‘Go get him!’ Heroes rescue elderly man from burning house in KCK

The truck driver pounding on the door across from a burning home in Kansas City, Kan. Thursday, asked the neighbor urgently: Was anybody home inside that house?

The answer that 43-year-old Michael Hudson got was frantic.

“Yes!” the woman inside the door answered. “He’s by himself! He can hardly walk! Go get him! Go get him!”

What Hudson and another passerby did next — dramatically pulling an elderly man from the floor of his house — is not recommended procedure, said Kansas City, Kan., Fire Battalion Chief Morris Letcher.

“We’re the professionals,” Letcher said. “We recommend you don’t go in. But sometimes circumstances don’t allow for it.”

A man in his 60s or 70s was inside the home, which was reported to be on fire about 1:40 p.m. in the 2500 block of North 38th Street.

He lived alone and had two bad knees and other physical ailments that made it hard for him to move, said the neighbor, 86-year-old Marie Broadnax.

Hudson had been driving his truck for the Baxter Healthcare Corp., heading toward his last stop of the day when he saw the burning home on the empty block.

He ran from Broadnax’s porch to the burning house. The house was engulfed in flames inside the front window and he feared fire would overtake him if he opened the door, so he ran to windows just around the corner and began breaking them with bricks, yelling for the man inside.

That’s when 41-year-old Christopher Moody pulled up in his car. He jumped out and ran to the front door and pulled it open.

The smoke overwhelmed him.

“I’m choking up,” he said. “I threw up.”

But he saw the man’s hand on the floor below the smoke. “He’s right here!” Moody shouted to Hudson —and the two men together pulled the man through the front door and lifted him away.

“A couple of more minutes in there and he’d have been done,” Hudson said.

They saw that the man’s hair and his beard were singed. They don’t know how badly he was burned. Fire crews soon arrived and the man was taken to a hospital. The extent of his injuries were not known Thursday afternoon.

The men’s actions “were very dangerous,” Letcher said. “It was very courageous.”

The cause of the fire was unknown Thursday. As firefighters battled the blaze they warned that they were hearing handgun ammunition discharging. Within the hour the fire was out and firefighters searching the house reported it was all clear.

This story was originally published January 18, 2018 at 2:06 PM with the headline "‘Go get him!’ Heroes rescue elderly man from burning house in KCK."