Brave Seventeen Year Olds

A lovely little story out of South Dakota

"She did exactly what we talked about. She was perfect and saved everyone"

I'm sure grandmothers across the globe say this all the time about their granddaughters. But this time, Marlys Sundby was right on point.

Marlys was saying this about 17-year-old Kaitlyn Sundby. And today’s story really begins with:

"I woke up with the sound of like wind at my door and I thought it was a storm. So I got up and I looked at my door and I saw the fire."

From that moment, Kaitlyn heeded the fire-safety lessons her grandmother had imparted during a family discussion months earlier. Instead of opening the door and feeding the inferno with fresh oxygen, she smartly and swiftly escaped through her window, called the authorities, and then rushed to her neighbor's house.

With the nearby help enlisted, Kaitlyn's sister and mother were rescued, but the baby brother was still in peril. His room lay just across from where the fire started.

And that's when the firefighters arrived, and again Kaitlyn was instrumental. The instructions she had provided enabled the professionals to quickly locate and rescue the two-year-old brother Carter.

There is a lot to take from this wonderful story. Keeping calm, knowing proper actions for deadly situations, rehearsing and/or reviewing contingency plans. Homes, sadly, can be dangerous places. This particular fire was started by a faulty bathroom fan. But with a cool head, multiple lives were saved by a 17-year-old.

That's a good thing.

Epilogue: For her actions, the fire department has honored the teenager as a "Citizen Hero". Such bravery is rarer than it should be. Though house fires occur often—2,800 times a day in America—few have such a storybook ending.