For J.B. Hawes, it was every parent’s worst nightmare. A major fire at home while his five year old son Aden slept and he was far away on a business trip. Thankfully for the Hawes’, they had an extraordinary nanny. 22 year old Alyson Myatt ran through a wall of 400 degree flames, barefoot, to get to Aden and then carried him out of the burning house without regard to “excruciating” third degree burns on the soles of her feet.
The fire started when a broken ventilation fan in the bathroom, which had already caught fire once during the night, fell out of the wall and burst into flames around 6 a.m. Tuesday. Myatt, whose room was in the basement of the house, woke to the scream of fire alarms. She didn’t stop to think, or find shoes, she just ran upstairs to find Aden. Myatt told Ann Curry of the Today Show that, when she reached the upstairs hall all she could see were “flames all down the hallway and the bathroom door was on fire, because I hadn’t shut the bathroom door before this big fire, so there was no way to avoid the flames.” But Myatt wasn’t deterred. She yelled for Aden, and realized that he was trapped on the other side of the fire. She would have to run across burning carpet to get to him.
“I didn’t even think about me getting hurt or getting burned,” Myatt said. ”I really didn’t even think that I was barefoot. I was just yelling for Aden and I ran and got him. All of it happened really quick.”
Local Shelbyville Fire Chief Willard Tucker told the Courier Journal newspaper that, “To physically run through flames is heroics to the Nth degree. To make a choice to charge right through flames is kind of above what are normal heroics.” Tucker made it very clear, if Myatt had waited for the fire department to rescue Adan, he wouldn’t have made it.
Hawes knows exactly how much he owes this courageous young woman. ”There are no words to put how grateful I am to have my son with me, how grateful I am to have Alyson in our world, and it’s just one of those things you can’t put any value on,” he told the Today Show. ”There’s no price to be paid. It’s a debt that will never be able to be repaid.”
Myatt will be in the hospital for at least another week, though she has no health insurance and isn’t sure how she’s going to pay for her care, which may involve skin grafts on her feet. When she gets out, Hawes has made it clear that she always has a place with the family. ”Alyson is part of the family,” he said. I know that she’s got her family to go to, but I’ve got to find another place so that she can come home.”
