BARROW COUNTY, Ga. — Barrow County Deputy Jhancarlos Arango and Winder Police Cpl. Hunter Cureington knew they couldn’t afford to wait.
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Both officers arrived at an apartment filled with smoke and could hear a baby crying upstairs.
“Hearing that baby cry just brought me home and reminded me of my daughters ... and I just, I couldn’t let her die in there,” Arango said.
“My thought is we are going to get the baby even if we get stuck up there,” Cureington said.
Both men have children under the age of 4. Faced with smoke, they used clothes to cover their mouths as they crawled upstairs, searching for the baby in the darkness.
“I couldn’t see the tip of my nose if I wanted to,” Cureington said.
“I was in that room maybe 55 seconds to a minute, and I was struggling to breathe,” Arango said.
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The two men say in the darkness, it was the baby crying that helped them find her.
“She was crying, and she was breathing, and she was trying to get out of there, but if it wasn’t for her, I would never have found her,” Arango said.
The deputy found the child. However, the smoke overwhelmed him as he began to stand, but Cureington was there to help him up.
The three individuals would make it down the stairs into the fresh air.
“When I was able to take, in my mind, my first breath, all I wanted to do was thank God.” Arango said.
“I saw her blink her eyes, and that’s all that mattered,” Cureington said
In all, the miraculous rescue took less than two minutes from when each officer first left their car.
The 3-month-old baby, named Autumn, was transported to the hospital as a precaution but is now healthy, thanks to the actions of the two officers.
“I get to live my life knowing she can get to live her life and get to grow up, and that’s the highest reward I can get in this profession,” Arango said.
The baby’s mother did not want to do a formal interview but told Channel 2 that she is incredibly grateful for the actions of the officers and that without them, she may have been planning a funeral.
The family did lose much of their personal property in the fire. If you would like to help them, they have a GoFundMe: https://gofund.me/8c8c620c.
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