Shinnecock Hills Man Celebrates 81st Birthday, Thanks Officers Who Saved Him From Roof of Burning House

Harry Fullum said that spending his 81st birthday at the Southampton Center for Rehabilitation would not have been his first choice for a birthday party venue.

But with a stack of birthday cupcakes next to his bed, and bandages on his feet, he thanked the two Southampton Town Police officers who landed him there, and able to celebrate the birthday at all, when they pulled him from the roof of his Shinnecock Hills house earlier this month as flames leapt out the window behind him.

“It’s not how I wanted to spend it, that’s for sure,” Fullam said. “But it could be worse. I’m glad I made it out.”

On the night of October 15, Fullum had just gone to bed in his second-floor apartment, which he has rented from two close friends for 30 years, when he smelled something off. When the odor grew stronger a few minutes later, he got up to investigate. He shuffled down a hallway toward the kitchen.

“I walked past the bathroom and kitchen — and the whole room was ablaze, and the ceiling was on fire,” he recalled on Thursday from his bed at the rehab center. “The heat hit me. I started to go toward the door, but I could tell I couldn’t open it before I even touched it, it was too hot. I just turned and ran.”

To escape the searing heat that was already burning his back and the skin off his feet, he ducked into the first door he came to — the bathroom — and headed straight for the window. But, as is common, the window in the bathroom was much smaller than a typical window. But Fullum says he knew he had no choice but to get his 80-year-old body out of it.

“I barely made it out because it was so small, but I said to myself, I had to get through that window,” he recalled.

Tumbling through the window, he landed on the pitched roof of the home’s first floor. He screamed for help.

He cries awoke the home’s owners who lived on the first floor.

Three minutes after the first call about the fire came in, Officer Jonathan Parsons pulled into the driveway of the house, to the sight of flames bursting out of the second-floor window like a blowtorch. One of the home’s owners was in the driveway and told him that Fullum was still on the second floor.

“I went in and went up the stairs to try to get to the door, but the door was locked and the stairs were full of smoke,” Parsons recalled. “I was going to try to kick down the door, but there was not enough space. So I went down to get a key — but then she told me you were on the roof in the back.”

As he made his way to the back of the house where Fullum had clambered out of the window, Officer Maura Torres pulled into the driveway. “There was so much smoke,” she remembers. “I heard [Parsons] calling for me in the back.”

The pair found Fullum perched on the roof, clinging to the peak to keep himself from falling, the flames leaping out of the window a few feet away.

The two officers went into the first floor in search of something that they could use to reach him. They grabbed a table and a mattress off a bed and dragged them into the yard, beneath where Fullum was trapped. Torres climbed up onto the table and pulled herself onto the roof so she could reach out and grab Fullam’s ankle and help him slide toward the edge.

“He wouldn’t let go — he thought he would fall — so I grabbed his feet to give him some support,” Torres said. With her hands on his ankles, Fullum slid his badly burned feet down the roof to the edge, then let himself fall onto the mattress below.

He was taken to Stony Brook University Hospital with second-degree burns to his feet. He was released and brought to the rehabilitation center last week, where he says his recovery is slow and painful. “The right foot especially, it hurts like hell,” he said.

Parsons said he remembered seeing on the night of the fire that the skin on that foot had been burned so bad it was peeling off.

An official cause of the fire has not been determined, but Fullum said he was told it was electrical in nature.

“They told me a couple more weeks and the pain will stop, but four or five weeks before it’s fully healed. It’s bad right now still — it sucks. But I’m lucky to be here.

“[The homeowner] said to me that if wasn’t for you yelling like you were, we all could have cooked.”