Chicago Police Officers Greg Klups and Felix Tomalis were on routine patrol early this morning in the New City neighborhood, heading down South Fairfield Avenue with the windows of their squad car slightly cracked, when they smelled smoke.
“There was a lot of smoke down by the street. We couldn’t see where it was coming from,” said Klups, 29, who’s been an officer for five years. “We drove around for about 30 seconds, going through the alleys and looking to see where the smoke was coming from.”
They finally saw smoke billowing from the roof of a two-flat in the 4300 block of South Fairfield Avenue. What happened next may have saved the lives of nine people, including six children. And it earned the 9th District officers praise from their superiors.
In a telephone interview later today, Klups gave this account:
He and Tomalis, 41, on the force for three years, ran upstairs to the second-floor apartment and found the front door locked. They started knocking and kicking the door to awaken the family inside.
After a next-door neighbor yelled to the officers that children were living in the apartment, the officers kicked in the door. Thick black smoke started to pour out.
“You couldn’t see two feet in front of you,” Klups said. “We were staying pretty low. The first door we seen off the living room, we opened. And that’s when we seen the bed there. We kind of felt around (the bed) and there was two kids in there. There was a 13-year-old and an 8-year-old sleeping in the bed. We woke them up and said, ‘Come on. You’ve got to go outside.’ “
The officers wrapped the children in blankets and Tomalis led them through the smoke to safety. At the same time, Klups walked to the kitchen at the back of the home, continuing to search for residents. He saw a back door, but he said he wasn’t sure if it lead to an upstairs bedroom or the apartment below.
“There was real thick smoke in the kitchen,” Klups said. “(Tomalis) and I opened the kitchen windows to get a few quick breaths before opening the door. We just kept moving forward, feeling around with our feet, because we didn’t know if there were stairs going down and we didn’t want to fall.”
It was then that the 13-year-old standing outside yelled up to them that the stairs led to an unoccupied attic.
Klups and Tomalis turned around and ran to the downstairs apartment. They knocked on the door, Klups said. When a man answered, the officers told him to get his family out of the house. The three of them awakened the rest of the family, carrying out the children as they fled the burning house.
“They honestly didn’t even know what was going on,” Klups said. “I don’t know how anybody could be sleeping with all that smoke in there. It could have been bad if the house really got going quick.”
Fire investigators later determined that an electrical spark caused the fire. No working smoke detectors were found in the apartments, police said.
Awaiting the arrival of Chicago Department of Human Services representatives, Klups and Tomalis sat in their squad car with several of the children as the rest of the family sat in their pickup truck to keep warm.
Police spokeswoman Laura Kubiak said the two officers’ heroics would be honored with a recommendation for a life-saving award.
Klups called the possible commendation a “big honor.” But he said: “That’s what we get paid for. We got to be out there doing our job. I’m just glad nobody got hurt. Right place at the right time — I guess you could call that.”
Kubiak said none of the residents in the home were injured in the blaze.
