September 7, 2008

An intellectually disabled young man is being praised for saving his family after a house fire in which a family friend perished yesterday.
Ray King, 51, died when flames engulfed a sleepout he was sharing with David Dahm in Miro Street, Upper Hutt.
Mr Dahm, 21, who received burns, rushed into the family home to wake his parents and five siblings who managed to flee outside before the blaze consumed the house.
'If he hadn't have come in, I think it might have been a lot worse,' Mr Dahm's father Les said last night.
Les Dahm said smoke alarms had failed to go off and the house was already on fire when his son alerted them.
'You watch the ads on TV and it's absolutely like that. It's that fast. It's a 1940s weatherboard home so it's all dry wood,' he told the Sunday Star Times.
Mr King's daughter's Michelle King also praised David Dahm, saying that her father would have been proud.
'Dad shared the sleepout with David so they were really close,' she told the paper.
'What David did was amazing. He did everything he could to save my father and the Dahm family. He is a true hero.'
Mr King's body was found by firefighters in the two-bedroom sleepout once the blaze was extinguished.
David Dahm, a younger brother and father were taken to hospital suffering from with burns and smoke inhalation but were later released.
The family spent last night with relatives.
It is the third tragedy to strike the Dahms.
In 2004, their daughter Marcelina, 14, was killed in a car accident and only a few months before that her best friend collapsed at the Dahms' home and died.
Detective Sergeant Tony Heathcote of the Upper Hutt CIB said specialist ESR and fire safety officers were investigating the cause of the blaze but 'it is not considered suspicious at the moment'.
He confirmed there were no smoke alarms in the sleepout and investigators were yet to discover whether those fitted in the main house worked properly.