By Scott Longman
July 11, 2022, 12:30 a.m. Union Street, Lafayette, Indiana
He took one look. This mess didn’t involve him in any way. The easiest choice was to just keep on driving. Most of the world would have.
Most of the world did.
Not him.
No hesitation. He flat-slammed the brakes.
What Nicholas Lee Bostic had just seen was a brutal house fire. Now, it’s not uncommon for an even highly lethal, horrible house fire to not show much drama outside the house, often just smoke. But this was not at all that. This was, instead, the epic conflagration kind, on a level that looked like a direct napalm strike.
He whipped the car into the driveway and bailed, running.
The front of the house was beyond unapproachable, so he bolted around back, yelling for survivors. Hearing no response, without hesitation, he immediately made entry.
Nick was not a professional first responder. Nor was he former military. Nor did he have any training of any kind for this mission. It was simply in him. Which makes it even more stunning.
He found himself inside the home of David and Tiera Barrett, of Lafayette, Indiana. The Barretts were out to a quiet dinner together, having left the family in the capable hands of their eldest daughter, Seionna, 18. She provided care for three siblings and a family friend. They had all gone to bed, and were therefore initially unaware that a gigantic blaze had started on the front porch and then involved the house.
Nick met Seionna inside on the stairs, carrying a three-year-old in her arms, and accompanied by two other children. Nick escorted them out, and immediately asked if that was everybody.
It wasn’t. Seionna hollered that they couldn’t find little Kaylani.
Nick instantly bolted back into the house.
Not “Shouldn’t I just call this in and wait for the cavalry?”
Not “I’ve done enough here already.”
Not “This job belongs to somebody in bunker gear with a Scott pack.” Nope. Not even the slightest pause for concern about his own life. He just flatass went.
Conditions had by then reached Hellscape, the house moving rapidly toward full-involvement, with the whole structure filling with thick, killing smoke and rising heat.
Once again in the structure, he punched to the second floor. Going upstairs took particular cojones, because heat rises and upstairs means hard-reducing your chance of escape, but Nick did it anyway, and he did it immediately. As he was searching upstairs, he heard her crying, and to his probable surprise, she was down below, on the first floor. As he descended, the smoke was becoming brutally thick, so he folded his shirt over his face and closed his eyes, working by feel and letting his ears guide him to her. He made an instant decision that it was too dangerous to try to make for the backdoor, so he picked up the child and rocketed back up the stairs.
There, he made his way into a bedroom with somewhat temporarily better conditions, and he attempted to open the window. When it wouldn’t open, he instantly bare-fist punched through the glass. No hesitation and glass frag-wounds be damned.
He tried to get Kaylani to jump, but the little child—no doubt understandably both traumatized and terrified—declined. Nick pulled her in tight to the left side of his body, took a good look, and leaped, with the outstanding clarity of mind to land on his right side, both protecting her from his own weight and cushioning the child on impact.
Although bleeding from numerous glass wounds, suffering from first degree burns, battered hard by the ground-hit, and choking from smoke inhalation, Nick wasn’t done yet. He scrambled out of the yard toward first responders, not slowing down, carrying the child toward the oh-so-close salvation of the medics.
Bodycam footage picks it up from there, and it approaches too-good-to-be-true: in a shot that would have made Coppola or Scorsese proud, just as first responders became aware that a little girl was still missing, Nick emerged from the conflagration, the child protected in his arms, with enormous flames billowing behind him.
Nick of course immediately handed Kaylani to first responders and then rightly went to ground.
As he lay back, paramedics put a tourniquet on his hemorrhaging arm. Did Nick ask about himself? Was he going to bleed out? Were his lungs damaged? Did the impact with the ground damage his organs?
No.
He asked: “Is the baby okay? Tell me the baby is alright.”
And because of his outrageous, balls-to-the-wall actions, she was.
Nicholas Lee Bostic. An unhesitating American Hero.
