Wilsonville Spokesman Online

Local teen was first on scene in apartment fire

She ran upstairs after man on balcony told her his family was trapped

• By: Michelle Te  
• Published: 11/13/2009 12:59:08 PM

Photo By: Patrick JohnsonApartment fire
Shayla Hart lives at Sundial Apartments and was first on the scene when a fire broke out Nov. 4 in Building 5.

Just as Shayla Hart passed Building 5, she heard fire alarms. Then she saw black smoke and heard a man yelling.
The 16-year-old looked up and saw a man on the balcony of his third-floor apartment.

“He was yelling for help,” she said. “He said he had a newborn baby and his wife was in the apartment too. He said, ‘We need help, and we can’t get out.’”

A day of ironies
Shayla fancies herself a morning person. Which is why she found it strange that she overslept by two hours Wednesday morning.

She decided to walk to school after missing the bus. Her father had been up late and she didn’t want to wake him. She got herself ready and slipped out the door.

/> On the way across the Sundial apartment complex in Wilsonville, she ran into the maintenance man. They chatted for a couple of minutes before she continued through the courtyard headed toward a path that leads to Wilsonville High School.

That’s when she noticed activity on the third-floor.

The man, she described as a small, light-colored Hispanic man, told her that he had touched his front door and it felt hot. When he opened his door, he could see smoke and flames.

Without knowing how big the fire was, Shayla ran toward the building. She called 9-1-1. The dispatcher told her crews already were on their way. Then she started up the stairwell on the building’s east side. She saw more black smoke and paused for a moment.

“When I went up the first time, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go all the way up,” she said. “I was there for what seemed like 10 minutes before the fire trucks ever got there.”

She found herself surrounded by black smoke, with flames burning in the middle of the walkway. She ran down the stairs and around to the other side, opting to use a different set of stairs. On the way, she took off her overshirt and covered her mouth and nose.

At first, I couldn’t see the flames from the bottom of the stairs,” Shayla said. “When I was up there, I could see the flames, on the wall, but on the ground too. The flames were in the center of the hallway. You couldn’t walk inbetween there.”

There are four apartments on the top floor. Hart pounded on three of the doors, but nobody answered. Where the man had called to her, she opened the door and ran in. She didn’t see anyone. The man no longer was on the balcony and the French doors had been closed. She entered a spare bedroom, and again saw no one.

Then she saw that the master bedroom door was open, and that the family had exited their apartment onto the adjoining balcony.

“By the time I got back out of the apartment, there was already actual big flames in the hallway, and plastic falling down,” she said.

Fire crews from Tualatin Valley Fire and Rescue’s Station 52 arrived shortly after Shayla made it back down the stairs. Then ran toward her and asked who was in the building. She told them there was a family with a baby, but that she couldn’t find anyone else.

“They told me to move away from the building,” she said. “My bags and stuff were at the bottom of the staircase, so I grabbed them and moved them. I dropped my stuff and turned around. (A firefighter) waved me to come over, I held the baby, until its mom came down and they went in the office.”

The baby boy, she said, was only about a month old.

Shayla said she didn’t feel fear until she ran out of the apartment and saw how high the flames had ascended and how quickly the fire was spreading.

“It was black, everything was just black,” she said. “I wasn’t actually scared until I was leaving the apartment. That was when I was realizing I had put myself in danger. Before, I was just thinking that a man said his wife and newborn needed help. That was my only thought. I didn’t think about it beforehand. I thought that if I can help them, then I should do it.”
What she remembers, though, is the look of terror on the mother’s face.

“You could tell she was scared, terrified for her baby,” Shayla said. “You could tell that she woke up in a terrifying situation that she couldn’t get her child out of. The man didn’t look like he had just woken up, but that’s just my opinion.”

Once the family was rescued, as well as another father and his 6-year-old child in another apartment, Shayla took a step back to survey her surroundings. She pulled out her mobile phone and snapped several pictures to show her friends. By this time, the flames had engulfed the third-floor hallway and were shooting out above the roof.

Shayla called her father, told him what happened, then picked up her bags and went to school. She made it in time for third period and a geography test. When her teacher heard what had happened to his student, he sent an email to student resource officer Deputy James Keen.

Keen had been on the scene of the fire and had instructed Shayla to get herself to school, not knowing the integral role she had played in the rescue. Once at the high school, he called her in and took her statement. After school, she received another phone call from the fire investigator and was asked to walk through the burnt rubble.

“The fire had gotten a lot bigger after I left it,” she said. “When I went back, I could see the burns down the handrails, almost down to the second floor. The entire hallway was singed. One of the doors was missing, and it was black all through the man’s apartment. The fire got pretty big in the 10 minutes it took to get it out.”
Shayla said she finds many things about that day “strangely ironic,” from the fact that she slept in, to not waking her father, to walking by just as the fire started.

The fire was dispatched about 9:30 a.m., and Shayla said she was alone on the grounds of the complex. She guesses the fire started while she was talking to the maintenance man. She saw no cars driving in and out, and no one else walking around.

The only person she saw was the man on his third-floor balcony.

Despite the drama of the morning events, Shayla continued her day like many teen-agers.
She finished her classes, did homework with a friend, then saw an evening movie. But by 10 p.m., she was ready for bed.

“I really am a morning person,” she said.

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