A St. Louis man is being called a hero after catching a toddler thrown from a second-story window during an apartment fire.
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a fire broke out in an apartment building in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood around 9:30 a.m. on Monday (November 29).
Latisha Williams and her three-year-old daughter, Tayliah, were trapped on the second floor; luckily, 30-year-old Arnez Merriweather was woken up by his sister telling him there was a fire next door.
Merriweather said when he ran outside, he saw Willaims dangling Tayliah out of the window and told her to "just drop her."
"We (were) yelling at the windows to tell people to get out, and a woman came to the window and tossed the baby," Merriweather said.
Merriweather and another bystander with one arm helped Williams down safely from the second story, then he took a ladder from a maintenance truck and tried to rescue three other people stuck in the fire.
"Everyone was frantic," he stated.
When firefighters arrived, everyone was already safely rescued from the building.
St. Louis fire Capt. Garon Mosby told St. Louis. Post-Dispatch that Merriweather was heroic. "This young man was pretty instrumental in coordinating the rescues of several occupants," Mosby said. "It's good in the times we live in, when people are concerned with 'likes' and clicks and follows, that someone took action to better the situation."
Williams and her daughter were taken to the hospital for evaluation as well as another woman.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation.