Photo Credit: @WESH/Twitter
Paul and Leona Jones of Deltona, Florida went to bed one night and are lucky to have woken up. The couple went out to dinner that evening but rushed home to get out of a rainstorm. Once they pulled into their garage, they closed the garage door and headed into the house. But in the rush to get inside, Leona forgot to turn off their vehicle, which has a push-button ignition. For the following eight hours, they didn’t have any idea that their car was left running inside their closed garage.
Carbon monoxide seeped into the Jones’s home while they were asleep. Around 1 a.m., it was their cat Bella that managed to wake them up. Bella’s incessant crying roused Paul to consciousness. “She was not able to stand up at all. I carried her from underneath the bed, I pulled her out, set her on the bed, then I collapsed on the bed,” Paul told NBC-affiliate WESH. Leona, who had fallen asleep on the couch, struggled to make it to bed herself.
At that point, she managed to call 911. She was advised to evacuate the house immediately but she couldn’t move her husband at all. “He was close to death. I wasn’t quite as bad, but he was close to death,” Leona said. Thankfully, firefighters arrived at the scene right away and quickly discovered what was causing their weakness and confusion. They administered oxygen to the family and took them to the hospital.
Since the incident, the Jones’s installed carbon monoxide detectors in their home and posted a sign in their garage reminding them to turn off their ignition. “If [Bella] hadn’t cried and hadn’t woken [Paul] up, we would have never known and we would have slept through it,” Leona said.
