Neighbor saves three from burning house in Buffalo, Minnesota

Three people in Buffalo, Minn., are alive and uninjured after a neighbor ran into their burning home Wednesday afternoon and ushered them to safety.

Matthew Stewart was on his patio around 3:15 p.m. with his fiancée, Reanna Schlosser, when they noticed an eerie smell, like a bonfire. Fifteen minutes later, they heard the loud sound of glass breaking.

They looked down the street and saw the third floor of a nearby three-story duplex was engulfed in flames. Stewart grabbed a fire extinguisher from his garage and ran two houses down on 4th Avenue.

"I pounded on the door several times, saying, 'Your house is on fire, you need to get out!'" Stewart said in a phone interview Thursday.

An elderly couple and a younger woman on the first floor had been unaware of the thick, black smoke billowing from one of the upper floors. The older woman thought a fourth person living there might still be upstairs.

Stewart ushered the three outside, along with a cat that also made it out safely. Inside the house, he climbed a winding set of stairs, breaking the latch on a door leading up. Looking up the stairs, he said, it was pitch black with smoke. He called out, but after about 30 seconds needed to retreat outside for fresh air.

In an interview, Schlosser said that she yelled to him, "Don't go back in!"

If he had stayed much longer, Stewart said, firefighters "probably would have done a body recovery of myself."

The fire is believed to have started in the kitchen area on the third floor and was extinguished before it caused major damage, said Buffalo Fire Chief John Harnois. No one was hurt.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation, Harnois said.

"It is a good thing they noticed it," he said. "It's good people watch out for each other."

Schlosser said she is proud of Stewart, who never hesitated to jump in and help neighbors whom they recognize but don't know well.

Schlosser, who said she has seen many traumatic things in her job as a nursing assistant, was grateful everything turned out as well as it did.