‘God gave me wings’: Philly woman rescued her family from house fire, leapt from second floor

Not all heroes wear capes, as the saying goes.

They can’t always leap tall buildings in a single bound, either. What they do have is exceptional courage and the willingness to exercise it during times of crisis.

This is why, to me, Philadelphia Police Officer Elauda Seawright qualifies as one.

July 15 started out like any other summer evening. Seawright, 39, and her two daughters picked up takeout from the Willow Grove Mall before heading to their Mount Airy home for dinner and a show on Disney+. But during the wee hours when the family was asleep, a fire erupted in their two-story rowhome in the 8000 block of Fayette Street.

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Seawright’s younger daughter, 12-year-old Elasia Grisson, noticed it first and woke up her mother saying she smelled smoke and could hear the fire alarm. Seawright sprang out of bed and raced to alert her other daughter, Ananda Grisson, 18, and 37-year-old Carmella, Seawright’s sister, who also lived in the home.

“I attempted to go downstairs but we couldn’t,” she told me. “The smoke was too heavy. I went in my bedroom and I looked out of the window and I said, ‘This is where we’ve got to go.’”

But the distance from the second-floor window was around 20 to 30 feet above the ground, seemingly too far to safely jump.

Seawright removed the top sheet from her bed and wrapped it around her forearm before instructing Elasia to hold onto the end of it. Seawright held tight as she carefully lowered the child out of the window. Next, she pulled up the sheet and handed the end to Ananda, and lowered her down the side of the house. Seawright then did the same for her sister. But the fire was building behind her, and as she attempted to lower Carmella to the ground, Seawright became overwhelmed by the heavy smoke. “I can’t breathe,” she yelled, before losing her grip on the sheet.

Seawright could hear her sister’s cries as she plummeted onto the concrete below, breaking her left leg in the process.

But Seawright couldn’t dwell on that in the moment; the time had come for her to save herself.

There was no one to hold the sheet for her, so she decided to jump.

There was no one to hold the sheet for her, so she decided to jump. To avoid landing on her sister, who was lying on the ground directly below on their front steps, she propelled her body forward in a giant leap and managed to land nearby. She sprained her ankle but jumped right up and headed to a neighbor’s house to tell them what was going on.

First responders arrived quickly, but practically everything Seawright and her family owned — except for the pajamas they had on that night — was destroyed.

They were banged up and bruised, but alive. Superhero Seawright had saved her family.

After stumbling across a social media post about Seawright, I decided to meet her at the apartment in Elkins Park where she is staying temporarily.

We stood on her front porch as she walked me through the nightmarish details of that night. I got to see the lifesaving sheet that Seawright had used. It’s light colored and covered with a French bulldog pattern since Seawright is a dog lover. She demonstrated how she’d wrapped it around her arm and braced one foot next to her queen-sized bed and the other against the front wall as she lowered everyone to safety. She plans to frame pieces of it.

Seawright hopes to one day renovate and return to the home she purchased seven years ago; fire officials said that the blaze started because of an electrical fire in the basement. Meanwhile, members of the Police Department, where she is a 10-year veteran, and others have been to visit and drop off clothes, food, and other necessities to help her family rebuild. Her best friend, Officer Jeanette Meizinger, who is based with Seawright in the 16th District, created a GoFundMe.

Seawright and her relatives remain shaken up by what happened, but they’re grateful to be alive. Ananda left Thursday to start her first year at Penn State, her mother’s alma mater.

Looking back, Seawright credits the quick thinking she learned in the police academy as well as a higher power for her heroic actions. “God gave me wings,” she said, “but I just didn’t know how to use them.”

She does now.