An 8-year-old girl is lucky to be alive after firefighters pulled her from her burning apartment on Friday, and now she and her mother are saying "thank you" to the people who saved her.
Shantell King, 8, was sleeping when flames broke out at her home on Hamilton Street in Hartford. Her mother, Michelle Peterson, ran to wake her up, but said they were both knocked to the ground in their rush to escape.
“I’m feeling around trying to find her and I can’t find her anywhere, and she’s not saying anything,” Peterson said, reflecting on the chaos that night. “The only thing I can do is run as fast as I can down the stairs to try to get a firefighter upstairs to help me, because I just can’t find her.”
Emergency responders answered those calls for help. Peterson said a firefighter and police officer sprinted into the fire-ravaged apartment and grabbed her daughter, pulling her to safety.
“I wouldn’t leave the front door of that building until they came out of there with her, and every minute seemed like an hour,” Peterson said. “When they first brought her out and laid her on the ground and she wasn’t moving and her eyes were closed, I thought she was dead. I didn’t know.”
Shantell, who was hospitalized in Bronx and released over the weekend, said she remembers very little of what happened that night.
“I remember in the ambulance when the woke me up, and I remember when I saw the smoke and I got knocked out,” Shantell explained.
Although the apartment has been leveled and the family lost two of their four dogs, Peterson said they’re just grateful to be safe.
“I want to say thank you for saving me,” Shantell said.
“And I want to say the same thing,” her mother added. “I’m just so very grateful because without those men, like I said, my daughter would not be here today, and that’s the only thing that I care about – that she’s safe. I don’t care about anything else.”
Peterson said Shantell is expected to make a full recovery. The two-alarm fire forced 12 families from their homes, and a firefighter and police officer were also treated for smoke inhalation, according to the fire department.
