Boston Herald
BOSTON — An off-duty Boston cop raced into a smoke-filled building to warn residents about a blaze next door during a two-alarm fire in the North End yesterday.
Police officer Shana Cottone said she was leaving Suffolk Superior Court when she spotted the smoke.
She radioed dispatch and told them about the blaze, and then drove over. She said a woman outside the building said there were people on the second and third floors.
“By the time I got there, there now was a good size fire going,” she said. “I ran up the stairs and I started kicking doors in. I had a big adrenaline rush, obviously. I kicked in the second-floor door and there was a guy in there with a dog, and his apartment was filled with smoke. I was like, ‘Get out of here. There’s a fire.’ The dog ran right out. The dog didn’t need to be told twice.”
The third floor she found no one, but she began to be overcome by the smoke and crawled on her stomach to the apartment shouting for people to get out. She said it appeared the occupants had already left.
“I’m not a firefighter, but fire wasn’t there yet and I couldn’t leave,” she said. “If there were people in there, which I was under the assumption that there were, I couldn’t just not go in there ... In the heat of the moment, you just do what you have to do.”
The fire destroyed the upper two floors of the vacant building next door on Stillman Place, but none of the neighboring residents was injured. Two firefighters were hospitalized for non life-threatening injuries, Boston Fire Department spokesman Steve MacDonald said.
Two years ago, Cottone was at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and helped victims of the bombing, including Rosann Sdoia, a severely wounded woman who Cottone comforted and accompanied to the hospital. Cottone was treated for smoke inhalation yesterday, but released. She plans to return to the marathon finish line today with some of the first responders who were with her that day.
Copyright 2015 Boston Herald