Kelly Dillon, who lives in a house on Union Street in Lafayette, was awake on her couch around 12.30pm Monday when she heard the slam of car brakes outside.
“I heard the tires screeching and I looked up and said, ‘The house across the street is on fire!'” she said on Wednesday.
The house opposite was burning, with five people still inside, including four children.
“When I looked outside I actually saw flames covering the house and shooting 25 to 30 feet into the air from the house,” said Brian Johnson, a neighbor of the house. “It was quite an intense fire, you could hear it popping and cracking.”
The driver who slammed the brakes was Nicholas Bostic, 25, who was passing by when he saw the fire. He stopped the car, reversed it and pulled into the driveway.
Kelly Dillon’s husband John also came out to help while she called the police.
“By the time I walked out their whole porch was swallowed up,” Kelly Dillon said.
She said Bostic and her husband were running around the house and banging on windows, shouting, “Your house is on fire! Your house is on fire!
“They were both over there trying to scream because we knew there was family in there,” Kelly Dillon said.
Also in the house were Seionna Barrett, 18, Shaylee Barrett and Livian Knifley, 13, who were sleeping, Kaylani Barrett, 6, and Kaleia, who will be 2 in November.
The parents, David and Tiera Barrett, had been out in the evening shooting darts, David Barrett said in an interview Thursday.
Bostic entered the house screaming, which woke the children from their sleep. Seionna Barrett grabbed Kaleia and ran up the stairs.
“Me and my friend Livian were sleeping in my room,” Shaylee Barrett said in an interview Thursday afternoon. The family is temporarily housed by another family. “For a minute I didn’t understand, but my sister ran upstairs with the baby in her hands and yelled at us to get up because there was a fire. And for a minute I froze and lay there because I was confused. That’s when we came down and Nick was downstairs helping us.
The four of them got out safe and sound but realized they couldn’t find the 6-year-old.
“Seionna kept yelling (on the phone) that she couldn’t find Kaylani,” David Barrett said. “So we knew everyone was safe except Kaylani when we got the phone call.”
Bostic ran to try to save her.
“He was like, ‘You have to stay here and be safe.’ That’s when he walked into the house and we walked out,” Shaylee said.
According to a Lafayette police news release Thursday afternoon, Bostic went upstairs first, because that’s where he found the other children.
He turned to the stairs where there was a “black lagoon” of smoke, he later told an officer. He moved to a window, deciding to get out of the house, when he heard the cry of a child coming from downstairs. He knew two things: that a child was still in the burning house and that he had to get her out.
Bostic “wrapped his shirt around his mouth and nose and plunged into darkness,” the press release reads.
He couldn’t see the plumes of smoke but used the child’s cry as a compass. The heat burned him like an oven. He had to crawl and use his hands to feel what was in front of him, Bostic said in the press release.
When he reached it, he ran to the back door but couldn’t find it. In a hurry, he decided to run up the stairs and broke the window with his bare hands.
But before he could jump with Kaylani, his leg “got tangled in the pull cord of the blinds”. There was no time to lose: he untangled the string and took her in his arms, jumping out the second story window and landing on the side, on the arm that wasn’t holding Kaylani.
“You can hear the glass breaking, but I didn’t know what it was,” Shaylee Barrett said. “And then you could see him coming and bringing Kaylani, and then he passed out right in front of us.”
He was taken to an Indianapolis hospital for treatment for “severe smoke inhalation and a severe cut to his right arm,” according to the press release. A Facebook fundraiser raised $10,660 of its $50,000 goal to cover Bostic’s medical bills.
For his heroic deeds, the city will honor him Aug. 2 at the National Night Out at the Aviators baseball game at Loeb Stadium, with proceeds going to Nick’s GoFundMe.
Bostic was released from hospital on Wednesday. Six-year-old Kaylani is mostly unharmed, according to the press release.
David Barrett said that before leaving the house that night, Kaylani was watching a “Power Rangers” show in the living room before heading upstairs to find someone to sleep with.
“If she had been in the living room, she would have died,” David Barrett said. “She would have been dead, that’s for sure.”
Kelly Dillon said the entire street from 26th Street to around 18th Street was blocked due to the number of emergency vehicles on site.
“I don’t know how (people in the neighborhood) didn’t wake up,” Kelly Dillon said. “At one point there were seven fire engines. I counted five ambulances. I don’t even know how many police cars.
The first thing the police did was evacuate the houses next to them. One of the houses was an AirBNB and unoccupied. The other is home to Brian Johnson and his wife, Sandy Johnson.
The fire lasted 30 to 40 minutes, Brian Johnson said, and firefighters arrived within five to 10 minutes.
“(The parents in their car) went through the line in front of all the team cars and everything that was here. The firefighters haven’t even arrived yet. And that was him and his wife getting out of the car completely freaked out, just yelling at everyone, ‘This is my house!’ I’m sure he didn’t know where his kids were or anything at the time. Pretty scary of him.
The Barretts were leasing the church property behind them, Johnson said. Kelly Dillon said David Barrett is the vice-principal at Tecumseh Junior High School, where the two 13-year-olds went to school together.
Paramedics rescued their dog, Buffy, who is currently in the care of Kelly Dillon.
Bostic’s red car is still at home, with the side facing the house burnt out.
“See the bridge over there inside that window?” said Brian Johnson, pointing out his window to a two-story terrace. “That’s the bedroom up there, and it’s dark inside because the fire was coming out of that window.”
“As far as I know from here, there’s nothing left inside,” he said.
Tiera Barrett said John Dillon told her he heard the hissing of propane tanks, although the cause of the fire is still under investigation.
“I cannot thank God enough for the safety of my children and for what the community has done for us,” said David Barrett.
The family is still adjusting.
“You also don’t think about what you don’t have anymore,” David Barrett said. “I didn’t even remember. I had no underwear, I always had swim trunks and I wore them for like two days and someone was like, ‘Hey, do you need underwear?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I need underwear.’ You don’t think about what you lost.
Tiera Barrett said the community came together to help. Legacy Courts donated basketball shoes for children to wear for practice. People donated money, brought an office, found them accommodation and, of course, gave them clothes.
“We don’t need clothes at this point. We have plenty,” chuckled David Barrett, looking at the pile of clothes in the garage.
“I literally said to my small group leader (when shooting darts): ‘I guess we’re not going anywhere to shoot darts anymore. So if you can get me anything, give me a board of darts,” he said.
He called Bostic after his release.
“I literally told him that he was now part of our family. And he was totally okay with that,” David Barrett said. “Once we’re settled somewhere, we’ll invite him and his girlfriend over for dinner.”
Some Facebook comments criticized parents for neglecting to leave their children at home.
“I have responsible children, they are more than capable of watching over their siblings. For someone to say something stupid like that? It’s boring,” David Barrett said.
Tiera Barrett said on Sunday they heard a sermon on life’s different paths and how road tripping is an experience.
“Sometimes you have to go through things to get there, which is quite heavy because obviously we’re going through it a lot right now,” Tiera Barrett said.
“I mean, there’s no doubt that God was definitely a part of it all,” she said. “Put Nick perfectly in the situation, how things happened. The way, if something had happened any differently at all, we wouldn’t be where we are.
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