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Quick thinking helps save couple

A teenage neighbor scales a fence to tell them their house was ablaze.

By EILEEN SCHULTE
Published October 7, 2006

CLEARWATER - Teenage sisters Rachel and Gillian Daniels were in the kitchen doing their algebra homework with a friend around 5:30 p.m. Thursday when they noticed a gray mist drifting by the window.

"It's kind of foggy out," said Rachel, 14.

But a few minutes later, when the girls looked again, the gray had turned to black.

"We said, 'That's not fog,' " Rachel said.

The smoke seemed to be coming from the house next door. Knowing an older couple lived there, Rachel, who stands 4 feet 11 and was a competitive gymnast for 11 years, used her arms to pull herself up the 8-foot wooden fence and peek over.

"I didn't want to do the whole James Bond thing," in case the smoke was something burning on a grill, said Rachel, an eighth-grader at Safety Harbor Middle School.

But she saw that the whole back of the house was on fire.

Rachel climbed over the fence and saw 76-year-old Fred Scofield on the patio "just staring at it."

"He said, 'We should call 911,' but seemed out of it," Rachel said.

She told her sister Gillian, 15, to hurry and get her own family's pets, Jackson, 8, a Yorkshire terrier, and Ella, 3, a former racing greyhound, outside.

Then she took Fred Scofield's hand and led him to the front yard as the windows of his house cracked and exploded.

Once he was safe, Rachel started back inside to find Scofield's 71-year-old wife, Pat, but she came out by herself.

Rachel started to go back in to rescue the couple's two Shar Pei dogs, Sam, 10, and Sumo, 3.

But the heat was too much, and Rachel's father, Scott Daniels, who happened to be rounding the corner of the house in his car at that very moment, screamed for her to stay out of the flames.

When firefighters found the two dogs, they were passed out in the smoky house.

Clearwater Fire Marshal Steve Strong and Palm Harbor Fire Marshal Jim Fletcher performed CPR and mouth-to-snout resuscitation on the dogs, but they died at the scene.

"We're just crushed," Pat Scofield said Friday. "They were our furry babies."

According to the couple's son, David Scofield, the couple own the Creative Learning Center in Pinellas Park.

He said they had lived in the house at 2951 Bethany Place for 18 years.

Seventeen units from Clearwater, Safety Harbor and Palm Harbor responded to the blaze. It took crews 25 minutes to put the fire out. The damage is estimated at $500,000. The cause of the fire was not known as of Friday.

"It's just ashes," David Scofield said.

On Friday, David Scofield and his girlfriend toured the back of the house, where the fire hit the hardest.

The windows were boarded up, ashes floated on the surface of the pool, and the palm trees were burned to a crisp. A doggie bed covered in soot lay in the grass.

As for Rachel, she said she doesn't consider herself a hero. "I just did what I thought I should do," she said.

Eileen Schulte can be reached at schulte@sptimes.com or 727 445-4153.

[Last modified October 7, 2006, 06:50:10]