Henderson resident honored for rushing into a burning building and saving lives
Something told William Collins to take a different route. Collins delivers donuts two or three times each week from Golden Glaze, and one early morning in May, he had just left the shop with his delivery in tow, ready to get going on his route that takes him to several stops in Morganfield.
It was about 2:15 a.m. and on those early morning runs, he typically swings by his Alves Street home just to see if all is well before he drives on to Morganfield.
But that night, he heard a voice that told him to take a different route. Instead of taking his normal path, the voice told him to make specific turns, the last directive being, “Take a left and look up into the sky.”
When he did, he saw the sky was a pinkish-red. That’s when he saw the apartment complex on fire in the 400 block of Adams Street. And that’s when he realized that “looked like Miss Mary Elizabeth (Dixon)’s house.”
He first banged on her door and when she didn’t answer, busted it down, he said. Collins said she was asleep when he got to her and didn’t realize there was a fire. When he got her out of the house, Dixon told him her 8-year-old grandson was still inside in a room in the back of the house.
So, Collins went back inside, crawling on his hands and knees to get to the back room. But when he got there, Dixon’s grandson wasn’t there.
He crawled to a front room and found him still asleep on the couch and got him out.
Throughout it all, Collins said the heat of the fire didn’t affect him.
“I didn’t feel the heat on me,” he said. “I knew God was with me.”
In fact, Collins said he said it was God who gave him the directives to take a route different from what he normally takes on that night.
“I know it was,” he said. “I know his voice.”
Collins said after he helped Dixon and her grandson, he then went to the doors of the other tenants in the complex and banged on them, and they got out of their residences, too.
For his heroics, Collins was honored with the city of Henderson’s Community Spotlight award at the June 24 Henderson City Commission meeting. He was recommended for the honor by Commissioner Robert Pruitt, who Collins said came to the scene of the fire that night.
Collins, 53, is a 1989 Henderson County High School graduate. For nine years, he worked in the Henderson County School system and later drove garbage trucks for the city, retiring after 19 years.
In addition to his Golden Glaze deliveries, he now also mows yards in the summer. He said he sometimes wakes at 12:30 a.m. to get ready for his delivery and then when he finishes hours later, starts right away mowing in the early morning hours so he can finish before the temperature rises too high. He took an early afternoon break from mowing grass recently to talk to the Hendersonian.
For those who’ve been patting him on the back and congratulating him recently, he said he’s just staying humble and giving the glory to God.
“Just give him the honor and the glory,” Collins said. “I don’t like to be lifted on a high horse. I just continue to stay humble, and I just do what I do.”
In fact, the doing what he does started immediately after the residents had got out of their apartments and fire and police arrived at the scene the night of the fire. Soon after, he got back into his delivery vehicle and went on with his route to Morganfield.
The gravity of it all, though, hit him as he was driving. He said he was “crying all the way there and back.”
Another piece of the story was that in the crawling through the apartment, Collins lost his cell phone. As he drove his route that morning, he prayed his phone wasn’t broken. Firefighters found it on the floor, and it worked, he said. “I’m still using it,” he said.
In addition to his commendation from the Henderson City Commission, Collins met with Henderson Fire Department Chief Josh Dixon, who gave him a medal for saving lives.
“I would’ve done it for anybody,” Collins said. “And I would do it again.”
