On New Year’s Day, Nicole Salgado and her family woke up to intense knocking at the front door of their house in Avondale, Arizona.
At the time, Salgado's home was on fire and she had no idea.
In an interview with CNN, Salgado said that her whole family was sleeping.
“Then all of the sudden around 7:30 in the morning, we hear banging on our door and our doorbell is going off and we kind of get scared,” Salgado said.
The mother-of-four quickly ran to check on her children as her husband frantically hurried to the front door. He found their next-door neighbor, Carolyn Palisch, telling the family to leave the house.
“He opened the door and all I heard was our neighbor Carolyn saying your house is on fire you have to get out,” Salgado said.
In an instant, the mother grabbed her children and escaped the burning home. At the time, no one was wearing socks or shoes except the oldest child.
“It was just kind of frantic at first, making sure we got everyone out and the dogs out,” she said. “Then once we realized the full extent of it we were just in shock as we watched our home burn.”
Minutes after the family escaped, Salgado said the roof collapsed and smoke was filled inside their home. The mother explained how firefighters told the family if they had still been sleeping when the roof caved in, they would have inhaled the smoke and passed out instantly.
“We are so thankful to just be alive,” Salgado wrote in a post to social media and included the doorbell camera footage of the incident.
She said that the family decided to post the video to share what their thoughtful neighbor did for them.
The harrowing clip soon went viral.
“Never did we think it was going to blow up the way it did. But we are so grateful,” Salgado said. “We are so glad it did for Carol, to show how amazing she is.”
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