‘You got to help:’ Paper delivery man saved woman from deadly Pawleys Island house fire
Paul Diaz was delivering newspapers when a red glow across the street caught his attention.
Diaz was dropping off copies of the Coastal Observer at Litchfield Restaurant when he thought the nearby church cemetery was on fire. He called 911 just before 5:30 a.m. Thursday.
He ran across the street so he could describe the scene to an emergency dispatcher when he realized the fire was coming from a two-story house just behind the stone wall of the cemetery.
Diaz saw a woman standing on a balcony of the burning house on Windy Lane. She held a small poodle in her arms.
“I asked her to come down and she said she couldn’t because the flames were at the bottom of the steps.” Had she tried to jump off “she would have hurt herself and probably me,” he said.
Diaz instructed her to come down the steps as far as she could.
“I asked her to meet me halfway and I grabbed her and pulled her off the steps,” he said.
By the time the woman and dog had been pulled to safety, flames “took over” the rest of the stairs.
That was when the woman told Diaz that her parents were still inside the house. He said he ran to the back of the house to see if he could get in the door but it was too late.
“By that time, the flames were all out in the open.”
The woman’s parents were killed in the fire, Midway Fire Rescue spokesperson Mark Nugent said. They were in their 70s and had lived in Pawleys Island on Windy Lane for about five years, according to neighbors.
“I just wanted to help the lady out. There was a fire. You don’t just go by and sit there and videotape the damn thing and watch it. You find out if there’s somebody in it,” Diaz said.
“I just felt a little heat on my face,” Diaz said. The incident got him “pretty riled up” for his second job in construction, where he spent his afternoon.
“You got to help each other,” he said.
Neighbors and public records indicated Herman and Sherry Pauley lived at the residence of the fire and were deceased. The Georgetown County Coroner’s Office said it could be weeks or months before a positive identification was made.
‘They were good neighbors’
By the time Midway Fire Rescue arrived at the scene, the flames had spread to a second house.
The house belongs to Quinn and Diane Parker, who live in Raleigh, N.C., most of the time and keep “nothing precious” in their second home in Pawleys Island.
Quinn Parker works in the area and typically stays in Pawleys Island on weekdays. Snow in Raleigh on Monday kept him from driving south this week.
The Parkers called the Pauleys “very good friends” and neighbors.
“I always told [Herman Pauley], we’ve lived in our house in Raleigh for 22 years. We have never been to any of our neighbors’ houses . . . and they’ve never been to ours,” Quinn Parker said.
“To find something like that, to find people you’re connected to, that is special,” he said.
Midway Fire Rescue Division Chief Mark Nugent said the house’s smoke detectors were activated.
“(The couple’s daughter) said the smoke alarm went off and her dad was beating on the door,” Nugent said. “Everything worked like it was supposed to.”
More than eight hours after the fire, the scene remained roped off with police tape several houses down from the site.
The State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) was investigating the site, which Nugent said was normal protocol for a deadly fire.
Nugent said at this point he has “no reason to believe it’s suspicious,” although the case remains under investigation by SLED.
This story was originally published January 9, 2022 at 6:58 AM.
