled over about 30 yards up the road,” she added.
They then flagged down another driver and asked that driver to call the cops when cell service was reestablished about 25 miles up the road. Firefighters and police eventually arrived and put out the blaze, but at that point fires were spreading in the forest and had to be doused as well.
Heiler’s wife added that he initially was going to keep driving when he saw the car pull over “But, in that same instant, something came over him, and he felt like he had to stop and see if he could help.”
That wasn’t the only citizen fire rescue in Arizona recently. Another occurred when an apartment caught fire, as The Guardian reported, saying:
An unhoused man in Arizona has earned the title of “angel” from a woman whom he helped rescue from a burning apartment, alongside her children and pets.
As those at the center of the extraordinary story told it to CBS News, Joe Hollins and his wife have been experiencing homelessness and happened to be camped out near an apartment which caught fire early on Thursday in Phoenix. Hollins became aware of the emergency when he heard screams coming from the apartment.
“All I see is a lady pull open the window, and she’s screaming, ‘Please help me, please help me,’” he recalled in an interview which CBS aired over the weekend.
Hollins immediately ran up to the window of the woman, Claudia Jimenez. According to Jimenez, the blaze was blocking the front way out of her apartment, and she was trapped inside with her two daughters and two dogs as flames and smoke spread throughout the place.
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