SAPULPA, OK — Grateful doesn’t begin to describe how the children and grandchildren of Catherine Ritchie feel. The 90-year-old woman had brushed her teeth, combed her hair and was preparing to retire for the night in her home in Sapulpa, located outside Tulsa, when she saw her bed was engulfed in flames.

Ritchie tried to put the fire out with pillows and blankets, but the flames licked higher. As the fire engulfed her bedroom, the elderly woman decided her best chance was to run for her life. She pushed the 911 emergency call button on her necklace and planned her escape, Ritchie’s daughter, Missy Ritchie Nicholas, wrote in a blog post.

She became disoriented in the thick smoke and hot fire, and “walked into the closet several times, thinking it was the door to the hallway,” her daughter wrote. “It wasn’t. She couldn’t find her way out.”

Catherine Ritchie’s bedroom was a death trap. “She was stuck,” with fire and smoke all around her, Nicholas wrote in a recent “open letter of thanks” on her “Sunsets & Snowflakes” blog.

Next door, 17-year-old Wyatt Hall and three other teenagers — Dylan Wick and Seth Byrd, both 16, and Nick Byrd, 14 — were hanging out at Hall’s house when they saw the reflection of the flames and smelled burning rubber. There were no adults at home, but that didn’t stop them. The teens, all high school football players, sprang into action, responding like well-trained fire brigade.

One of teens broke the glass on the front door while another called 911. One boy began kicking in the back door, and the other went to a neighbor’s house to fetch an ax.

Nick Byrd, the youngest of the boys, got into the house. He found Catherine Ritchie in the hallway, scooped her up in his arms and carried her to safety.

“Kids who are told about all the things they aren’t old enough to do saved the life of the most precious and beloved woman we know,” Nicholas wrote, heaping praise on the teens. “Courageous young men. Young men who risked their own lives, their own safety, perhaps their good standing with their parents who might have chosen for them to do otherwise, and they carried my mother out of her burning home into the street, where firetrucks and ambulances would soon arrive.”

Ritchie was shaken up by the fire, which occurred about two weeks ago, her granddaughterJennifer Sontag told CNN. She’s back to her usual, active self, volunteering for The Salvation Army and The Boys and Girls Club. Until recently, she drove around her neighborhood delivering Meals on Wheels, Sontag told the news outlet.

“Thank you for being the kind of young men who thought about another person above yourselves,” Nicholas wrote on her blog. “Thank you for staying safe yourselves as well. Thank you to your parents who obviously raised you in such a way that lead to you making life saving and heroic decisions on behalf of someone else.”

Read the full blog post here. Be sure to click into the replies to read what others had to say about the teens’ actions.

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