You cant jump: Man helped save pregnant woman from fire, then explosion hurled him out window

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Set us as preferred A Riverside man fell from a window after helping a pregnant woman escape an apartment fire last week, and now his family says his hospital bills are stacking up far beyond what they can afford with the looming possibility that he might have a leg amputated.On Sept.16, security guard Brian Jackson, 48, went to visit a friend at an apartment building in the 3400 block of 5th Street in Riverside.

The apartment caught fire in what Jackson described as mere minutes.“It happened so fast, I panicked and started running to the rooms to make sure that everyone was OK, and that’s when I saw the pregnant girl trying to jump out the window,” Jackson recalled in a phone call with The Times from his hospital bed.As fire ripped through the apartment building, the stepfather of five paused to talk the unidentified pregnant woman out of jumping from the second-story window to the dirt and concrete below.“In five minutes, it felt like the whole house was engulfed in flames,” Jackson said.

“Everything I touched was hot … doorknobs and everything.”Jackson said it was a “scary situation” as the window started to melt.“I told her, you can’t jump out this window, girl,” Jackson said.“Look how far it is down.

… If you jump out of this window, you’ll be in trouble.”Finally, help arrived when a passerby lowered the woman from the window with the help of a ladder.Although Jackson hasn’t reunited with the woman yet, he believes her to be safe.

But in an unpredictable turn of events, Jackson said an explosion from within the home threw him from the window onto the ground.Tehani Gutierrez, Jackson’s stepdaughter, said her mother reached out to tell her that Jackson had broken his legs and they had to go to the hospital.“Honestly ...

I didn’t know what to do,” she said.“My stepdad is a b...