CHURCH POINT — Bailey Deshotel was watching after her younger brother Blaize last Wednesday afternoon while their parents and other sister were out when their house on East Plaquemines Street in Church Point caught on fire.
Bailey recalls her younger brother running to her in the hallway with his shirt in flames. Bailey immediately told him to stop, drop and roll, but the six-year-old did not understand and began to panic.
"He told me, 'I don't know how to do that,'" says Bailey Deshotel. "So I had to push him onto the ground to stop it and eventually I had to take the shirt off of him."
Bailey sent her Blaize to their grandparent's house, who lived next door, and then went back inside to call her parents.
"Maybe twenty minutes after I am on the phone with them, I start smelling smoke," Bailey says. "Then I realized that black smoke is coming into my room and I said, 'Mama I have to leave.'"
By the time Bailey got outside and turned to look at her home, it was up in flames.
Bailey tells us that there were five of their family pets inside the house, and only one of them was saved by her grandparents who went inside to retrieve them.
"They went back in to get them," says Bailey. "They heard them crying, but no one could save them."
Her younger brother, Blaize, is in the hospital's burn unit where he is being treated for second and third degree burns on his upper body and arms. The rest of her family is receiving the support they need from family and community members, but Bailey is still haunted by what happened last week.
"Every time I close my eyes, that's all I see is him on fire," says Bailey. "And that's the last time that I had really seen him face to face, was him being on fire and then the ambulance taking him away."
The family tells us they are still not certain how the fire was started, but they believe it was caused by a heater that was on the back porch that Blaize was near at the time it began.
There is a Go-Fund-Me account set up for donations to help the Deshotel family get back on their feet and pay for medical bills.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/bless-the-deshotel-family
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