WVVA Hometown Hero: Boy saves family from fire

Oakvale, W.Va. (WVVA) - The day after Christmas 2022 could have ended tragically without the actions of 11-year-old Johnathon Robinette.  The Oakvale Elementary 4th grader says he was the first one in his family to wake that morning. 

He was eager to use his phone and the new ear pods he received for Christmas.  But instead, he found himself in a room filled with smoke,

 “I didn’t know if there was a fire I just like, I just didn’t know like what was going on. So I just woke my mom up,” Robinette said. 

His mother, Crystal Wyrick says it’s a good thing her son woke her because she’s a very deep sleeper, adding it took several minutes to find the fire.  Wyrick says while the house was filled with smoke, she couldn’t find the fire until she looked in the attic.

 “That’s when I just panicked and started screaming and screaming and trying to get cats out the door, ‘cause we had cats. We tried to get them out the door and they was running back in. Yeah, it was crazy so we lost a few cats,” said Wyrick.

In the panicked effort to save what they could, Wyrick says her husband told Johnathon to go call 911.  Robinette says he ran to the closest neighbor to their house on Goodwin’s Chapel doing so wearing only the shorts he’d been sleeping in, running over snow-covered ground to do so, on that post-Christmas morning.

 “I sprinted over there with no shoes, just shorts on, and no shirt, nothing on just shorts.” said Robinette.  He says it was a scary moment, amplified by the loss of his biological father two weeks earlier, “Well, this is one thing that went through my head, I was wondering, like, what if me and my sisters was in school and my parents didn’t wake up,” said Robinette said in a quiet tone.

But His Mother, stepdad, and siblings were all able to escape the inferno that destroyed the home and virtually everything the family had.  But thanks to the quick actions of Robinette, everyone made it out alive. 

Johnathon says his actions give him the courage to live up to the title: Hometown Hero, “Oh, it makes me feel like, like I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s like, makes me feel like, like I can do... like anything. I can save anything,” the fourth grader said.  For his mother, Johnothon’s heroism is something she’ll never forget, “What’s going through my head is like, I wouldn’t be here today.  He’s our hero!”, Wyrick said as she looked at her son, beaming with pride.

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