Man rescues neighbor from house fire in Nashville

By Joylyn Bukovac

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    NASHVILLE, Tennessee (WSMV) — When a man was stuck inside his house while it was on fire, Jerome Del Pino pulled him from the flames.

Del Pino said he was driving around when he noticed the sky looking hazy. That’s when he saw thick smoke coming from a home on the 2000 block of Elliott Avenue.

Jerome Del Pino says that he saw the flames just before 8:00 am Saturday morning. He pulled over to make sure everyone was out of the home. That’s when he knew something was terribly wrong.

“When I got to the front door of the house it was ajar, I yelled inside and heard another voice saying, ‘I’m in here, I’m in here.’ I realized that the owner of the house had fallen and couldn’t move himself and was lying on the floor inside the door. And so I was able to pull him out as the fire began to spread to the ceiling and to the roof of the porch,” Del Pino explained.

Del Pino was about to get his neighbor to safety just in time.

“It really is frightening to see a fire spread so quickly and start to consume everything around it. By the time I got him to the porch, the fire had moved inside the house to where he had been laying. By the time I got him down the steps, it was coming out the front windows and up into the roof of the porch. I don’t think that he would have been there if I had been five minutes later,” Del Pino said.

First responders say the homeowner was taken to the hospital where he is being treated for burns and smoke inhalation. He is expected to be okay.

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