CEDAR CITY — A Cedar City Police officer who helped rescue an older man from a burning home in early January will receive an official commendation for his lifesaving efforts.
Officer Patrick McCoy is scheduled to be recognized Tuesday evening in St. George, during the annual awards dinner of the Utah Chiefs of Police Association, Cedar City Police Chief Darin Adams told Cedar City News.
As previously reported in Cedar City News, on the morning of Jan. 3, firefighters and emergency personnel responded to a fire at a residence at 320 W. 900 North.
The home’s only occupant, a man later identified as Larry Taylor, was still inside the burning building when the initial responders first arrived.
During a recent interview with Cedar City News, McCoy said he had been in the area of the skate park at nearby Bicentennial Park when he first noticed some smoke in the air. At first, McCoy said he thought it might have been a controlled burn, but then soon heard the dispatch call summoning firefighters to a residence at the end of a nearby street.
“I got there and there’s smoke billowing out the front door and the windows,” McCoy recalled. “I asked the people that were there, who’d called it in, and I said, ‘Does anybody live there?’”
After being told that an older man lived in the home by himself, McCoy said he then ran up to the front door and opened it.
“I started to try to go in and look around for him,” he said. “I kept getting lost and I couldn’t breathe, so I came back out. But I kept calling out to him and I could finally hear just kind of a faint moan, almost.”
At that point, McCoy said he ran back to his car and grabbed a sweatshirt that had been left in there by one of his children.
“I tied it around my face and took off to go back in there,” he recalled.
By that time, he said, Cedar City Fire Chief Mike Phillips had arrived at the scene and was able to deploy an aerosol fire suppression device through the basement window. Meanwhile, McCoy said he asked two officers who had gone around to the other side of the home to kick the back door open.
“I don’t know if it was the fire suppression device or them kicking the back door and the oxygen changing, but the smoke lifted about that much,” he said, adding that he was preparing to re-enter the home by crawling across the floor with his face close to the ground.
“Once it lifted, I could see just the top of Mr. Taylor’s head, like, at the top of the stairs or something,” he added. “When I went in there, I couldn’t see much. I remember crawling to him. And I remember looking on the right side of me and it was orange. All I could see was orange. The floor had caved in there, and it was fire that I was seeing. But with the smoke and everything, it was just an orange glow.”
He said he thought he found him but realized he was wrong.
“I thought I had him at the staircase,” McCoy said. “But it turns out he was actually in the doorway of the bedroom behind the staircase. So that’s where I grabbed him and started pulling him out.”
Body camera footage from one of the officers who came from around the back of the house can be seen in the clip in the player above, courtesy of Cedar City Police Department. The body cam clip ends just as Taylor has been brought to the inside of the front doorstep.
After Taylor was safely removed from the building, both he and McCoy were transported to the hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation. Although McCoy was treated and released from Cedar City Hospital the same day as the fire, Taylor’s case was more severe and he ended up spending several days at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City.
During the Cedar City Council’s meeting on Jan. 12, Chief Adams told the council and others present about the incident, lauding McCoy’s heroic actions and calling the response “a great story with great teamwork.”
Adams said McCoy had gone up to northern Utah the previous weekend as part of his regular military reserves training and stopped by to visit Taylor in the hospital.
During his subsequent interview with Cedar City News, McCoy said that during that first hospital visit, Taylor was still in the intensive care unit and unable to speak.
“He couldn’t talk to me, but he shook my hand and I didn’t think I was going to get my hand back,” McCoy said. “He got a strong handshake.”
McCoy said he then paid Taylor another visit when he went up to the Salt Lake area for military training again in early February.
“He was out of the hospital, staying up there with his family and his sons,” McCoy said. “I got to sit down and actually talk to him and kind of get to know his story and who he was. He’s a funny guy.”
McCoy said he doesn’t see his actions that morning as being out of the ordinary.
“I think anybody that would have been in my position at the right place and right time would have done the same thing, especially in this profession,” he said. “I think sometimes when you’re in a situation, you don’t know how you’ll react until it’s right in front of you and you have to make a decision.”
Although McCoy said he was hesitant to be interviewed at first, he agreed to share his story publicly with the idea that so much media coverage tends to be focused on the negative rather than the positive.
“So if my small little contribution helps paint Cedar City in a good light, and law enforcement in general in Utah and across the states, that’s what needs to happen,” he said.
Updated March 30, 10:30 a.m. to include a photo of McCoy receiving his award on March 29 in St. George:
Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2022, all rights reserved.