A 41-year-old man escaped from his burning third-floor apartment on Tarragon Road in Reisterstown and ran through the building alerting others to get out, including Danny Gulley who lives just across the hall.
“I just heard his voice, ‘Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!’, and I was in my pajamas with my sleepers and stuff and I ran straight downstairs. I left my phone and everything of my personal belongings.”
The call to the Franklin fire company just after two o’clock in the morning brought 20 pieces of equipment and 80 firefighters to the scene in a matter of minutes.
“Crews arrived to find pretty heavy fire coming through the roof and out of that third floor apartment,” said Capt. Len Stewart of the Baltimore County Fire Department, “They did an excellent job in actually knocking that pretty quickly.”
But the heroics of saving a woman from a burning unit had already unfolded.
Gulley, a Baltimore City worker in its Bureau of Finance, had already made it outside safely when he learned the man who had saved him had left his 61-year-old mother behind in their apartment, three floors above them, when he was unable to reach her due of the intense flames and heat.
“We kept saying, ‘Mom, jump! Mom, jump!’ so the guy and I were standing right at the window and that’s how she jumped,” recounted Gulley, “Both of us were caught here together and we fell. Later on, I think about three to four minutes, the fire service came and helped us out to cut off the fire.”
Paramedics transported both the mother and the son to the Johns Hopkins Bayview Burn Center for treatment, but they are both expected to survived.
