It is not uncommon for small children to wake in the night and come running disconcerted into their parents’ bedroom.
However, when three-year-old Olivia Newson woke her mother Amy at 2am on Nov. 22, Amy soon realized it was more than just a nightmare.
Persistent in her attempts to wake her mom, Olivia repeated urgently that she could hear an alarm.
Initially not hearing anything herself and half asleep, Amy roused herself to investigate, if only to assuage her daughter’s distress.
“I said ‘Okay, I’ll go downstairs and check it out,’” Amy recalls. “So I went outside and she waited by the door and it was the next-door neighbour’s fire alarms going off … all his alarms were going off, [even] in the garage; the whole house, you could hear it.”
Concerned and seeing no action next door to her Victoria Street home, Amy said she approached the house and tried knocking on the door – and then she tried entering but the doors were locked.
“So I went home right away and phoned the police,” Amy says. “I didn’t smell any propane or fire so I wasn’t too sure if it was a false alarm or if something else was going on.”
Amy says the police arrived within a few minutes but it took them quite awhile to rouse the house’s occupant.
“[They were] banging on the door so loudly that you could hear it at my house,” she says. “They weren’t too sure if he was awake or not.”
When they finally managed to arouse the sleeping dweller, he was disoriented and surprised to find the police on his doorstep and his alarms going off.
“The gentleman didn’t have his hearing aids in and so he didn’t hear his alarms going off,” Amy explained.
“[The police] weren’t too sure if he had left something on the stove that caused the situation, but he didn’t even know what was going on, he was just so gracious that we were looking out for him.”
Amy says she is glad it turned out to mostly be a false alarm and she shudders at how it could have played out differently.
“It could have been so much worse, it could have been that he was unconscious on the floor with a huge fire going on,” she says.
Either way, little Olivia is being viewed as a hero.
“I couldn’t even believe she heard that. Her room is the furthest away from the house, at the back corner … I didn’t hear it until I went outside,” says Amy.
“I’m very glad she was consistent with trying to get me up and saying, ‘something’s wrong, I hear an alarm going off, you need to check it out mommy.’”
