The new year had just begun, but little did the Salgado family know that their 2021 was off to a horrible start. If it wasn’t for their neighbor, they might not have lived to see another day.
“We were all asleep,” Nicole Salgado told CNN. “Then all of the sudden around 7:30 in the morning, we hear banging on our door and our doorbell is going off and we kind of get scared.”
Their house in Avondale, Arizona was on fire and had their neighbor not woken them up they would have been trapped because minutes after they escaped the roof collapsed.
It was 7:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day when the family of six heard loud banging on their front door. The noise startled Salgado and her husband, who rushed to the front door, while she ran to check on their kids.
“He opened the door and all I heard was our neighbor Carolyn saying your house is on fire you have to get out,” Salgado said.
Their doorbell camera captured the frantic moment Carolyn Palisch started banging on the Salgados’ door.
The family didn’t know it, but their house was on fire. Salgado quickly gathered her children, who were all barefoot except for her oldest, and ran outside.
The family’s dogs also escaped.
“Then once we realized the full extent of it we were just in shock as we watched our home burn.”
A GoFundMe account was set up to help the family. More than $50,000 was raised. They also received $25,000 to put towards a new home from 84 Lumber.
Salgado credited her neighbor Carolyn with saving her family’s life.
“If it wasn’t for her it’d be a totally different story,” she said. “We feel so thankful to her. We’re always going to consider her family. She not only saved us, she saved our kids.”
I hope if I ever find myself in a similar situation that someone alerts me to danger like Carolyn alerted her neighbors. Thank you, Carolyn.
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