“Come on, get out man!” Coweta deputy speaks after pulling man from burning car

COWETA COUNTY, Ga. — A man is recovering after a Coweta County deputy pulled him from a burning car – and it was all captured on the deputy’s body camera.

It happened just after 3 a.m. Feb. 1 when deputies received reports of a vehicle fire near 1320 Highway 154.

When Coweta County Sgt. Steven Mills arrived, he found a car that had run off the road and crashed into a tree. Heavy fire shot out of the engine.

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Mills, 32, ran up to the car and used his baton to break the rear driver’s side window.

“Smoke started to billow out,” Mills said. “I yelled for someone, didn’t hear anyone. When I went up to the front window, I saw an arm come reaching out, and so I broke the front window.”

The driver was trapped in his seatbelt.

“My biggest thing was trying to get him out, if he could lean the seat back and slide out from underneath the seatbelt,” he said.

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Instead, Mills had to use a pocket knife from another deputy on the scene to cut away the seatbelt.

Both deputies pulled the man out through the back driver’s side window, legs first. By now, the fire had consumed the front seat. Mills said within seconds of pulling out the driver, the car was engulfed.

The man, whose name has not been released, went to Grady Memorial Hospital with second and third-degree burns.

Mills doesn’t consider his actions heroic, saying it was all about good timing.

“We got lucky is the way I would say it,” he said. “Because there are so many times we get dispatched to these calls and we’ll be just 30 seconds later, and unfortunately it would be a different story.”

Mills said when confronting emergencies, he’s laser-focused. “I forget everyone and everything around me and just dictate everything I got – as much as I can get – at the task at hand,” he said.

As for the rescue, he describes it this way: “It just seems like a normal part of the job.”

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