Young dad thanks hero for catching his baby daughter from burning home
A young father who was forced to drop his three-month-old daughter from the window of their burning home has thanked the young man who caught and saved her.
Four adults and two children had been taken to hospital yesterday after the house fire in Dublin's North inner city.
Mark Furlong, aged 20, rescued baby Mila by catching her as she was dropped from an upstairs window down to him by her dad, Derek.
Mark Furlong tells RTÉ cameraman Magnus Kelly how he caught a baby thrown from a burning building in Dublin.https://t.co/r5S4lmxgA0
— RTÉ News (@rtenews) November 25, 2014
Mila and her sister Lola are being kept in for another night in Temple Street Children's University Hospital.
Twenty-six-year-old Derek Healy posted his thanks is on his Facebook page.
He said: "Thanks everyone for all the text & mails. Were all doing ok , thanks to everyone in the Diamond for all the help & the 2 lads who was on the scene first & helped us with Mila, life savers x"
Derek told RTE's Liveline today how the rescue happened, starting from when he screamed for help as he was hanging out his window.
“I sounded out for help. There was no one around so it felt like ages but it was only two or three minutes. The two lads came running around, I was screaming out for help. I had Mila hanging out, down low, so that the smoke wasn’t getting at her.”
“You hear people saying that smoke is the killer and it is really,” he said.
“We were screaming out for help; the two lads just came running up. I seen them coming up and I said come over to the window, grab the baby, grab the baby.”
“They jumped over the wall. [Mark] had his arms up and I let her down as much as I could and I let her go. He caught her, I knew he would.”
“As soon as he got her I got out and I landed perfectly on the ledge, there’s another roof right underneath – a tiled roof – and I landed on it.”
Derek then recalled how Mila's mother Charelene jumped out of the burning house.
“Charelene jumped down and tripped up and fell from that to the grand, and fractured her pelvis and cut her chin. She got surgery on her chin today and got all the stitches – it’s all cleaned back up. They can’t actually do anything with [the pelvis], it just has to heal itself.”
