Nadasia Johnson had just nodded off to sleep when she was awakened by the squawk of a fire alarm in her third-story apartment in south Minneapolis' Whittier neighborhood.
As fire and smoke raged around her, Johnson said she ran out onto her balcony and dropped into the waiting arms of several police officers, who had scaled the side of the burning building in an effort to reach her.
She credited the officers' calm actions and quick response with saving her life.
"I thank them because I probably was going to hurt myself — I wasn't really thinking straight," Johnson said Thursday.
The blaze broke out around 1:15 a.m. March 6 in Johnson's building at 3030 S. Pleasant Av.
Johnson said she had only been asleep a short time when the smoke detector went off, causing her to wake up and run to the kitchen where she found a pan of grease had caught fire on the stove.
By then, the apartment was filled with thick, black smoke that scorched her lungs, she said.
"My kitchen is very close to my front door, so after it spread I couldn't get that far, and it was very dark and I couldn't even breathe," she said. She recalled that she was about to go onto the balcony when she remembered that she didn't have her phone. "So I tried to go back in there to go get it and I made it about halfway back into my living room and I started bumping into things, and I couldn't breathe."
Turning back, she went onto the balcony, where she heard a male voice from below, telling her to climb over the railing and he would catch her.
Moments later, she was on the ground, dazed and burned, but otherwise fine.
The voice she heard was likely that of police officer Stephen Sporny, who had been on patrol in the area with his partner, Scot Kaiser, when they got a call about an apartment fire.
Sporny said in a police report that he reached the building before any fire engines had arrived. He and Officer Zachary Seraphine scaled the apartment balconies, according to their reports. When Sporny reached the second story, he saw "extreme flames were bursting out of her patio door with heavy black smoke" and called up to Johnson to climb down from her balcony to him. She did, and he eventually grabbed hold of her and passed her down to Seraphine and another officer, Zakari Ketchmark, the reports said.
"I just know that somebody grabbed me," Johnson said.
Sporny wrote that as he carried her, he noticed "thick black smoke coming from her hair and soot on her face. I also could feel that her hair was singed and hot."
Other officers, including Shawn Woods and Elizabeth Barlow, later went door to door in the building to evacuate other residents.
Police spokesman John Elder said a body camera was knocked off an officer's chest during the rescue and captured the "flames billowing past the railing."
"There is every reason to believe she would've burned to death had they not acted the way they did," Elder said.
