Parker Ewing was asleep in bed when he felt heat on his face. He opened his eyes and saw black smoke.
"I tried to get under it but I was inhaling more and more black smoke," the 15-year-old recalled of when his family's Federal Way home burned in a fire on Friday morning.
Parker managed to crawl out the front door, across the porch and down the front steps. That's when he heard his grand-grandpa screaming for help.
"My instinct told me to go run back in there and try to save him," he recalled, noting he went back into the burning home, found his grandpa and put him over his shoulder. The family's American bulldog named T-Bone pulled at the boy's pant leg and tried to pull Parker down the hallway as the boy lugged his grandpa toward the front door. "We got him almost to the door and I collapsed because I was inhaling too much smoke," Parker said. "I woke up in the hospital with tubes down my throat."
South King Fire and Rescue firefighters rescued the two from the house, located in the 2600 block of SW 332nd St., at approximately 8:30 a.m. Capt. Jeff Bellinghausen said witnesses screamed that there were people inside. The smoke had completely filled the house to where it was only a foot from the floor, Bellinghausen noted.
Using the department's new thermal imaging cameras, firefighters found the grandfather in the front room, unconscious, and the teenager in the hallway on the floor. Both had heartbeats but were unconscious from smoke inhalation. They were transported to Harborview Medical Center, where the grandfather, Thomas Finckel, later died of his injuries. The cause of the fire is still under investigation.