A Salt Lake City Boy Scout is being called a hero Thursday after he pulls a young boy out of a burning dumpster. Clayton Abrams, 11, was at his church earning a merit badge when he noticed a nearby dumpster engulfed in flames.
As he and two other boys watched it burn he heard a voice calling out.
"I kind of run around to the side (of the dumpster) and then I hear 'help me, help me! I'm inside.'"
Clayton says that as he watched the flames shoot up into the sky he lifted the lid of the container. "So I opened it with one hand and I reach inside," says Clayton, "I reach inside and something grabs my hand, I could tell it was a person," says the boy.
Clayton quickly pulls the boy out of the dumpster, he was red in the face from the intense heat of the flames and was crying and in shock.
Clayton says as he placed the boy on the ground he watched as he put a box of matches into his pocket. Investigators believe the boy was playing with the matches when the fire started.
"We're pretty pleased," says Clayton's dad Gordon Abrams. Abrams says that 7-year-old boy was just seconds away from losing his life. "The fire really got out of control, a minute or so later he wouldn't have survived," says Abrams.
As for Clayton, he knows people are calling him a hero, he says what's important is that that little boy is alive.
"Good thing no one got seriously hurt," says Clayton.
