A 58-year-old Navy veteran sprang into action to help save an elderly man from a burning home in Riverhead yesterday afternoon.
“It’s the military training,” Joe Hofmann of Glenwood Village said this afternoon. “You don’t think. You react,” he said. “I saw somebody needed help. I just jumped.”
The person in need was a resident who lives around the corner in the quiet 55-and-over Riverhead community. Hofmann was leaving his home, stopped at the corner and looked for traffic. Instead, he saw smoke billowing out from a home down the road.
“Instead of turning left, I turned right,” he said. “When I pulled up, a man outside the house asked if I could help him get his bedridden father out of the house,” he said.
Hofmann jumped out of his truck and ran to the house. The side of the home was in flames, he said. Firefighters weren’t yet on scene.
He helped the son get his father out of bed and safely out of the house.
At that point, fire trucks were arriving on scene.
“I didn’t want my truck to be in the way, so I shook the man’s hand and got back in my truck and left,” Hofmann said.
Last night, Hofmnan found he was having trouble breathing. His girlfriend Diane Barba took him to Peconic Bay Medical Center for evaluation.
“The fumes were noxious,” Hofmann said. Medical staff gave him oxygen and ran tests — checking his carbon monoxide and oxygen levels. They also did an EKG.
Everything checked out okay, he said.
“I was just glad to be able to help,” Hofmann said.
Riverhead Fire Department Chief Tim Corwin said the cause of the fire remains under investigation, but it appears to have been sparked by a discarded cigarette that found its way under the home.
“The family saw smoke coming into the kitchen from behind the stove,” the chief said. “Fortunately everyone was able to safely evacuate,” he said.
And that’s thanks in no small part to a quick-thinking, military-trained neighbor.
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