One night in May 2010, musician Chris Sheeran, then 20, went to a band rehearsal before seeing the new version of a nightmare on elm street in the theater. She then slept in the Allentown, Pennsylvania, apartment that she shared with his father, his father’s girlfriend, and her 10-year-old brother.
Around 3 a.m., he was woken up by a notification on his Palm Pre, one of the first smartphones that was popular at the time. She set it up to receive text messages when his friends tweeted, and it would play a riff from the song. “Big Wavy Style” from the metal band The Devil Wears Prada.
“The color inside the room was this hellish amber hue, with this smoke,” he recalled. “Being in the heavy metal realm, I thought it was my imagination.” He thought that he might still be asleep, having a lucid dream. Then another notification rang on his phone. “That’s when I knew he was awake,” he said.
He breathed in smoke and realized that the building was on fire. Remembering what she was taught at school, she dropped to the ground to breathe clean air. He crept to her bedroom door, and when he opened it, he was met with thick black smoke.
“She started to panic a little bit,” she said, adding that the first thing that went through her mind was that she needed to get the other two people out of the apartment at the time, her little brother and her father’s girlfriend. .
Still in his boxers, Sheeran ran to the doors and banged furiously, but they wouldn’t come up. Struggling to breathe, 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’s girlfriend and his father out. .
His thoughts then turned to other people in the building. “I ran back to alert the neighbors upstairs, only to be greeted by this gentleman who was extremely upset that I woke him up,” Sheeran recalled. “And he says, ‘What’s going on?’ I just remember yelling in his face: ‘Fire, get everyone out!’ Then everything changed between us.”
Later he tried to wake up the family on the top floor. Although she was unsuccessful, they survived after firefighters forced his way to his apartment.
