Chandler officer, off-duty firefighter save woman from burning truck
By: -----
Mesa, AZ - A Chandler police officer says he was in the right place at the right time to help save a woman who was trapped in a burning truck on an East Valley highway Tuesday morning.
The collision happened in the westbound lanes of the U.S. 60 Superstition Freeway near Val Vista Drive just before 7 a.m.
According to the Arizona Department of Public Safety, a woman was slowing down due to traffic congestion when her pickup truck was rear-ended by a cement mixer. The collision caused her truck to catch fire.
Multiple troopers and fire crews were dispatched, but a Chandler police officer and an off-duty firefighter were already in the area.
Officer Brian Larison was on his way in full uniform on his police motorcycle to work from east Mesa when he saw traffic slowing in front of him, followed by a truck hitting the median and rolling halfway onto its side.
“Something I didn’t expect on the way to work, for sure,” he said.
Black smoke was visible on ADOT cameras, billowing from the pickup truck.
Officer Larison turned on his lights and made his way through traffic to the burning truck.
“Can you get out?” Larison asked in a helmet-camera video released on Tuesday afternoon.
Flames can be seen shooting out of the back of the truck.
Two other bystanders tried to break the driver’s side window because the door wouldn’t open, but Larison told them to get out of the way so he could use his baton.
The helmet-video shows another man using a small fire extinguisher to battle the flames.
After a few hits, the window shattered.
“Get out! Get out!” he said to the woman on the video.
An arm is seen coming out of the window, but she was still stuck.
“My thought was, I’m not going to let her burn up,” he said. “She’s not dying.”
More oxygen came through the broken window, and Larison says the fire began to spread from the truck bed to the cab.
As the woman began to step out, the truck fell back onto all four tires, and she was still stuck inside.
Then Larison noticed a man wearing fire gear heading his way, but he wasn’t coming from a responding fire engine.
“Get her out, dude,” Larison said in the video.
The off-duty firefighter then pulled the woman out of the burning truck through the broken window.
He asked if anyone else was in the truck, and the woman said no.
“Luckily, I had somebody there who’s a fireman who had that fire retardant suit,” Larison said. “He just happened to be there, and reached in and grabbed her, and then we got her to safety”
Larison says he helped the firefighter carry her away from the truck right before it was fully engulfed in flames.
“Relax relax relax, we got you,” he told the woman in the video.
She continued to say “Help me” as the two men carried her.
“I’m glad you’re here, brother,” Larison told the firefighter in the video.
“She was hysterical, as anyone would be,” Larison later said. “She clung to me on the side of the road, and I just held her.”
Larison called the woman’s husband to tell him what happened, then handed the phone to her so she could talk to him before being loaded into an ambulance.
Larison then asked her if she was OK as she returned his phone.
“And she goes, ‘Yes, thank you for saving my life,’” Larison said.
The chain reaction crash also involved five other vehicles, but no one else was seriously hurt.
Larison says he typically takes the Loop 202 to work but decided to take the 60 freeway at the last minute.
“Right place, right time, I guess,” he said, adding that it’s all part of the job.
“I signed up for this. I was a Marine before I became a cop, and I’ve been doing it since I was 18 years old,” Larison said. “The contract says payable with life, if necessary. That’s what we do.”