A Boston man has received recognition for his courageous rescue. Socrate Joseph, a third-floor tenant of a building in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood, was fleeing a fire when he remembered that one of his neighbors, a blind woman, lived on the second floor.
His immediate instinct was to assist the legally blind woman, but she first “did not want to come out.”
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“I proceeded to grab her hand, but she was fighting back,” Joseph told WCVB-TV. “So in that moment, I just yanked her, put her over my shoulders, [and began] climbing down the steps with her.”
Around 3:30 a.m. local time, firefighters arrived at the blazing structure on the 900 block of Tremont and reported “fire showing from 3rd & 4th floors,” according to a Boston Fire Department (BFD) social media post.
Joseph noted that a firefighter then showed up and “took her from me.”
“It was just the right thing to do, even though she was really stubborn,” Joseph explained. “I couldn’t just leave her there.”
The woman’s injuries were not life-threatening, and she was eventually taken to a local hospital.
BFD Fire Commissioner Paul Burke praised Joseph for his bravery in a social media statement.
“His quick actions of carrying his neighbor to an exit and passing her to responding firefighters were heroic and undoubtedly saved her life in a rapidly progressing fire,” Burke said. “As always, thank you to our firefighters for quickly extinguishing this fire at great personal risk as they do every day they come to work.”
Currently, the BFD is investigating the cause of the fire.
Meanwhile, fire officials reported that the incident caused an estimated $500,000 in damage and displaced 14 persons, 12 of whom were adults and 2 of whom were children.
The Massachusetts Red Cross is providing aid to people affected by the incident.
