SAVANNAH, Ga., (WSAV) – Chaotic body camera footage shows the moments three Savannah Police officers rescued a woman from a burning home.
Last Wednesday Savannah Police officers, Ian Gallagher, Shaquille Brown, and Terrell Truitt, were dispatched to the home on Porter Street. They were just minutes away on another call.
They arrived before firefighters and immediately began to help. Upon arrival, they found black smoke billowing from the house. Officer Gallagher tried to enter but quickly realized the smoke was too thick to enter through the front door.
“We heard the lady yelling for help on the other side of the house,” Officer Truitt says.
The woman’s cry for help is what really got them moving.
“She let us know she was stuck inside the bedroom. You could see the flames from behind her in the kitchen and a thick cloud of smoke…we took her comforter, we wrapped it around her. officer brown had one side, I had one side of her. Officer Gallagher took her legs and we pulled her out of the window safely from the house.”
The officers were able to rescue her in less than three minutes, the time it took Savannah Fire to arrive.
Officers say her quick-thinking actions, getting near a window, possibly saved her life and kept them from getting hurt.
“It really makes me feel good to know that I’m doing my job and saving someone’s life. When we got the call that day I didn’t think it was going to be an actual house fire. I thought it was going to be a small structure fire,” Officer Brown says.
Brown, was recently awarded after rescuing someone from a burning home on Augusta Avenue in January.
The officers say they aren’t always seen doing good, so this was rewarding.
“It feels good, not every day you get to work together and save someone’s life,” Officer Gallagher says.
Officer Truitt says this situation shine light on the officers during a time when they are under scrutiny.
“I think situations like this definitely shed a positive light on the profession. a lot of people when they see us they only think that we deal with bad guys but that’s not true,” Truitt says.
All three of the officers were been with a life-saving medal.