Off-duty firefighter saves woman pulled from burning car with no protective equipment

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Off-duty firefighter saves woman pulled from burning car with no protective equipment

An off-duty firefighter saved a woman's life when she was pulled from a burning car with no protective equipment or a hose line, officials in Connecticut said Saturday.

Nicholas Perri Jr. gained access to the well-injured vehicle and successfully removed the badly injured female driver as flames entered the passenger compartment, the Brookfield Fire Department said in a statement.

The statement said that he carried the woman to an EMS and she was later transferred to the hospital. He was only minorly injured and refused transport, he said.

After the incident on Route 7 in southern Connecticut, Perri Jr. told NBC New York that training kicked in and ran in and did the best I could do to get her out.

I looked at how she was in there and then broke the front passenger window. I was able to get one of her legs free, the other was pretty mangled -- it was giving me a hard time, he said. I was just yelling, You have to work with me because we are running out of time here. Chief Andrew Ellis told the station he was among the first responders and was surprised to see a fellow firefighter.

Ellis said that there was no way that the victim would have survived had he not done what he had done.