When Officer Michal Pietrusinski of the Plant City Police Department went for a peaceful walk in his Zephyrhills neighborhood, little did he know that an emergency would arise where lives would depend on him.
On June 23, he and his fiancée, Sharon Navarro, were walking down their block when they saw a large amount of smoke coming from the rooftop of one of his neighbors’ homes.
“That’s not right,” he said. “Those are not cooking vents. There’s no way they’re barbequing like that inside the house.”
He then saw the woman of the home running towards it with her autistic daughter in her hands. The mother also had two autistic sons who were in the home at the time.
Pietrusinski immediately grabbed a water hose nearby.
He sprayed a burning couch that was engulfed in flames, but it had little effect.
The smoke was too thick to see through and made him teary-eyed, he recalled.
“With all of the military experience and academy experience, it only helped me to stay calm, to be focused, to do what I had to do.”
He crawled on the ground and yelled out to the boys to follow the sound of his voice.
When he got no response, he sprayed himself with water, and soaked a shirt, putting it over his mouth to help him breathe.
He was finally able to locate one of the boys and safely took him outside to his mother.
Pietrusinski went back into the home and tried again to extinguish the fire and locate the other boy.
Pasco County Fire Rescue arrived on the scene at that point.
Firefighters then entered the home working their way through the thick smoke themselves, to locate the other son.
Other firefighters began to perform a medical assessment on the boy that Pietrusinski had brought outside and it was determined that he did not have any medical issues.
Captain Craig Harris, and firefighters Timothy McCormick and Joshua Casal successfully located the other son in a bathroom.
He was conscious and breathing but the fire department requested a helicopter to transport the boy to the hospital as a precautionary measure.
Pietrusinski and the boy he rescued were also take to the hospital. However, after being released from the hospital at 6 a.m. the following morning, he decided to go to work that day.
He is a new recruit to the Plant City Police Department and was sworn in on June 10 of this year.
Pietrusinski is an immigrant from Poland who came to the U.S. in 2003.
He graduated from the University of South Florida with a degree in history, but decided to take a different career path in public service.
He also served over seven years in the U.S. Navy and was a search and rescue swimmer for four years.
He stated that he did not have any formal training for fire rescue but his actions on that day were instinctual.
“I was at the right place at the right time, thank God.”