Four Culpeper Police Department officers were honored with valor awards on Oct. 14 for crawling through heavy smoke and flames to rescue a man trapped inside a burning house on Oct. 3, according to the department.
When officers arrived at the wooden house in the town of Culpeper that evening, heavy smoke was already billowing from the windows. Residents who lived in separate apartments inside the building had gotten out and were standing outside, but they told police one man had not made it out and might still be inside.
Officer Ashley Sain went in first, without protective gear, moving through the house to check doors and search for anyone remaining. Officer Neal Coffey joined her moments later. Body-worn camera video shows one of the officers running up a staircase past posted “No Smoking” signs.
On the second floor, the officers found a door locked from the inside, with smoke seeping through the cracks above and below it. Sain shouted “Police department, if you’re in here!” over the sound of shrieking smoke alarms while Coffey picked the lock with a small tool and pushed the door open, calling out again. No one answered.
Heavy black smoke poured out of the bedroom, and the officers could see flames. By then, Sgt. David Cole and Officer Michael Beel had also reached the second floor.
Video shows Coffey dropping to his hands and knees, then crawling flat along the wooden floor with a flashlight as the smoke thickened. “I can’t see!” he shouted. Pushing forward on his chest, he felt his way through the room until he found a man lying unresponsive on a bed.
“Hey brother, come on!” Coffey shouted, pulling at the man’s arm. “Come on! Come with me!” He called out to the other officers: “We’ve got to get him out! I have him! He’s breathing!”
Beel crawled in to help Coffey move the man, and together the four officers dragged him into the hallway. A firefighter in protective gear then arrived, and a team of firefighters carried the man out of the house and put out the fire.
The man was taken to a hospital and later transferred to a regional burn center. His name and the cause of the fire have not been released because the incident remains under investigation.
Three of the four officers were also treated at a hospital that evening for smoke inhalation and other injuries before being released.
Capt. Kevin Tooley of the Culpeper Police Department, who supervised the scene, said all four officers were recognized with valor awards on Oct. 14.
“They went above and beyond the normal call for a police department,” Tooley said. “We normally don’t go into burning buildings. I mean, that’s not our job. That’s typically the fire department’s job. But we don’t know how to say no, especially when there’s a life … that we know we have to save.”
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