ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - The St. Louis Fire Department is lauding the efforts of a man who helped save multiple people and caught a 3-year-old girl who was tossed from the second story of a burning apartment building on Monday.
Arnez Merriweather, 30, lives next to the Hillvale Apartments in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood of north St. Louis. He says he ran to the fire and looked up to see a mother dangling her little girl from the window, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
"We (were) yelling at the windows to tell people to get out," he told the Post-Dispatch. Then he shouted to the woman with the girl: "Just drop her!"
Merriweather caught the child and handed her off to someone else. Then he and another man with one arm helped support the mother as she climbed out of and dropped from the second-story window.
St. Louis fire Capt. Garon Mosby confirmed the report with multiple witnesses as the scene.
"This young man was pretty instrumental in coordinating the rescues of several occupants," Mosby told the Post-Dispatch. "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."
Photos of the rescue and of Merriweather (pictured in a red hoodie) were shared by Post-Dispatch photographer Robert Cohen:
The fire department says the child and four other occupants of the building were treated for injuries. Three people were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The fire reportedly began in a boarded-up, vacant unit and an arson investigation is underway.
Merriweather says he sells mattresses for a living and is very fit as he jogs five miles every morning. He told the Post-Dispatch his sister woke him up to alert him of the fire that morning.
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