SPOKANE, Wash. — A Browne's Addition family is grateful for three good Samaritans who woke them up when their apartment was on fire early Monday morning.
Spokane police are investigating the Browne’s Addition apartment fire as a homicide. It killed two people in the Tiffany Manor apartments near Coeur d’Alene Park.
Brandy Teilborg said she never heard a fire alarm. Many of her neighbors told KREM 2 the same thing.
"I am on the bottom floor, and I woke up to a homeless person pounding on my window," Teilborg said.
Teilborg and her family could not escape out their front door, so they climbed out the back. When they got out, she realized one member of her family was missing: her white chihuahua named Shawn Onions.
"I set him down and he got scared and took off," Brandy said. “All the material stuff I can replace, but I can’t replace my dog.”
Teilborg and her neighbors spent the whole morning searching for her dog.
Then, just before noon, her fear for the worst vanished. Someone found Shawn Onions crouched underneath a car near the apartment building.
“I thought he was gone forever and it’s the only thing I cared about," Teilborg said.
She is grateful to the neighbors who helped search for him and the good Samaritans who woke her family up.
Hatti'Lynn Balcom was with her boyfriend and a friend when they saw the smoke from Coeur d'Alene Park. She said she instinctively ran to the apartment building to wake people up.
"On the second balcony there was a girl that didn't want to jump so I was just trying to get her to jump," Balcom said. "I put my bags down so maybe she would land on the bags. She finally jumped after I talked her into it. And then on the side of the building there are windows. So I just started pounding.”
Balcom doesn't live in the building. She said she moves from place to place with a couple of bags.
The families who escaped the fire are calling her a hero.
“I don't know if I'm a hero. It’s automatic," Balcom said. "It made me cry when people told me that. But that's not what I did it for. Because that's the right thing that people are supposed to do. We need more people like that.”
Because she did the right thing, Teilborg's family have all that matters to them today: each other.
“I feel like everything is going to be fine now," Teilborg said. "We’re going to be fine. We got our whole family back!”
The Red Cross is not setting up a shelter for displaced families. Instead, the organization is providing preloaded debit cards and connecting families with financial assistance.
Those who lived in one of the buildings destroyed and need assistance getting a place to stay can contact the Red Cross at 1-800-RED CROSS.