A teenage boy has been branded as a hero after his brilliant idea saved the lives of his neighbors.
17-year-old Falon O’Regan from Bentleyville, Pennsylvania, was about to go to sleep on early Monday morning when he saw flames engulfing the four-unit building where he lives with his mother.
“I opened the [front] door and I was flabbergasted. I stared at it for a couple of seconds, closed it, grabbed the stuff that I could, broke a door, broke a window, and I jumped,” the teen recalled in an interview with DailyMail.com.
After he grabbed his birth certificate and his wallet and jumped to safety, he was soon joined by other first-floor occupants.
That’s when the brave teen realized that the people living on the upper floor of the apartment building were still trapped inside, possibly with no way out other than through the windows.
“I thought about the kids, and what I would do if I was younger. I just thought I’d panic, so I just had to do this,” O’Regan added as he spoke of his determination to help other residents.
Knowing he didn’t have much time to act, the 17-year-old moved a nearby trampoline close to the building and under the window where he saw his neighbors.
For the following few minutes, Falon continued to encourage his neighbors to jump from the window and onto the trampoline.
Eventually, two adults, two children, and two dogs jumped out of the burning building and survived the incident without major injuries.
“He threw the phone at one of the people laying on the trampoline so he can yell at everybody else to jump and get out,” the boy’s mother, Becky Williams, recalled outside the wrecked home on Tuesday morning.
“I couldn’t get him anymore, and I was worried because our pets were all in there, and my other son had his cat there and I was worried about getting him woken up and getting someone here for my son. He was slowly losing it trying to help, but at the same time he was freaking out because he was alone.”
While no human died in the blaze thanks to O’Regan’s quick thinking, Williams lost some of her cats in the fire.
She was also left heartbroken by the destruction of all of her possessions and things that were of great value to her grandmother and her son.
“My son really beat himself up for the fact that he couldn’t get the cats out. But he thought enough to at least get the window open and make sure the door was open,” she added.
As of this writing, the cause of the fire is yet to be confirmed.