One evening in May 2010, 20-year-old musician Chris Sheeran went to a band rehearsal before watching the recently released remake A Nightmare on Elm Street in the theater. Then he went to bed in the Allentown, Pennsylvania, apartment he shared with his father, his father’s girlfriend, and his 10-year-old brother.
At about 3 am, he was woken up by a notification on his Palm Pre, an early smartphone that was popular at the time. He set it up to receive text messages when his friends tweeted, and it would play a verse of the song “big swing style” From the metal band The Devil Wears Prada.
“The color inside the room was an infernal amber, with that smoke,” he recalls. “Being in the world of heavy metal, I thought it was my fantasy.” He thought he might still be asleep, having a lucid dream. Then another notification came on his phone. He said, “That’s when I knew I was awake.”
He inhaled the smoke and realized the building was on fire. Remembering what he had learned in school, he threw himself on the ground to get fresh air. He crept to his bedroom door, and when he opened it he encountered thick black smoke.
“Some slight panic started creeping in,” he said, adding that the first thing on his mind was that he needed to get two other people into the apartment at the time — his little brother and his father’s girlfriend — outside safely.
Sheeran ran to their doors and banged hard, but they didn’t get up. Struggling for air, he ran out of the apartment, and on the street he saw two men calling 911. Once he caught his breath, he crawled back into the building and managed to get his brother and his father’s girlfriend out.
Then his thoughts turned to the other people in the building. “I ran back to alert the neighbors who were upstairs, only to be greeted by this guy who was so upset I woke him up,” Sheeran recalls. And he’s like, ‘What’s going on? I just remember yelling at him: “Fire, get everyone out!” Then everything changed between us.
Then try to wake up the family upstairs. Although he didn’t make it, they survived after the firefighters forced their way to their apartment.