A California woman credited her hero dog with having saved her and her baby girl’s lives after the courageous pup had alerted them to a fire that had been spreading through their apartment building and even pulled the child to safety.
Nana Chai had placed her 7-month-old daughter, Masailah, in her crib and was getting ready for bed when she heard her dog, Sasha, frantically scratching at their Stockton apartment’s back door on June 3 2018.
“I thought, ‘What’s wrong with her? That’s not like her at all.’ Normally, she strolled in and headed straight to the couch to relax… but when I opened the back door, she started barking furiously at me.”
Chai, at the age of 30, said, “I was stunned, frozen, thinking, ‘Is this real?'” Nevertheless, Sasha sprang into action.
The 8-month-old pit bull pup darted into the bedroom, and by the time Chai followed her, the dog was busy trying to get the baby out of danger.
“She grabbed the bottom part of my baby’s diaper and started pulling her,” Chai explained.
Chai took her baby from Sasha, grabbed her phone, and the dog’s collar, and rushed outside. There, she called 911 and began banging on doors and windows to alert others in the complex about the fire. She added, “My aunts and cousin all lived in apartments there. I started yelling, ‘Fire! Fire!’ And then Sasha went back in.”
The dog raced back into the home, which Chai believed was her attempt to find Chai’s two older children, who were not at home as they were visiting their father at the time. Chai frantically yelled for Sasha to return, saying, “Come back!”
Firefighters quickly arrived at the scene and fought the growing blaze. “The smoke was so thick,” Chai remembered. “I kept shouting, ‘Where’s Sasha?’ and the firefighters said there’s no dog in there. But I knew Sasha was in the house.”
After the fire had been put out, Chai was allowed back into the apartment to search for Sasha and found her in a closet in the kids’ room. “My kids love to play hide and seek, and that’s their hiding spot,” Chai revealed. “She was in their hiding spot. When I found her, I started crying, hugging her, kissing her; I was so emotional.”
While Chai and her family waited to learn the cause of the fire, they were busy looking for Chai’s cousin’s dog, HP, who had escaped during the fire and had not been seen since. Chai said, “He’s Sasha’s brother; they came from the same litter. HP is very friendly and loves everyone. We were hoping someone would return him.”
Their old apartment, which had been part of a complex her extended family had called home for decades, had been damaged in the fire, Chai mentioned. Even once the property had been renovated, the rent would likely have been too high for the single mother to afford.
“We couldn’t go home anymore,” she said. “My son was 9, and my daughter was 8; explaining to them had been hard. They had asked, ‘Are we going to be homeless?’ I had said, ‘No, we’ll be fine.'”
Chai had been able to salvage the children’s clothes from the charred apartment. She and her children had been staying with her father after the fire, while Sasha had been with her aunt, as she looked for a new apartment. She expressed, “When the baby came home, that’s when Sasha came home, and they have been inseparable ever since.” Sasha had been there while Masailah bathed, ate, played, and slept, and the separation had been hard.
“My aunt had been calling me, saying [Sasha] was crying, but when I brought the baby in, she had just calmed down,” Chai had said, laughing. “She’s family.”
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