“Is the baby OK? Please tell me the baby’s OK.” That’s the first thing Nick Bostic asked after jumping from the second floor of a burning home with a 6-year-old girl in his arms. The 25-year-old pizza delivery man from Lafayette, Indiana is being hailed as a hero for saving 5 children from a house fire after spotting the blaze as he was driving by.
Police bodycam video shows the moment Bostic carried the child out of the burning home.
A few days after the incident, Bostic related what happened. He told Fox News that he ran to the back of the house and entered the home yelling to see if anyone was inside.
He went up the stairs and found a one-year-old baby and three teenagers, aged 13 to 18, who had been woken up by his yells.
“For a minute I didn’t understand it, but my sister ran upstairs with the baby in her hands and yelling at us to get up because there’s a fire,” 13-year-old Shaylee Barrett told the Purdue Exponent. “And for a minute I froze and I laid there because I was confused. That’s when we went downstairs and Nick was downstairs helping us.”
When Bostic asked if everyone was accounted for the children told them their 6-year-old sister wasn’t with them. “Without hesitation, he ran back into the burning house,” Lafayette Police Department said in a statement.
It was like “hell” Bostic said of the interior of the house which felt like “walking into an oven.” He used his ears to hear the girl’s terrified screams because the smoke was too thick to see through. Once he got her he tried to find his way out of the home but lost his way so he went back upstairs to where the smoke was less thick.
At this point he didn’t know if he and the girl were going to die. In an interview with Dave Bangert, he said that despite accepting that he might die right there he had a “weird calm.” “You just got to work as fast as you can,” he added.
Bostic tore the blinds off a bedroom window but noticed the girl’s ankle had become entangled with a cord from the blinds, he told Fox News. He quickly untangled her and then “broke open a window by punching it with his bare hand.”
Lafayette Police Department
Bostic jumped out of the window and landed on his side to cushion their fall. After running out to firefighters Bostic collapsed on the ground. In the bodycam video, firefighters applied a tourniquet to his arm.
“I can barely breathe,” Bostic says on the video. He then asks: “Is the baby OK? Please tell me the baby’s OK.”
Someone off-camera assures him the girl is fine.
Thankfully, the girl was “miraculously mostly uninjured,” the the police press release read.
Bostic suffered from smoke inhalation, burns and a laceration to his arm and was rushed to hospital. A GoFundMe set up by his cousin has raised over $200,000 to help cover his medical expenses. Bostic been released now from hospital has told news outlets that “he’s recovering great.”
According to the Lafayette Journal & Courier, The Lafayette Fire Department believes the house fire started from a bucket of ashes on the porch that wasn’t fully extinguished.
The parents were out for a date night and returned home to find their house surrounded by emergency responders. They have thanked Bostic and told him that he is now part of their family.
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