‘Holding my son, I watched the flames in disbelief’

It was just after 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning when I woke to screams of “Help.”  I roused my husband, and ran downstairs to see someone banging frantically on our sliding glass door.  Panicked, I couldn’t get it unlocked so I ran out the front entrance and called 911.

“Someone is screaming for help at my back door,” I said to the dispatcher. “I don’t know what is going on.”

It was then I saw a plume of smoke billowing from my neighbor’s roof. Our homes shared a wall at the Oak Villas Condominiums. A man, whose name I can never remember, was lying motionless on the grass. “There’s a fire!” I told the woman on the phone. “Someone is badly hurt.”

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