CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. -- The acrid plume gave off a scent just strong enough to pique Raleigh Powell's interest as he zipped down Grooms Road on Sunday evening heading to what appeared to be another uneventful round of pizza deliveries in Saratoga County.
"At first, I thought someone was having a bonfire," said Powell. "Then I saw it." Kenneth and Grace Keefer's Lapp Road home for more than 40 years was crumbling under a sea of flames. The 83-year-old woman was trapped inside. Her husband, 86, and a neighbor were outside. It was around 6:30 p.m., just minutes after the blaze began. Emergency crews had not yet arrived, and time was running out.
Powell, a 20-year-old town native who's been delivering for Upper Crust pizzeria for two years, stopped and sprinted across the street. The smoke was blinding. The heat scorched his skin.
Kenneth Keefer told Powell his wife was in the bedroom. Powell shattered a bedroom window with his arm.
"I yelled for her," he said, "but she didn't come."
Powell then went to the side of the home, smashed open another window and lifted the storm window behind it.
"I couldn't see her until she came to the window," Powell said.
When Powell couldn't reach her, a neighbor ran over with a chair for him to stand on. Powell grabbed Grace Keefer by the arm and pulled, but she got caught on the way out. With the flames coming closer to the elderly woman, Powell and the neighbor pulled at her arms.
The chair snapped, but the men were able retain enough leverage to yank the woman out.
"She looked at me and said, 'Who are you? What are you doing here?" Powell said.
Minutes later, firefighters and emergency medical workers were at the scene.
Kenneth and Grace Keefer were taken to Albany Medical Center Hospital.
Powell cut both his arms on the broken glass.
"I didn't realize I was bleeding until I looked down at (Grace Keefer's) shirt," Powell said. "I saw the blood on her and thought it was hers at first, but then I felt it dripping down my arms and realized it was mine." Powell went to an urgent care site in Clifton Park, received stitches on both arms and was released.
The couple could not be reached for comment Monday, but Powell said he spoke with family members who told him the Keefers were fine and that they were grateful for what he'd done.
Another neighbor, Bob Haakanson, said of Powell: "If he didn't make it there when he did, Grace would not have made it."
Charred and gutted by the flames, the home that Kenneth Keefer built some 40 years ago may be a total loss.
"I know how devastating a fire can be," said Powell, whose family lost their home to fire two years ago. He wasn't there at the time, but the blaze swallowed nearly everything the family had.
The Hudson Valley Community College student and Army Reservist said he never thought about calling 911 when he learned someone was trapped inside.
"You don't stop to think," Powell said.
He blushed and shook his head when someone called him a hero.
"Everyone throws that word around," he said. "I just did what anyone would have done in that situation."
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
