A heart-jerker that I will always remember is a run where we had a fire at a two-story home. We got there and it was really ripping. They had five kids, and four of them were already out. They told us that there was a little girl that didn’t get out. 

So we really did our best to knock the fire down and to search the house to find that little girl. What happened was that they had one of those rope ladders that you buy at the store, with hooks on them that you can put over a windowsill and drop out the window. Then you climb down the rope ladder. 

We found that girl up in the hallway at the base of the window where they had put the rope ladder out. The older kids had dropped it out, and you could see from where she was that she was just waiting her turn to have somebody help her go down that ladder. But in the moment, nobody thought to turn and help her down. She died right there at the base, just waiting. That was really a heart jerker when we found her.