A mysterious stranger pounded on a Las Vegas family’s front door at 4:51 a.m. on July 5, screaming about a raging fire before vanishing.
Danna Shabtai, 82-year-old father and 14-month-old son
were asleep when the stranger’s frantic knocking and doorbell ringing woke the household’s dogs.
Her sister was awake but unaware of the fire.
“My dog started barking, so I woke up and I stumbled to the door,” Shabtai said.
“I opened the door and the gentleman was yelling, ‘Fire! Fire!'”
“He pointed toward the back of the house, and I turned around and I could see the French doors to the backyard. I just saw orange — like a wall of orange.”
The blaze broke out on Old Town Drive in the Las Vegas Valley just before 5 a.m.
Shabtai had gone to bed after asking children across the street to stop setting off fireworks near her home on the night of July 4.
She scooped up her infant and raced out, then tore to her neighbors’ home to wake them up.
“I started banging on their windows and their door trying to make noise, like, ‘Wake up! Wake up!'”
Two other women helped pound on the neighbors’ door until everyone inside made it out safely.
Meanwhile, the man wasn’t finished.
“He went to those neighbors’ house and grabbed their hose from the front yard, and he was trying to put out their fire,” Shabtai said. “So not only did he wake us up, he was trying to put out the fire with my sister.”
Shabtai’s sister had already grabbed the family’s own garden hose to battle the flames spreading across the backyard.
“If he wasn’t driving by at that time, I don’t know. It would have been a lot worse before we would have even noticed or woken up that there was a fire,” she said.
The stranger disappeared after fighting the flames, leaving no name or way to contact him.
In a Facebook post after the fire, Shabtai credited the unidentified passerby with saving multiple families and expressed frustration over what she believes caused the blaze.
“This is why you leave fireworks to the professionals,” she wrote. “This guy who just happened to drive by saved our lives and our neighbors’ lives. Next year I’ll be standing outside with my garden hose and hosing down any feral kids lighting up fireworks in my neighborhood.”
Shabtai said she believes
the man spotted the fire from Lone Mountain.
The family’s Shabtai home remained habitable, but their neighbors were displaced.
“Aftermath of fire. Neighbors are displaced now because of fireworks. Luckily we don’t have to leave,” she wrote.
In the viral moment that’s drawn media attention, surveillance video shows the unidentified man ringing the doorbell repeatedly and pounding the door while flames rage in the background. He’s captured on camera in the moments before he alerted the household, standing in the driveway. Ring camera footage reveals him gesturing urgently toward the back of the house, his mouth moving as he delivers his frantic warning.
The family has since posted on Facebook asking if anyone knows who he is so they can thank him. “You’re an angel. You saved our lives, and I’m really thankful for everything that you did. You didn’t have to stop. You know, you could have driven by and said, you know, probably someone already called it in. But no, you took the time, and you woke us up, and you’re a hero,” Shabtai said.
The fire department has connected with investigators to determine the official cause.