ABINGTON, MASS. (WHDH) - A heroic neighbor raced into a burning home to help rescue an Abington man late Tuesday night.
Kurt Knepshield says he was taking out his trash when he saw flames shooting through the roof of a house on Plymouth Street around 9:45 p.m.
When he ran up to the home, Knepshield says he could hear a woman yelling for her 57-year-old son.
“I told her, ‘open the door. Open the door,'” he recalled. “I just really wasn’t thinking, it was instinct, I guess.”
Knepshield then risked his own life by running into the burning house in hopes of getting to the man.
“The smoke was too much for me,” he said. “I went back downstairs, grabbed a kitchen towel, put water on it, put it on my mouth and went back upstairs and pulled him by his feet to the threshold of the door.”
An Abington police officer who entered the house helped him get the man all the way outside.
“He grabbed his feet and I went around and grabbed his arms and we got him down the stairwell,” Knepshield said.
Paramedics took the victim to Massachusetts General Hospital. His condition was not immediately released.
An investigation suggests that the fire, which was contained to the second floor and attic of the home, was electrical in nature.
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