Woman Saves Dog, Dog Returns the Favor

May 1, 2001 Willard, Missouri, USA

A four-week-old Black Lab/Border Collie puppy certainly began life on the wrong foot when her owner tried to drown her.

But the pooch got a lucky break when Dawn Wyman happened by.  Ms. Wyman rescued the dog from death and afterward brought the dog into her own home, to offer a new life.

This all happened three years ago, and now you wouldn't think "Sarah Grace" would remember at all the incident that happened to her when she was a newborn pup, right?

Late Sunday night, as Ms. Wyman was preparing to go to sleep, Sarah Grace went into an unexplained frenzy and wouldn't leave Ms. Wyman alone.

"She would not let me go to bed," the woman recalls. "She was running around, trying to get me to follow her."

Ms. Wyman, perhaps begrudgingly, got up out of bed and followed the little dynamo into the kitchen, where the dog ran to the garage door and began scratching at it furiously.

Probably a racoon or a squirrel, the woman thought as she opened the door.

She surely didn't expect to see a room engulfed in flames.  As Fire Chief Gary Wirth would explain later, an electrical fault caused some flammable materials to ignite, and the blaze spread rapidly to the house.

Ms. Wyman immediately ran for her 15- and 16-year old daughters.

"I screamed bloody murder for Amber to wake her sister up,” she recounts. "They called 911 and escaped the fire, which was spreading to the home."

Firefighters soon arrived on the scene, but not in time to save the Kennedy Road house from ruin.  However, thanks to a certain furry, four-legged hero, an entire family escaped injury.

The Wymans, all alive, thanks to each other.
Photo: Steve J.P. Liang / News Leader

Says Fire Chief Wirth, "I told them that night, 'Hey, you owe your lives to the dog.'"

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