A Burnaby house fire a few weeks ago could well have ended in tragedy if not for a pair of unlikely heroes.
Ever since 13-year-old Deon Johnson can remember, he and his Russian great-grandmother Rimma Mussina have lived in the same house.
She doesn’t speak English, so he has learned to speak Russian.
“We both love each other,” he said. “We have a really good relationship. She’s a really nice, caring person.”
Since contracting polio at age three, the 86-year-old Mussina has had only limited use of her legs.
Going to school and work in Russia and later Turkmenistan, she got around with braces and crutches.
At home, among family, however, she would sometimes do without her artificial supports, using only her upper body to make her way around the house.
“To me, it’s normal,” said her granddaughter, Victoria Aganova, Deon’s mother. “When I was little and my mom was away, she would have a dress on and she would put me between her legs on the dress, and, because we had hardwood floors, then she would take me with her, drag me around with her on the dress.”
Her grandmother doesn’t like using a wheelchair, Aganova said, because she finds it “belittling,” so, when a fall and a broken leg made it impossible for her to continue using crutches about five years ago, she preferred making her way around the house with her hands.
To cook meals, she pulls herself onto a wheelie office chair.
Mussina moved to Canada about 13 years ago to live with her daughter’s family.
When fire broke out at their Mark Crescent home last month, Mussina’s mobility challenges put her life in jeopardy, but they didn’t stop her from saving her great-grandson.
On Nov. 21, she woke up at about 6:20 a.m.
Her daughter and son-in-law had already left for work, and Deon – her only great-grandchild – was asleep in the room next to hers.
The house was dark but she could see an orange glow reflected on the wall outside her room.
She pulled herself out of bed and into the hallway, where she witnessed an arc of flames shooting out of a hallway closet and across the ceiling to the opposite wall, she said.
She called to Deon, whose room was quickly filling with smoke.
The fire was growing between them and the way out.
Deon could feel the heat when he woke up.
“The whole house was very smoky,” he said. “I couldn’t really see anything.”
As soon as he was startled awake, however, the 13-year-old sprang into action.
He called 911 right away and then quickly grabbed his great-grandmother by the pajamas and pulled her through the arc of flames toward the front door.
“It got bigger once I got her out,” he said of the fire.
As firefighters began to arrive, Deon also ran around the building and into the backdoor to open the kennel for the family’s German shepherd.
Meanwhile, the hubbub of the arriving fire trucks alerted homestay students staying in rooms downstairs.
The real seriousness of the situation didn’t hit Deon until he got back outside, he said.
“Mostly I was just worried about my grandma,” he said.
A few moments more, and she might not have made it, they said.
“He could have broken a window and he could have gotten out, but not me,” Mussina said with help from her granddaughter, who translated from Russian to English.
Aganova couldn’t hold back the tears as she translated her grandmother’s next few words:
“She said she would have saved him, but she didn’t want to save herself if she didn’t save him.”
