“He’s my hero”: 5-year-old saves baby sister from burning cot
A little boy who suffered severe burns after saving his 18-month-old sister has been praised for his heroics during an out-of-control accident in July last year.
Jade, a NSW mum-of-four, was supposed to be asleep during an afternoon nap-time with her kids, but two of her youngsters were still awake and had found a gas lighter.
The young mum said her five-year-old son Aspen and another of his siblings started several small fires around the room and blew them out, when they lit their younger sister Nirveya’s cot - which she was sleeping in - thinking it could be blown out just as easily.
But, the plastic netting around her cot quickly went up, helping the fire spread.
Aspen attempted to rescue his infant sister from her burning cot, but struggled to lift her out.
“He tried to save her but she was too heavy and so he blames himself,” Jade told A Current Affair.
“He could not get her out. But to me, he bought time at the expense of him being burnt.”
With the cot collapsing under his weight, the pair fell into the fire and Aspen shielded his little sister from the flames.
“It burnt me when I covered her,” Aspen said.
Waking up to “screaming and the fire alarm going”, Jade said she ran to the bedroom, where she saw Nirveya’s cot “completely consumed” by the fire.
“The flames (were) as tall as I was: you could feel it, the heat from the door,” she recalled.
“I just reached in, grabbed her and put her on the floor.”
With an ambulance on the way, Jade’s sister Aisha arrived at the house at the same time as a stranger, who would go on to give Aspen immediate treatment for his burns.
“As he approached he said he was a burns specialist; that he was close by at a friend’s event, a party, and got an alert,” Aisha said.
Aspen’s brave actions meant his little sister - who could have been engulfed in the fire - was left with one minor burn to her nose.
"All thanks for Aspen, she (Nirveya) could have been disfigured from the fire if she was consumed with it," Jade said.
But, Aspen wasn’t so lucky, and faces years of treatment and operations after the cot’s plastic netting burnt into his arm.
“I don’t think he quite knows how special (it is) … what he has done,” Jade said.
“He’s my hero … he’s her hero.”
His mum said Aspen just sees the physical wounds on his body, which has been difficult.
"He says at school he wants to cover his burns because he wants the kids to still play with him and he doesn't want to get bullied for his burns," she said.
Though Nirveya and Jade carry mental scars from the accident, with her young daughter waking “up a lot during the night” ever since, the strength of her son gives Jade strength too.
“I think, ‘If you can do it buddy, I can do it too. You’ve been through so much’,” she said.
Image: A Current Affair