BRADENTON, Fla. (WSVN) — A Florida family is mourning the loss of their home and their canine companion after both were lost in a house fire.
According to Fox 13, Leroy Butler awoke to his fire alarm alerting him of the blaze. However, though the alarm started going off, it soon stopped making noise.
“It only lasted a short ‘beep beep,’ and then it was already on fire. It was gone,” said Butler.
That’s when the family dog, Zippy, started barking to alert the rest of the family to the blaze.
“He was back and forth. He was from bed to bed, back and forth,” Butler said.
The family ultimately made it out of the home, but when Butler said when he tried to go back in for Zippy, the fire had grown too large.
“The floor in the living room was all on fire, so there was nowhere for him to run out. Even if the smoke was this high. He was a short little dog. There was nowhere for him to go,” Butler told Fox 13.
By the time firefighters put out the flames, Zippy was already gone and died from smoke inhalation.
“We adopted him as a pet, so we can only, I can only say he was a good dog. He only did what he could,” Butler said. “With the smoke, he still did his job. That’s just one thing and one person that I couldn’t save and one person I couldn’t get to.”
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