Neighbors are speaking out after a woman was saved from her SE 19th Lane Home Sunday morning.
"This, for some people, is once in a career where they're actually going to make entry into a fire and able to remove a victim from a house successfully," said CCFD Battalion Chief Eric Wichmann
The fire department said the home didn't have working smoke alarms. Because of that, six dogs died, and the woman nearly didn't make it out alive.
"We were also removing dogs at the same time," Wichmann said. "That would do another obstacle at the same time, so that is nine other victims, on top of a human being."
Luckily, the fire department has an animal oxygen mask, which firefighters used Sunday to breathe life into three of the nine dogs found in the home.
"It's so sad that all those dogs had to die, but I don't know if anybody checked inside the house," said neighbor Tara Boccia.
Boccia knows the woman she thinks is in her 60s.
"This lady is walking, and she's in a daze," Boccia said. "I said, 'Oh, your dog's good off the leash!' She would walk ahead of them. She just kept walking like a zombie. She kind of looked like a zombie."
Cape Coral fire said the fire started after someone unintentionally left a pan of oil on the stove before leaving. There also weren’t any working smoke alarms in the home.
Boccia says she believes something weird is going on at the house.
"A lot of people say it's like a meth house," she said. "I don't understand why, but my neighbor said that he sees people out there all the time at different times, so something shady is going on."
She says she also hasn’t seen her out in a year.
Gulf Coast News did reach out to the Lee County Domestic Animal Service to see how the three dogs that were saved are doing. They said they have no information to share at this time.
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