Four police officers in Culpeper, Virginia, crawled through a smoke-filled house and pulled an unresponsive man from a burning bedroom, an act of rescue that their own department acknowledged falls outside the normal scope of police work. The man was taken to a hospital and later transferred to a regional burn center. Three of the officers were treated for smoke inhalation and other injuries and released the same evening.
The rescue unfolded on the evening of Oct. 3, when officers arrived at a wooden house where heavy smoke was pouring from the windows. Residents of separate apartments in the building had gathered outside, but they told police that one man had not come out and that they feared he was still inside. Officer Ashley Sain went in immediately, without protective gear, and began checking doors. Officer Neal Coffey joined her moments later.
Body-worn camera footage shows an officer running up the stairs past «No Smoking» signs posted on the walls. On the second floor, the two officers found a door locked from the inside, with smoke slipping through the cracks above and below it. Sain shouted «Police department, if you're in here!» over the sound of shrieking smoke alarms. Coffey opened the lock with a pocket-size tool and swung the door open, calling out «Police department!» There was no answer. Heavy black smoke poured from the bedroom, and the officers could see flames.
By then, Sgt. David Cole and Officer Michael Beel had reached the second floor as well. Footage shows Coffey crawling on his hands and knees and then flat on the wooden plank floor, searching the room with a flashlight. «I can't see!» he shouted as he pushed through thicker smoke. He inched forward on his chest, feeling around, and suddenly found a man lying unresponsive on a bed.
«Hey brother, come on!» Coffey urged, tugging the man's arm. «Come on! Come with me!» he shouted to the other officers. «We've got to get him out! I have him! He's breathing!» Video shows him struggling to move the man before pulling him onto the floor. Beel crawled in to help, and together the four officers dragged the unconscious man into the hallway. A firefighter in protective gear then emerged through the smoke, and a team of firefighters carried the man out of the building and extinguished the fire.
The rescued resident's name and the cause of the fire have not been released because those details are part of an active investigation. All four officers who entered the house were honored with valor awards on Oct. 14, according to Capt. Kevin Tooley of the Culpeper Police Department, who was a supervisor on the scene.
Tooley said the team went beyond what is normally asked of a police department. «We normally don't go into burning buildings. I mean, that's not our job. That's typically the fire department's job,» he said. «But we don't know how to say no, especially when there's a life … that we know we have to save.»