Hero dog saves one-year-old baby from Detroit house fire by barking until help arrived
DETROIT, MICHIGAN: A dog is being praised as a hero after helping save a one-year-old baby girl, who became trapped in a raging house fire. Janet Kelley, a mother-of-four, said the fire broke at their multi-family home in Detroit on February 21, when a child, living in a unit below them, lit up a mattress while playing with a lighter.
The vicious fire rapidly spread upstairs and "over to the house next door," Kelley said, according to USA Today. The residents in the apartment below rushed up to warn everyone, but both flats were already stuffed with black smoke. Kelley said everyone immediately rushed outside but her one-year-old daughter was left stuck in a playpen inside the house. However, their family dog, Blue, accompanied the baby and refused to leave the house until firefighters arrived to rescue her. Blue kept barking and "alerted rescue to where she was located,” Kelley said.
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'Blue is very protective over all of us'
Kelley further noted that she and her fiance, DaQuan Davis, were at Walmart with her two oldest children, when the fire broke out at their home. "I got a phone call that the house was on fire. My fiance's brother was at the home and he's the one that called," she said. Kelley addedz "He was trying to rush and get the dog, the kids, and everybody out of the house." After losing everything in the fire, Kelley, her fiance Davis, her four children and Blue are staying at a nearby hotel.
Kelley noted that Blue is a three-year-old Pitbull Lab mix rescue dog that she adopted nearly two years ago. "[Blue] is very protective over all of us," she said. "He also loves his best friend Smokey, the family cat." Smokey is still wandering around the damaged house as Kelley was not able to take him to the hotel due to a lack of room. She said she stills checks on him and takes Blue over to play with him.
Where is Janet Kelley's family living now?
The family is currently living in a minivan after a donation of $290 to their GoFundMe campaign allowed them to secure a hotel room for two nights. "I just paid him rent two days before this, so when I asked him if he could give me something back, I got told 'No, I have bills, too,'" Kelley said. In the lack of renter's insurance, Kelley and her family are unable to recover their losses, and their landlord's sole answer, according to Kelley, has been "to create a GoFundMe page and go to a shelter." "The reality is that when you are in a fire situation, there is little help out there to get people back on their feet as renters," a family friend said in a news release.
