Dan Setchfield speaks matter-of-factly. He’s down-to-earth and to-the-point when it comes to telling his story, but as he speaks, there’s no mistaking that Dan is a man who’s grateful to be alive.
Understanding Dan’s story means understanding how so many of our stories begin. It means rewinding the event itself and looking beyond what could have been to a single moment when Dan, like so many others, weighed the pros and cons of an APX Alarm security system.
Dan lives at home with his wife and son in Memphis where they first met an APX representative. “To be honest, I didn’t really want it,” he remembers. “I thought we’d never use it, forget to turn it on, and forget the code.” Eventually Dan’s daughter talked his wife into the security system, and Dan agreed. They installed a two-way voice system over their kitchen counter that would eventually save their lives.
It was the two-way voice feature that woke Dan and his wife just past midnight on May 30, 2009. “We heard a woman’s voice through the panel,” Dan recalls. “She was saying there was a fire in our house and that we needed to get out.”
At this point Dan’s story becomes surreal. He describes walking to the panel and the ringing telephone and looking back toward his son’s room where he could see small traces of smoke coming from the doorframe. Meanwhile, his wife had gone to investigate what was presumably only a small fire. “It wasn’t until I walked back toward the hallway, leading to the bedroom and heard ‘crackling’ from inside his room that I told the operator to call the fire department.” Amazingly, Dan’s wife, JaNell, had remained collected. She opened the door to the room and saw her son cornered by flames and smoke: disorientated by the fire and his nightly sleep medication. She acted quickly, convincing her son to lie on the floor and crawl around the perimeter of the room to the doorway. They left with their son toward the front door to the yard, only minutes before the fire took a turn for the worst.
Dan adds, “I have a new found respect for fire and smoke because in the fifteen to twenty seconds that it took me to get my son out of the house, I couldn’t go back in.” Still calm, Dan watched as smoke poured from his house. He noticed his wife was missing. He remembered two litters of kittens trapped in the room above the garage. He tried to get back in the house but the smoke was too thick, the heat too powerful. His wife forced her way through the back door and his family met on the front lawn. “We were sitting there watching smoke pouring out of our house. That’s when we really started shaking our heads,” Dan remembers. It took only seven minutes for the fire department to arrive and only a few more minutes to remove the kittens in a single armful.
Now Dan has time to reflect. He talks about what happened, what is, and what could have been. A fire that started with a small candle his son brought home for his mother has left so much changed but so much untouched. “I feel grateful,” he repeats. His son spent a week in the hospital on a respirator and with 2nd degree burns over thirty percent of his body. His house must be virtually rebuilt from the frame up over the next eight months; But yet he’s justifiably grateful. “I think about what would have happened if [APX] had woke me up five minutes later. What would it have been like? I just don’t know what could have happened. We’re just real lucky to have that security system that woke us up.”
