Suburban Hero: Collegian returns to Naperville home just in time to help family escape fire
The fire did everything blazes do to turn catastrophic, and Christine Sentman arrived home just in time.
The Jan. 4 inferno, spurred by the family's dried-out Christmas tree, destroyed the home where Christine lived with her parents, her younger brother and two younger sisters. But it didn't result in a loss of life, and for that, Naperville Fire Chief Mark Puknaitis said the 20-year-old Sentman deserves praise as a hero.
He lauded her as such during a recent city council meeting, when he gave her a Fire Chief's Citizen Award the day before Sentman was to head to Bradley University to begin her sophomore year.
At the Sentmans' home on Redwing Court, on a day with a low temperature of minus 8, this was no ordinary fire.
"It engulfed the entire home," Puknaitis said. "It was one of the biggest house fires we've seen in a long time."
It began right as Sentman, on winter break from school, arrived about 4 p.m. and began unloading groceries.
She told firefighters she heard a "whoosh" from the living room and saw the live Christmas tree was on fire.
The top half was ablaze when she ran halfway down the basement stairs to warn her sister, 11-year-old Chloe, and two friends. By the time she climbed to the main floor, the living room was on fire.
"I've never seen anything move so fast in my whole life," Sentman said.
Fueled by home designs with large open spaces and the synthetic materials used to make furniture and fabrics, suburban house fires now typically take five minutes or less to reach "flashover," the point at which everything in a room is burning, experts say.
With Chloe and her two friends, sisters Eyde and Molly Keen, safely out of the basement, Sentman handed Chloe a phone, told her to call 911 and had her run to a neighbor's house.
Sentman wanted to go upstairs to see if her brother, 15-year-old Jake, was in his room, but she couldn't because the stairs already were burning. Luckily, Jake wasn't home and neither was 17-year-old Claudia. Sentman then looked for a black lab named Leila.
Leila was standing near the back door, inside burning curtains. She was frozen in place. Sentman couldn't get the dog to come with her, so she had to carry Leila toward the front door. It wouldn't budge.
Puknaitis said fires cause pressure to build up, making it difficult to open doors or windows until something gives. What gave was the window above the door. When it blew out, the door swung open and Sentman and Leila were freed.
She stood outside for a short time while firefighters and police began their hourslong response. Initially, Sentman said she thought she was OK.
"I eventually started throwing up soot," she said. "My airways were closing."
She had a friend drive her to an emergency room, from which she was transferred to the burn unit at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood. There, Sentman said she was immediately intubated and remained on a ventilator for days.
After she left the hospital, she had to return a week later, suddenly unable to breathe.
She said diagnosing the cause of her respiratory distress and identifying the right treatment took time, but she was able to return to Bradley. At school, she carried a portable oxygen tank for more than two months. Friends called her "Grandma."
Puknaitis said Sentman is a hero for saving the lives of her sister, the Keen girls and the family dog.
But Sentman said she doesn't feel like a hero. Anyone in her family faced with the same scenario would have taken the same action, she said. Instead, she feels thankful.
Thankful to be alive, to have seen so much support from neighbors in the wake of the blaze, to be living with her family in a rental home in the same neighborhood when she's not at school, and to be able to continue her studies.
"It's overwhelming," she said. "So many people have helped my family and come together; it's completely shocked me. I feel so grateful."
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