While Running for his Life, Heroic Stranger Stops to Save Young Girl from Deadly Bronx Fire
During the horrifying Bronx apartment fires that occurred Sunday, Jan. 9, Fatima Wood was trying to get herself and her two children out of the building, struggling to escape their 19-story apartment building as it was being overwhelmed with smoke and flames.
A neighbor that they had never met before approached them in the stairwell, offering to help them down from the ninth floor. Then, the neighbor quickly grabbed Wood’s three-year-old daughter and continued running down the stairs.
“As soon as I got down, the kid was cold, she didn’t have enough clothes. So I took off my jacket and I wrapped her in my jacket,” said the neighbor, Mahamed Keita. “I was sitting down, shaking. People were just going through, they couldn’t breathe, they were performing CPR, cardiac arrest. I’ve never seen something like it, so I was just shaking the whole time.”
Keita and the three-year-old girl were already in an ambulance en route to the hospital by the time Wood and her other child were able to make it out of the building.
On Sunday night, the family was reunited once everyone was released from the hospital.
“I cried all day, even when we got here [to the hospital] and we finally see her, I was still crying because it’s so traumatizing,” Wood said of her daughter.
Keita added: “I was just trying to do the right thing. Everybody was struggling, lots of people lost their lives, I was just trying to do the right thing.”
Wood said she cannot wait to see Keita to express her gratitude.
Image source: Times New Express
