Flames still flared as Everett fire Capt. Nick Adsero and firefighter Brent Duckworth made their way through heat and smoke. In the apartment unit’s dark master bedroom, Adsero went by touch — until he found a tiny girl.
“It was shocking, that this was really happening. I have a kid in my arms,” Adsero said in a Herald interview a week after the Jan. 29 fire at the Olin Fields Apartments on Holly Drive.
“We knew they were in the back bedroom,” said Adsero, 41. “I just felt on the bed and grabbed something and I kind of heard a sound.”
That sound was 3-year-old Chloe Orick, who was limp as a rag doll.
Duckworth carried Chloe to an ambulance that would take her to Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center. Then he went back inside the burning first-floor apartment.