A homeless man from Houston saved a family after they let him stay with them and their house caught on fire overnight.
The unnamed family allowed Thomas Smith to stay with them after the man ended up having nowhere else to go. Smith was was reportedly sleeping around 1:30 a.m. when a loud boom woke him up.
He told KPRC he rushed out of bed and ran toward the homeowner’s bedroom, but quickly noticed smoke. When he got to the room, he was shocked by what he found.
“I jumped out the bed and ran to her room, and something was on top of her — sheetrock and what not,” he said.
Smith freed the woman from the debris and brought her outside, before running back inside to save the woman’s 8- and 10-year-old granddaughters.
Firefighters arrived after everyone was out of the the home, and nobody was hurt in the blaze.
The cause of the fire was not initially known, but KPRC reported the woman owned the house for 40 years. Her granddaughters lost nearly everything they owned in the fire, including laptops and clothes.
“Both are Angels …the grandmother for offering shelter to a stranger…the man in need for rescuing the grandmother and two grandchildren with no thought to his own safety,” one Mad World News reader commented on the site’s Facebook page. “God places Angels where needed. God bless them.”
“That homeless man should be commended for his heroic actions,” another wrote. “If I was that woman. When I got a new home, I would invite him to be adopted into her family.”
“This is a wonderful story, just don’t understand why you had to put a caption that suggested he was doing something wrong,” another added.
In another story of a Good Samaritan, a man was shot dead after attempting to save a woman from being held hostage by a gunman.
The man who tried to help was shot dead in Brazil after trying to save a woman from an armed gunman who took the woman hostage on the steps of the cathedral in Sao Paolo.
“An armed criminal targeted a victim and announced a holdup,” police said in a statement, Metro reported. “A passerby saw what was happening and on intervening, was injured by shots fired by the criminal. The passerby died at the scene. The victim, who was also injured, was helped by local police at the scene where she received medical attention.”
The alleged gunman also died at the scene, police say.