Hero Says Rescuing Boy Was Just a Reflex

Robert Mathews says it was just a reflex that led him to go into a burning house to rescue a 3-year-old boy--three times.

“What got me, there were people just standing there,” Mathews said. And he couldn’t pass the horror by.

Mathews, 33, is unemployed. But he says he was reluctant to take the $2,500 check that he won from the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission last month. It is embarrassing, he says, to profit when the little boy he saved, James Edwards, suffered such pain and disfigurement.

“I kind of don’t like to take the money because he got burned up and all,” Mathews said. “I really don’t need the money right away. . . . I’ll probably get him a little something for Christmas.”

Mathews was driving his friend Carl Knopf to work Nov. 17, 1989, when he saw smoke coming out of a house. A nightgown-clad Darla Edwards was on the roof, screaming that her son was trapped in a rear, second-floor bedroom.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Knopf said. “We saw smoke, and he stopped the car right in the middle of the road, ran to the house and kicked in the door.”

Twice he was driven back by smoke and heat. On the third try, Mathews put a coat over his mouth, took flashlight in hand, rushed up the stairs and found James unconscious and on fire. The boy was burned on 85% of his body.

“There were flames coming out of the room. Part of his arm was still on fire. The coat I had over my mouth to keep the smoke out of me I put on his arm to get the fire out,” Mathews said.

“He lost the outer part of his ears and all his fingers,” Mathews said. “I just wish I could have come along a little bit earlier.”

The boy was released from the hospital this summer, and is back at home after plastic surgery. Surgeons have fashioned thumbs out of his flesh.

The Carnegie honor is one of several that have come Mathews’ way. Warren Fire Chief Roger Hernon hopes that the publicity will get him a job.

Mathews hasn’t worked in more than a year, unable to find a job in this Rust Belt city in northeast Ohio. The area fell on hard times during the 1970s and 1980s, when the steel industry declined.

Mathews lives in a one-room apartment and uses welfare payments to pay his rent and keep his car running. He has moved from job to job, laying carpet, hanging dry wall, doing maintenance work and working as a security guard.

As a child, his family was burned out of their home. But there was no foreshadowing of the heroism he exhibited a year ago.

“It was especially a thrill to me the way he did it,” said Hernon, the fire chief. “He made an attempt up the stairs, ran back down and got a coat and ran upstairs and rescued the baby.

“The thing that impressed me most was everybody today is saying, ‘What’s in it for me?’ . . . You’ve heard, ‘Let George do it.’ Well, he was George. It reaffirms your faith in your fellow man.”