“A rescued Rottweiler saved a sleeping Livonia family from dying in a fire house early Tuesday morning, Livonia Fire Marshal Don Donnelley said. The dog kept nudging his owner until he got up and saw the smoke in the living room. The home did not have a functioning smoke detector.”
Ironically, the family had just adopted the dog from a family in Detroit that no longer wanted it. “They rescued him, and now he rescued them,” Donnelley said.
The fire started in a living room wall in the home on Rayburn between Merriman and Middlebelt. The family had had a fire in the fireplace the evening before, and the fire may have spread to the wall space through a hole in the brickwork, Donnelley said.
The 2-year-old Rottweiler, Boomer, alerted owner John Bates at about 5:15 a.m. “He kept putting his cold nose right into my face. He was bouncing around,” Bates said, adding that that was unusual behavior for Boomer. The family’s other dog, a 1-year-old bull mastiff named Princess, was right behind Boomer.
“I thought they had to go the bathroom real bad,” Bates said. He got out of bed, let them out the front door, turned on the light in the living room and saw 4 to 8 inches of smoke on the living room ceiling coming from around the fireplace. He woke up his girlfriend, Lisa Bowden, and her two daughters, Monica, 11, and Julia, 18, who got safely outside the house. Bowden called 9-1-1.
Bates said he had checked one of the smoke detectors in the home after moving in this past November, saw that it wasn’t working, but didn’t get around to replacing the battery. He said the family took Boomer in about a week before Christmas. The dog had been living outside, tied to a chain. The fire marshal said he can’t emphasize enough the importance of having working smoke detectors in a home. If it hadn’t been for Boomer, the family would have died, he said. “The dog saved their lives.”
Go Boomer! We are very proud of you.
