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A Middle Tennessee man is being hailed as a hero after his quick actions helped save a family from their burning home.
Derek Hales was up late on Saturday (September 24) when he noticed that his White House neighbor's home was on fire, a sight that he said "shakes you to your core," per News Channel 5. He jumped into action, running over to the home to alert his neighbors, said home owner Bobby Robinson.
While Robinson wasn't home at the time, his wife and two children were. He recalled the phone call he received alerting him of the blaze. "My friend across the street said, 'hey, we need to go; your house is on fire.' And I thought, 'obviously this is a joke,'" he said.
"It's surreal what you went through, and just the trauma of what they experienced," said Hales. "And I have two little ones, and they're still sleeping in my bed with me because I'm terrified if something like that happened. They sleep upstairs. I'm not sure I could get to them that quickly because of how fast that fire ripped through the home."
When he arrived home, he found his wife and children were safely away from the house and out of harm's way thanks to Hales.
"That's the first thing that my wife said, is that 'Derek saved our lives; Derek saved our lives,'" he said.
Robinson also credits his neighbor's actions with saving his family's life, saying "this would be a whole different story" if he hadn't noticed the fire.
"There's so many circumstances that had to happen just perfectly for my family to escape," he said, adding, "There's a chain of events that has to happen, and each one of them only has a certain probability. When you get to the end of it, I mean, it's absolutely amazing that he was awake, that he saw it, that my family was sleeping on the bottom floor, that he saw it when he did."