Teen escapes fire uninjured
<p>A Kootenai County firefighter drops a interior door that was damaged by a house fire Friday on the 1300-block of Fernwood Court in Coeur d'Alene.</p>
COEUR d'ALENE - A 15-year-old girl escaped injury Friday morning when she was able to escape through a bedroom window when her house caught on fire while she was sleeping.
The girl, who is not named because she is minor, said she awoke to flames and smoke in her bedroom. She quickly grabbed her phone, laptop and a picture and crawled to safety out the daylight basement window.
She called family friend Brad Finney, a former firefighter who lives down the street, for help.
Finney said when he arrived the house at 1306 Fernwood was full of smoke. He looked in the girl's bedroom window to assess the fire.
"I heard it crackling and hit it with a fire extinguisher and it just smoked," he said. "I made it about 3 feet in the backdoor, but the whole house was full of smoke, there was nothing I could do."
Firefighters arrived on scene shortly after that and quickly put the fire out, but investigators were still unable to determine the exact cause of the blaze at press time.