MATTHEW ROBERTS
Carried unconscious woman. (
)
Brooklyn firefighter Matthew Roberts saw that the living room was in flames and knew that if he went past it, the blaze could spread into the hallway and trap him — yet he kept going and found and rescued an unconscious woman.
“If you know there’s somebody back there in the apartment, you learn to take the chance of going past the fire,’’ he said of the dramatic July 7, 2011, rescue in Flatbush.
Roberts, 35, of Ladder Co. 113, had forced the apartment door open and entered the hallway of the fifth-floor dwelling at 111 E. 21st St. before the engine companies’ Bravest could put water on the fire.
The living-room fire to his right “was free-burning. The whole room was going,’’ Roberts recalled. He was confident he would not be trapped because there were “two great engine companies’’ behind him with water.
He moved along the smoke-filled hallway in pitch-black conditions toward the bedrooms.
Then, “I felt a leg,’’ said Roberts. “I told the boss I had . . . a victim.’’
He could not take the 69-year-old woman out a back window because she was unconscious, so he carried her to the front door.
Sadly, the woman died a few days later.
Roberts was nominated for a New York Post Liberty Medal in the Bravest category by the FDNY.