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By WESLEY P. HESTER —- originally posted 02 April, 2008
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

A Chesterfield County man went from delivering the news to making it yesterday when he saved two young girls and two adults from a fire. Mike Williams, 60, was driving his regular Richmond Times-Dispatch delivery route in Chesterfield just after 4 a.m. when he heard an explosion and saw flames spilling from the window of a single-story home along Laurel Oak Road. The fire had blown out the glass.

“I immediately jumped out and started pounding on the other windows,” he said.
Williams quickly made his way to the front door in the 4200 block of Laurel Oak Road and roused Jennifer Poniatowski and her boyfriend with his knocking.

“The couple came to the door, and they seemed disoriented,” he said. “The house was full of smoke, but they didn’t even realize it was on fire.”

Poniatowski, 24, and Shaun Hankins had Poniatowski’s 7-year-old daughter, Alexis, with them when they met him at the door. He spoke to them only briefly before realizing there was another child still inside the burning room.
“As soon as they opened the door, I went in,” he said.

Hankins and Poniatowski tried to follow, but Williams, a retired officer with the New York Police Department and a Navy-trained firefighter, held them back.
McKenzie, 2, greeted Williams at the bedroom door. “I gave the baby to her mother and chased them out of the house,” he recalled. The room engulfed in flames was the youngsters’ bedroom.

“He’s a great man. He’s an angel,” said Poniatowski yesterday from CJW Medical Center (Chippenham) where she was staying with McKenzie, who was put on life support after the fire for smoke inhalation. The toddler is expected to make a full recovery.

Lt. Matt Coffin of Chesterfield Fire and EMS said his department got the call from Williams at 4:20 a.m. and were on the scene six minutes later. Williams already had saved the girls, and probably the two adults, too, he said.

“If it had been a couple minutes earlier or a couple minutes later, it would have killed them. The timing was absolutely critical,” Coffin said. “It’s a miracle they weren’t burned.”

Coffin said the blaze was likely caused by the home’s baseboard heater igniting a nearby object. The fire was brought under control by firefighters within 20 minutes of the call and the home is still inhabitable, though the one bedroom was badly damaged, he said.

The house did not have a functioning smoke detector, Coffin said. The family had removed it the day before because it was chirping, indicating it was low on batteries.

Coffin said Chesterfield Fire and EMS would nominate Williams for a Lifesaver Award, presented for acts of valor.

Williams has been running his newspaper delivery route for four years. The native New Yorker retired from the NYPD after 11 years in 1991 and moved to Virginia. He now lives in Chesterfield with his wife, Carmen. “I was just doing what I was trained to do,” he said. “As far as being a hero, I doubt that.”

Either way, the family and the firefighters were thankful. “That would have been one nightmare of a call if he hadn’t done what he did,” Coffin said.