Burn victim wants to thank firefighter who saved him years ago. Are you out there?

Trey Anthony Loomis might have died that horrible day 26 years ago. The 2-year-old was trapped in a 1995 Kansas City house engulfed in flames. A firefighter found the child in a closet and pulled him free.

The firefighter who rescued him probably never thought the toddler, burned over 90% of his body, would live. At that time, people died from burns half as bad. Only his soaked diaper kept him from being burned everywhere.

Had Loomis not survived, a Kansas City Public School teacher would not have had the pleasure of teaching “one of the most beautiful people” she said she’s ever met. His guardians, Debra Hughes and John Walker, would never have had the satisfaction of raising a severely injured boy into an active, funny and loving man.

The world would’ve missed out on the artwork that Loomis, now 28, creates despite the permanent impairments that have left him legally blind, nearly deaf, and with reconstructed fingers he can not bend.

Loomis doesn’t even know where the fire occurred, beyond that it was on KC’s East Side. But he wants to find the firefighter so he can thank him.

“Our family owes a tremendous debt to that firefighter who saved Trey’s life,” said Hughes, Loomis’s older adoptive sister, who took responsibility for him after their mom died in 2009. Loomis was 16 at the time. Now he calls Hughes, who is 57, mom.

“Trey has done so much. Traveled so many places and inspired so many people,” Hughes said. “I can’t imagine my life without him.”

Painting “makes me feel good, and I like that it makes other people happy,” Loomis said. He paints portraits of hip hop artists like Cardi B, Beyonce and Snoop Dog, and skylines of cities he’s visited, including Dallas, Atlanta and St. Louis. His art has been featured in several exhibitions.

“He has come up with his own way of seeing,” said Wolfe Brack, curator at Overland Park’s Interurban Art House, where Loomis’s work was exhibited last summer as part of the gallery’s Tangled Roots annual show.

Tracey Sullwold Murray, who taught Loomis in her English class at J.A. Rogers Middle School, introduced him to the gallery. “He has overcome so much, but he remains a very humble and caring person. The world is lucky to have Trey and his unique perspective.”

In the dimly lit bedroom of the Kansas City home where he lives with his family, Loomis moves his face within inches of a canvas. His left hand, which has no fingers, keeps the canvas in place. With his right hand holding the brush between his thumb and index finger, he paints, he says, “very slowly.” And beautifully.

He doesn’t miss a day. Boxes of his art are stacked in a corner of his bedroom.

His voice is soft. Because of the fire, his jawbone was fused, so he barely opens his mouth. Doctors rebuilt his voice box from his ribs.

Loomis graduated from Paseo High School in 2012.

He has no memory of the fire. But he firefighter likely never forgot.

That 1995 blaze started in a second-story apartment. Two brothers, a four-year-old and a two-year-old, lived there with their mother, who had left them with her brother. When the fire broke out, the uncle escaped with the oldest child. A firefighter found Loomis on fire in a closet. The story Hughes was told is that the children had been playing with a lighter.

He spent two years – six months of them in a coma – recovering at Shriners Hospital for Children in Cincinnati. Doctors told Hughes that they had never had a patient before Loomis survive burns as severe.

He has endured dozens of surgeries. Doctors reconstructed his nose and lips. They built the four fingers on his right hand with plastic and parts of his toes. As a child, he only complained when Hughes scrubbed the areas of tender skin graph so blood would circulate. “He’d say, ‘Mom, that really hurts,’ ” Hughes said.

Loomis has no hair, except for the lashes that curl over his dark brown eyes, which were “damaged, but not burned,” Hughes said. For his portraits, he always paints the eyes first. “The eyes are the most important part,” he says.

His own eyes brighten when he’s asked about his future. “I’m gonna paint forever,” he says.

Let’s hope so. We’re also hoping, as is Hughes, that the hero firefighter could someday meet this hero artist.

“It would be tremendous,” Hughes said. “I’d tell Trey, ‘Here’s the person who saved your life.’ ”

This story was originally published March 24, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Burn victim wants to thank firefighter who saved him years ago. Are you out there?."