Off-duty firefighter praised for a lifesaving rescue in Connecticut

An off-duty firefighter saved a woman's life when he pulled her from a burning car without any protective equipment or a hose line, officials in Connecticut said Saturday.

Nicholas Perri Jr. “gained access to the well involved vehicle and successfully removed the badly injured female driver as flames were entering the passenger compartment,” the Brookfield Fire Department said in a statement.

The statement said that Perri carried the woman to an EMS unit and that she was transferred to hospital. It added that he sustained only minor injuries and refused transport.

“Instinct, training kicked in, and I ran in and did the best I could do to get her out,” Perri Jr. told NBC New York after the incident on Route 7 in southern Connecticut.

“I assessed how she was in there, and then I broke the front passenger window. I was able to get one of her legs free; the other was pretty mangled — it was giving me a hard time,” he said. “I was just yelling, ‘You got to work with me because we are running out of time here.’”

Brookfield Fire Chief Andrew Ellis told the station that he was among the first responders and was surprised to see a fellow firefighter.

“There was no way that the victim would have survived had he not done what he’d done,” Ellis said.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com