Deputies pull burning man from car into a puddle to put out flames, Texas bodycam shows
The newly released bodycam footage from southeast Texas is as dramatic as it is harrowing.
Two deputies from the Chambers County Sheriff’s Office are seen running toward the flames, following a major crash along Texas 124, about 60 miles east of Houston.
It happened at about 8:30 p.m on Dec. 13, Sheriff Brian Hawthorne wrote in a news release posted to the department’s Facebook page.
“Where, where, where, where?” Deputy Braedon Boznango asks as a woman pointed him toward the car on fire.
An unconscious man behind the wheel of the burning vehicle can be seen in the darkness of the country night in the video, illuminated only by the flames creeping up around his body. His head rests on the steering wheel, with the blaring car horn adding to the chaos of the scene.
“Right here. Can you pull him out?” the woman frantically asks.
The flames, more fully engulfing the man’s legs and stomach with every passing second, appear too intense for Boznango to get a good grip on the body alone.
“Carlton, I need your help,” Boznango says. “It’s too hot.”
Carlton Carrington, the other deputy at the scene, jerks the man loose by what appears to be his hoodie jacket, and both of the deputies are able to pull him free from the car. But at this point, the deputies had a burning man, literally, on their hands.
“My first thought was we can’t let this guy burn to death right in front of us,” Carrington, a 20-year law enforcement veteran, told KTRK. ‘”I just remember watching the flames run up the man’s face. There was, I guess, a draft.”
So they dunked the man — where else — in a ditch, the video shows. Recent rains left roadside dips along the rural highway with standing water, which the deputies used to put out the flames on his body.
The flames from the car wreck were hot enough that Carrington’s bodycam unit started to melt on his uniform, KTRK reported. At one point during the video released by the Sheriff’s Office, the video feed switches from Carrington’s camera feed to Boznango’s.
The man, who has not been identified by authorities, was airlifted to a Houston area hospital in critical condition, Hawthorne wrote in the release. He remains in the hospital, the station reported, but has been upgraded to critical but stable.
Hawthorne called the actions of his deputies “heroic.” Neither Carrington nor Boznango, who is in his first year with the department, was injured in the rescue.
“Had these deputies not acted quickly, decisively and without total disregard for their own safety, the seriously injured man would have perished inside the vehicle,” Hawthorne wrote.
