PHOENIX — What was supposed to be a relaxing morning turned into a life-or-death situation for Maddison Porter.
It was 10:30 a.m. and the 16-year-old was home alone after her family had just left for Tolleson.
Porter was about to lay down and take a nap in her room — she had a minor headache from a concussion she suffered days prior while training a baby horse. But that’s when she heard a noise.
“Things in the kitchen started to break, like glass, and I thought that someone had broken into the house,” she said.
Porter got up and tried to open her door, but it was locked.
As she got on her hands and knees to look under the door, she noticed her feet were glowing orange. After looking, she noticed her whole bathroom was bright orange.
Scared, Porter called her mother.
“I told my mom, ‘someone broke into the house, and they locked me in my room and my bathroom is on fire,’” Porter said. “My mother told me to go out through the window and run to a neighbor’s house.”
But what Porter hadn’t realized yet, was what sounded like someone was ravaging through the home was actually glass breaking from a massive fire in the kitchen.
Porter couldn’t open the door because the flames had already melted the handle on the other side of her room.
While still on the phone with her mother, Porter managed to exit the home through a window.
“I turned around and I saw that the front of the house was smoking and there were flames, that’s when it hit me that my house was on fire,” she said.
Home surveillance video captured part of the chaos that unfolded on Saturday in the North Phoenix home.
The footage showed neighbors and people passing by running to help. Porter can be heard screaming for help when she was trapped and when she noticed two of their dogs were still inside the burning home.
“I ran and tried to open the front door, but because of all the fumes and smoke inside it slammed it shut in my face,” the teen said. “My mom wasn’t home and no one else would let me go in, but that’s when you could hear my mom arriving, honking.”
When Porter’s mother, Casey Porter, arrived she saw the entire house engulfed in flames with black smoke covering most of the home.
In the surveillance video, you can hear Casey Porter screaming, asking “where are my babies at,” referring to her dogs. She then proceeded to run inside her home.
“I came around and got as low as I could and let the dogs out,” Casey said.
A goat and her two newborn kids were also rescued by good Samaritans. They suffered minor burns after a plastic crate melted and fell on top of the goats.
Before firefighters left, people showed up with trailers to help the Porter family to transport their horses and pigs, Casey Porter said.
The family rented the home for three years.
“We don’t have a guarantee that they’re even going to keep the house or that they’re going to rebuild, so we don’t know where we are going to go,” Casey Porter said.
As their future remains uncertain, they are thankful for all the support their community has shown them.
“We’re extremely blessed to have these people in our community,” Porter said. “I thank god every day for letting me be here because a firefighter came up and said ‘sweetheart, if you would have opened the door, you wouldn’t be here with us.”
The cause of the fire is still under investigation, but they believe it was an electrical wire that sparked in the kitchen, Casey Porter said.
How to help the family
Finding Hope Sanctuary & American Equipment & Excavation have opened their locations for donations and will be holding a yard sale on Saturday.
All proceeds will go to rebuilding the Porter family’s life. The yard sale will be on 7th Street, just south of Desert Hills Drive, and I-17 and Carefree Highway.
The family is accepting monetary and gift card donations by mail. They can be sent to Arizona Foothills 911 and Casey Lynn Porter at 29455 N. Cave Creek Rd., Suite 118-288, Cave Creek, AZ 85331.
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