A New Jersey man in town visiting family got a Greensburg woman to safety Thursday morning as a fire next door began spreading to her home.

Gary Demus happened to be riding along Harrison Avenue around 9 a.m. with his cousins Cheryll Chakrabarti and Kevin Conaway, both of Hempfield, on the way to a haircut appointment when they noticed thick smoke.

Demus jumped out and tried to get to a home that was on fire. Heat and smoke pushed him back.

“I started choking because the smoke was coming out fully now,” he said. “My first reaction was I hoping nobody was in there.”

He quickly moved to the neighboring home a couple feet away. He banged on the door, waking the woman inside.

“She didn’t believe that there was a fire until she came out herself and looked,” Demus said. “And I heard the glass (windows) pop from the basement, and the flames shot across into her house.”

Chief Tom Bell said the fire had spread to the second floor of the original house and the rear was engulfed by the time firefighters arrived. Flames had jumped to the neighboring home, and crews stayed inside of it to make sure it didn’t catch fire. The second home had mostly water damage, Bell said.

“The wind played a huge factor here,” he said. “The wind was just whipping this fire up and down.”

Firefighters worked for a couple hours as flames kept appearing in the charred remnants of the home where the fire began. Two ladders were aimed at the roof and second floor from trucks parked on Harrison Avenue.

“It gets in the basement, it gets in the walls … it’s a tough thing to fight, and we got close quarters up here,” Bell said.

No injuries were reported. A state police fire marshal is investigating.

The woman who escaped the neighboring home watched from the sidewalk throughout the morning. Children who live with her were not home at the time. Occupants of the home where the fire started were in the process of moving out.

The woman’s parents, Tina and Ed Underwood of Ruffs Dale, said she had lived there for 10 years. Tina Underwood could not hold back tears when thinking about the bravery of Demus and his family, whom they did not know.

“So grateful,” she said. “That’s my only daughter. I don’t know what I would do without that child.”

Ed Underwood said he appreciates that someone stopped to help and that his daughter was safe.

“I can’t wait to meet this person who knocked on her door,” he said.

Chakrabarti, who said she is a member of late jazz pianist Billy Strayhorn’s family, didn’t think twice about stopping.

“My thought process is that someone might be in that house and I had to stop because that was the right thing to do. It was worth the risk,” she said. “I’m really grateful that we were at least able to notify her so that she was able to get out of the house.”

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