Editor’s note: Kalamazoo Public Safety officers are cross-trained to serve as police officers, firefighters and medical first responders. The unified public safety model allows personnel to respond to law enforcement, fire and medical emergencies during the same shift, sometimes placing the closest trained responder at a scene before additional fire or EMS crews arrive.
By John Agar
mlive.com
KALAMAZOO, Mich. – Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety released video showing a woman in a burning house dropping a child to rescuers below.
Firefighters then used a ladder to rescue the woman.
“Hey, throw me your kid. Kick out the screen,” public-safety officer Michael Arnett said on police video.
“Oh my God,” he said.
Moments later, he said: “Yep, I got (the baby).”
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The fire was reported around 4:15 p.m. Friday, May 15, at a two-story house in the 1200 block of Washington Avenue near James Street.
Dispatchers were told that a woman and her infant were trapped in a second-floor unit. When firefighters arrived, they saw flames engulfing the porch on the right side of the three-unit house and Arnett found the 911 caller leaning from a second-floor window on the left side.
Smoke poured from the window as she held her baby. Arnett told the woman to drop the infant to him.
Both the mother and child were taken for evaluation at a local hospital but neither suffered injuries. The occupants of two lower-level units escaped on their own and were not injured.
Firefighters used ladders to enter the second floor and put out the fire because an interior staircase had been damaged. Most of the damage was on the outside of the right side of the house but fire spread into the attic, too.
The fire’s cause remains under investigation.
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