BANK TELLER RUSHES FROM JOB TO BURNING HOUSE TO RESCUE FAMILY

When a customer told tellers at AmeriFirst Bank of smoke coming out of a nearby house Tuesday, head teller Carol Littleton reacted quickly.

Hearing that there might be a child in the house, she ran out the back door of the bank at 3060 William and raced up the hill to the white house at 3305 Gordonville Road.

There, she found Donya Gilbert and Gilbert's 9-month-old daughter, Deshae, and 3-year-old son, Ronnie Gilbert Jr., and alerted them to the fire.

All three were downstairs and unaware of the fire on the second floor, Littleton recalled Thursday.

"I carried the little boy out and the mother got the little girl," she said.

In the meantime, bank employees notified the Cape Girardeau Fire Department.

The fire department received the call at 3:11 p.m. and responded to the scene. Firefighters were at the scene until 4:22 p.m.

Fire department officials said some string had become wrapped around the fan blades of a box fan on the second floor. That caused the motor to overheat and started the fire, they said.

The fire burned part of the ceiling and a wall. There was a lot of smoke, but minimal damage, officials said.

Littleton, of Cape Girardeau Route 1, said she could see the smoke as she ran up the hill. "It was coming out of the top windows," she said.

She said she didn't stop to think about her own personal safety. "You don't even think about it," she explained. "You just do it.

"The only thing I knew was to run and get the kids.

"It sounds like I was a hero or something; I was not thinking that way," she said.

Donya Gilbert's husband, Ronnie, was working in Evansville, Ind., Tuesday for Drury Development Corp., helping to renovate a Drury Inn that had been damaged when an airplane crashed into it. The house on Gordonville Road is owned by another Drury entity, Drury Trust.

Donya Gilbert said she and her family had been living there for about two or three months, having moved to Cape Girardeau from Paducah, Ky.

The Drury company gave the Gilbert family lodging at the company's Thrifty Inn in Cape Girardeau Tuesday night.

Ronnie Gilbert returned home, and on Wednesday he and another Drury employee spent the day working to repair the house.

The Gilbert family moved back into the house Wednesday night.

Littleton received flowers Wednesday from an appreciative Gilbert family.

Donya Gilbert said that thankfully there was more smoke than fire, and much of that escaped from the open windows.

"It could have been worse," she said. "If the windows hadn't been open, it would have been worse because all of the smoke would have come downstairs."