Man pulls mom, child from burning home
A 34-year-old St. Paul construction worker pulled a woman and her infant from a burning home Monday night in the city's North End.
Rick Johann was eating dinner at Tin Cup's restaurant when he went out for a smoke just before 8 p.m. He noticed something wrong down the alley across the street.
"I look over and I see smoke, pretty dark smoke," he recalled. "Thought to myself, that's not a barbecue. There's something going on."
The front of a duplex was on fire — a blaze so hot it melted the vinyl siding on a garage — across the street.
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Johann and his friend, Stephanie Luellen, ran toward the flames. The front of the flaming duplex was too hot to go near it.
"I backed up and the whole front of the house was just on fire and the flames are just roaring out," Johann said. "There was no way to get in the front. I didn't hear any sirens and there was nobody else around trying to see if there was anybody inside."
He and Luellen are being called heroes for what happened next.
Johann circled around to the north side of the house, pushed in a screen and saw the woman and her child inside.
"I'd seen the woman even before I got a chance to climb in," he added. "At that point, her and the baby, that was my biggest concern — let's go. I don't think she was even aware there was a fire."
He pulled the child out and handed the infant, a 7-month-old girl, to Luellen, then helped the woman out.
They backed away, across the street, and watched it burn.
The blaze totally destroyed the duplex and was so hot it melted the vinyl siding on a garage across the street.
Fire officials say they believe the fire was intentionally set and that they're conducting a criminal investigation.
Smoke alarms were still sounding in the building's basement this morning.
The young mother, Lynetta Pryor, and her daughter are lucky Johann acted so quickly, said St. Paul Fire Marshal Steve Zaccard.
"Would she have gotten out in time by herself? I can only speculate," he said. "But what he did was very brave."
Vanessa Pryor lived in the duplex. She said she wasn't home when the fire started and did not know her sister and baby stopped by. The other side of the duplex was vacant.
Pryor said the fire left her with not much more than the shirt on her back.
"I guess the first step is to try and find another place and try to recover as much as I can out of my place," she said. "Looking at it I don't think I'm going to be able to get nothing out of there. So, we pretty much have nothing."
As he looked at the charred wreckage this morning, Johann said he still sees good fortune.
Fortunately, things happened the way they did, and everybody's safe," he said. "You can replace this house and everything in it, but you know the lives, you can't."
Stephanie Luellen captured video on her cell phone of her Johann pulling a woman and her infant from the home. The video had been edited for clarity.
