WHIZ KID: Dulaney High Freshman Pulls Woman from Burning Car

One of the nicest things we can witness as a parent is our child behaving in a level-headed, responsible manner during an emergency. One of the scariest thing we can witness as a parent is our child trying to walk away from a flaming car.

Both happened to Clare Cayce in the same moment.

Clare is a kindergarten assistant at Warren Elementary School. Toward the end of her work day, she was hastily summoned by a co-worker to come outside. What she saw panicked her. Her daughter, Michaela, a freshman at Dulaney High School, was trying to lead an older woman away from a burning car.

The car wasn’t merely smoking. Flames were shooting out of the hood, she recalled. 

Clare was quickly reassured by her co-worker that nothing had, in fact, happened to Michaela.

Michaela said to her mom, by way of explanation, “Mom, this is Miss Jillian, and her car is on fire, and she didn’t want to get out of it, and I told her she needed to get out of it because it’s on fire! She didn’t have any way to get home, so I told her you would drive her home.”

Michaela gets points for, if nothing else, the most original ride request ever posed to a parent.

Michaela gets more points than that, though. She had been in her friend’s car after school, driving down Bosley Road on Feb. 11, and saw another car stopped at a stop sign. Seeing that the hood was smoking, Michaela said, “That’s really not good!” She told her friend who was driving to pull over.

“I dropped my backpack and I ran to the lady’s car because she had started to pull away. I tried to encourage her to get out of the car. She was old, and she didn’t want to get out of the car. I kind of had to persuade her to get away from the car. I was thinking fire, gas tank, this is really bad.”

By chance, this encounter happened right in front of Warren Elementary, so Michaela knew her mom was nearby. She sent a friend into the school to summon Clare, the principal and a fire extinguisher. The older lady, who first introduced herself as Jillian, later changed her mind about her name and other personal information. It is possible the woman suffered from Alzheimer's.

Her main concern wasn’t that her car was on fire, or that she and Michaela had been in danger. It was that the bath rugs she was transporting to the dump were still in the car.

“She was not making sense,” Clare said. “She said she had no family, she had no children, and she was just saying things that didn’t make sense. She kept saying to me she didn’t want to leave the rugs. She was taking her bath rugs to the dump, and she was worried about them being in the car. Michaela kept saying, ‘It's OK, it's OK, you can get new ones!’"

The fire department arrived and put out the fire. The police came to escort the elderly lady home and make sure she was cared for. 

“I don’t think she should have been driving,” Michaela said. “She was probably at the point where it wasn’t safe, with her mindset.”

Those words were music to Clare’s ears—a teenager who knows when it’s not safe for someone to be driving.