June 20--Jasmine Doss doesn't remember much about what happened ten years ago when a Molotov cocktail was tossed into her home--just waking up in the hospital afterward, and getting a teddy bear from Richard Rosado, one of the Chicago firefighters who saved her life.
Doss, who was 13 at the time, still has the teddy bear, and on Friday, she was reunited with Rosado and John Patton, the men who rescued her from the burning building.
Doss invited the men to the Arie Crown Theater to look on as the 23-year-old woman graduated from Northwestern College with an associate's degree in criminal justice.
"I'm just so grateful for them," Doss said as she fought back tears, wearing her cap and gown. "Ten years later, and look at me now."
The two men are practically family now, said Nancy Williams, Doss' mother. Williams got Rosado and Patton to attend Doss' eighth-grade graduation, and then wrote the fire department again to invite them to her college ceremony.
"I want to cry, I want to laugh," said Williams. "Ten years ago, that night, I was a frantic mom ... They saved my baby, and here it is, ten years later."
According to a Tribune story, on July 26, 2005 someone pitched several Molotov cocktails into a West Englewood building, sparking a blaze that sent six people -- including a 2-week-old baby -- to the hospital.
Patton said when he arrived to the burning building at about 5 a.m. that morning he heard people scream that a girl was was trapped inside. He took a ladder down the gangway and climbed up to a window on the second floor and found Doss passed out in a room inside, he said.
"I got her to the window, but I was by myself," said Patton. "I looked out the window and I saw Rich in the gangway. I said, 'Richie, I need some help, come on up.'"
Rosado climbed up the ladder and grabbed the girl, but he couldn't get down because didn't want to risk slipping off the ladder with the girl.
"He says to me, push the ladder," Patton said.
So Patton pushed the ladder across the gangway, where Rosado and Doss fell a short distance to a neighboring rooftop. Patton jumped out the window after them.
Rosado is now a commander working in the fire commissioner's office; Patton has retired from the fire department. But thinking about it still makes them emotional, they said.
"I'm an instructor at the academy also, and I always tell the guys and girls, 'we're meant to be somewhere,'" Rosado said. "John was meant to be there at that particular moment ... I turned that corner, I was supposed to be there, John was supposed to see me and Jasmine was supposed to get saved and she was supposed to live. It's touching for both of us."
Doss said Friday that after her rescue she considered becoming a firefighter herself, but decided to go another route. She wants to use her new degree in criminal justice to become a police officer.
