Anthony Parsons
John Haley

TRACY CITY, Tenn. — Local resident Anthony Parsons is a hero for rescuing a couple of dogs locked in a kennel beside a burning home Wednesday, postal carrier John Haley says.

Mr. Haley witnessed the rescue when he stopped at the fire while driving his postal route just outside Tracy City.

“I yelled a few times to see if anybody was in there,” Mr. Haley said.

He determined the house was empty but said Mr. Parsons, one of a couple of bystanders, remarked, “‘Yeah, but there are these dogs.’”

The dogs’ kennel gate faced the burning home, and the animals were cowering in a shelter made from a plastic barrel, he said.

“You could see it was going to be just minutes before they were dead,” Mr. Haley said. The blaze already had spread to a truck beside the house, and wind was feeding flames that reached 40 to 50 feet high, he said.

A truck beside the house and the dogs was in flames, “and who knows when that (gas) tank was going to blow up,” he said.

The dogs by that time had come out in panic, he said. Mr. Parsons shielded himself with a coat, then ran over and grabbed the kennel structure, he said.

“When he lifted it up, they ran out,” Mr. Haley said.

“He risked his life to save the dogs,” he said.

But 29-year-old Mr. Parsons dismisses the recognition with an embarrassed laugh.

“My wife knew the dogs were in there. She wasn’t having it any other way so I knew I had to do something,” he said.

“I thought the dogs had done got out, but she said they were in the barrel, and they were,” he said. “When the barrel started melting, they came out.”

His efforts were “no big deal,” he said. “You can’t just watch something like that.”

He said the dogs’ owner, Bobby Layne, later checked on the charred remains of his uninsured home.

Mr. Layne said his family lost everything in the Meadows Road fire but he was thankful his wife and children, Zachary and Carrissa, weren’t home when it happened.

One dog inside the home is feared dead, but the family is thankful for what Mr. Parsons did.

“I shook hands with him, I hugged him and told him how much I appreciated it,” he said. The dogs and family are staying with friends in Palmer, Tenn., he said.

Mr. Parsons said he did only what anyone else would do.

“Us rednecks, we’ve caught enough cars on fire, fire don’t bother us,” he laughed. “We know when they’re fixing to blow up.”