Dmitri Ganis looks like he’s seen better days.
The 11-year-old has burns on his forehead and cheek and a thick bandage on his left arm. When he breathes, it sounds like a wheeze. And when he speaks, his words are incoherent.
To his parents, none of that matters, because he’s alive. When the Ganis family’s Burnaby condo went up in smoke and flames on Monday, that much seemed unlikely.
“I thought, ‘He’s going to burn alive in there,’” said Dmitri’s father George. “If it wasn’t for those guys, Dmitri wouldn’t be here.”
“Those guys” are Michael Von Hatten and a neighbour named Fred -- no last name given. The two of them rescued Dmitri from a window in the back of the burning building after flames had made him impossible to reach from the front door.
When firefighters arrived on the scene, the rescue was already complete. Greg Mervin, chief fire prevention officer for the Burnaby Fire Department, said it’s rare for neighbours to intervene during fires.
“It doesn’t happen that often, but in this case it made the difference,” he said.
For Von Hatten, there was never any other option but to help.
“It’s what you’re supposed to do,” he told CTV News. “You’re supposed to help people when they need it.”
The fire started in a closet in the hallway of the Ganis home. When George Ganis smelled smoke, he asked his wife Vivian Haris Ganis to check on it. The stove wasn’t on in the kitchen, but when she got to the hallway, she saw it was already engulfed in flames.
Vivian ran out the front door and pulled the fire alarm. George ran to the hallway to try to get to Dmitri.
“I burned my hand and burned my head and the smoke was so intense, I couldn’t go through,” he said.
When Von Hatten heard the alarm, he was initially slow to react.
“Every fire alarm I’ve ever heard has always been a false one,” he said.
Once he saw his neighbours in the hallway screaming that their son was trapped, however, he snapped into action.
Von Hatten grabbed a fire extinguisher from his unit and tried to put out the blaze, but the smoke was too thick in the Ganis condo to be able to see or breathe.
Back outside the condo, Fred asked Von Hatten if he had access to a ladder. As the building’s caretaker, he has access to some 6-foot ladders, but not a ladder tall enough to reach the window of the Ganis home on the second floor.
A contractor doing work on the building had 20-foot ladders, but Von Hatten didn’t have the key to where they were kept. Instead, he grabbed a pair of bolt cutters.
Von Hatten and Fred cut the lock to retrieve a tall ladder, then brought it to the window where Dmitri was trapped. When Fred brought the boy down, his face was black from smoke, and he was coughing up soot, but he was alive.
“It was very scary,” said Vivian Haris-Ganis of the fire. “I thought, I don’t know if he’s going to make it. I did actually think that we had lost him.”
If it weren’t for their neighbours’ quick thinking, things would be very different today.
“I couldn’t save him,” said George Ganis. “I wouldn’t want to live.”
Both George and Vivian said they feel forever indebted to their neighbours for saving their son. Even the firefighters are impressed by their actions.
“I’d say that was a heroic move by those neighbours,” Mervin said.
Von Hatten doesn’t consider himself a hero, though. He said he did what needed to be done. And now that the Ganis family will be coming home to a house that’s been destroyed, he’s prepared to do it again.
“We’ll all band together around here and give them what they need,” he said.
Members of the public interested in helping out the Ganis family are asked to email tudorvillage@live.com.
With files from CTV Vancouver's Jon Woodward
