Farris: If God had not put that tractor in front of me, we would never have seen the fire

HARLINGEN, Texas - Rio Grande Valley banker and philanthropist Bobby Farris has recalled an incident earlier this year where he and his wife Robin were referred to by the City of Rio Hondo as “good samaritans.” 

On Valentine’s Day, the couple rescued a six-year old girl and an elderly man from a house that was ablaze. Along with an off duty Sheriff deputy, they were first on the scene. Robin Farris called emergency services.

Bobby Farris, chairman of Texas Regional Bank’s wealth management division, told Ron Whitlock Reports the story:

It was Valentine’s Day. We were driving to a party with some other couples,” Farris said. “As we're going down 106, that's from Rio Hondo to the Island, Robin looked over while I was driving and saw this older house. Most of the houses are pretty old out there, on pier and beams. On would have been the northwest corner of the house, there was a small fire underneath. Robin yelled at me, turn around. She we turned around. She called the fire department. We knew it would be 25 or 30 minutes before it would get there from Rio Hondo. It's a volunteer fire system. So we got out of the car, and went running up to the house.

“The off duty sheriff guy was there. He had a garden hose trying to put this fire out. I thought he was the owner, so I said, is there another hose on the side of the house? And he goes, I don't know. Oh, okay. So I ran around in the other side of the house, and there wasn’t. I went back around to the front of the house, and there was a little girl, about six years old, standing at the front door holding a blanket, scared to death, because by this time, the flames were starting to move across the south side. The wind was howling that day.

“So, I'm telling her, come down, come down. You must get out. And she was petrified. I thought if I went up to get her, she would run back into the house, and then I might have a problem, because she could hide under a bed or something and  couldn't find her. And these flames were coming. The next thing I knew, a person went running by me, ran up, grabbed her and ran down the stairs, and that was Robin. And Robin took her out. She was about six, six or seven. Her name was Charlotte. Robin took here out and sat her on the grass and said, everything is going to be okay.”

Bobby Farris told Whitlock he has always been punctual and never likes being late to events. That day, however, he was going to be late because he got stuck behind a huge tractor going 20 miles an hour on Highway 509.

“We lost 15 minutes and were going to be late for the function. For the first time in my life, I was not bothered. The day before I would have been trying to get around him. I would have been really upset. I was at complete peace. We got our stuff out of the house real quick and took off. That is when, going down 106, between 803 and 1847, that is when Robin saw the fire. It was barely going at that time, Had God not put that tractor in front of me, we would never have seen the fire.”

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So I'll start with who the Good Samaritans are. It was an off-duty sheriff deputy that got there about 30 seconds before Robin and I did. And we were You called it in? Robin called it in. We were driving to, it was Valentine's Day, we were driving to a party with some other couples, eight or ten other couples we were going to meet. As we're going down 106, that's from Rio Hondo to the island, 106, Robin looked over while I was driving and saw this older house. Most of the houses are pretty old out there on pier and beams. In the corner, what would have been the northwest corner of the house, there was a small fire underneath it. She yelled at me, turn around. We turned around, she called the fire department, but we knew it would be 25 or 30 minutes before it would get there from Rio Honda. It's a volunteer fire system. So we got out of the car, we went running up to the house, and the off-duty sheriff guy was there. But he had a garden hose trying to put this fire out. I thought he was the owner. So I said, Is there another hose on the side of the house? And he goes, I don't know. I'm like, okay. So I ran around to the other side of the house and there wasn't. I went back around to the front of the house, and there was a little girl about six years old standing at the front door holding a blanket, scared to death, because by this time the flames were starting to move across the south side. The wind was howling that day. And so the wind is so I'm telling her, come down, come down, you must get out. And she was par she was just petrified. I knew if I frozen, frozen. Frozen. I thought if I went up to get her, she would run back into the house. And then I might have a problem because she could hide under a bed or something, and I couldn't find her. And this flames were coming. The next thing I knew, a person went running by me, ran up, grabbed her, and ran down the stairs, and that was Robin. And Robin took her out, set her. She was about six, six or seven. Her name was Scarlet. Robin took her out and set her in the grass and said everything's going to be okay. By this time, with all the ruckus, the neighbors came outside, and I told them, I need a hose, because we're not keeping up with this fire. So they handed me over the fence a hose, but it was too short. So the guy says, I have another one. So he hooked that up. So we're running with two small garden hoses, a half inch, not five eighths. We're both spraying water. I'm calling up underneath the pyramid beam because that's the wall that was on fire. The fire got all the way to within three feet of the front door and was still going. We're two guys with little bitty fire hoses, little bitty garden hoses, and I'm sitting there, there's no way we can put this out. About that time, Charlotte, Robin asked Charlotte, is there anybody else in the house? And she says, No, there's nobody else in the house. So she said, uh, Charlotte had a phone, and Robin said, Can you call your mother? And she says, Yes, my mother just left to go pick up my brother. And uh my grandmother's picking up one of the other children, they're all they're coming back. Charlotte's phone wouldn't work. He didn't get it, wasn't getting a signal. So Robin, forcedly Charlotte had her mother's number. Robin called the mother. Of course, it's a number the mother didn't recognize, so she didn't answer. Robin called her again, she didn't answer. Robin called her again, she picked up, and she says, uh, I see you called me. She goes, Yes, everything's fine. Uh, but there's been a fire at your house, and we have Scarlett out in the front yard. Well, she thought the mother thought this is some kind of scam going on.

SPEAKER_00 3:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

And Robin kept talking to her, and she could hear Charlotte. And so the mother said, Okay, I've got the little, I have my other son. I just picked him up. I'm on my way back right now. The grandmother got there before her, but what happened was uh the mother told Robin, my father, the grandfather, is in the house. And so we by that time we had another person that came up and was just standing there, and I told him, go run in the house, there's somebody else in there. And so he ran in, came back out, and said, There's nobody else in there. We talked to Charlotte's mother. My grandfather, my father is in there, Charlotte's grandfather. So he went back in, saw the guy laying in bed. I think he was passed out. This was uh about six o'clock.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

PM P.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

P.M. And um uh I'm gonna go back and give you another part of the story in a minute, but I want to finish this. And so he grabbed the guy and shook him, said, You've got to get out of the house. Now this guy woke up, saw a strange man in his house, and he started screaming and wanting to fight the guy. And he came out of the side door while I'm on my knees spraying water up under the house, and I thought he was gonna hit me. But what happened? The next door neighbor, who was about 20, uh had obviously had words with this guy before. And the guy went running over there to fight him. Fortunately, there were two other people, so they just kind of played around, nobody hit each other. At that point, I yelled to Robin, y'all two go get in the suburban and sit in there. So they went and sat in there, so they were fine. The grandmother came up, the grandmother went over and got, that was her husband, grabbed him, put him in her car and locked it so he couldn't cause any more trouble. After about 25 minutes, 20 minutes, the fire was out. The wall was still smoldering, but the fire, all the flames were out. About this time we got a uh prime primer, no, Salmonito policeman came up, and uh then the fire truck came. Robin was talking to Charlotte, and and Charlotte was saying, You don't know us, and you're here, and she goes, Well, that's what you do. You help people when they're in trouble. She goes, When you grow up, what are you gonna do if somebody you see somebody in trouble? I'm gonna help them. And Robin said this. She said, You know, you can be a firefighter if you want to. She goes, I'm a girl. She goes, No, you can be a firefighter. The fire truck pulls up, the first firefighter out of it was a female. And Robin pointed to him and said, See, you can do that. So the mother came over to thank us, and Charlotte, of course, wanted to hold on to her mother. Uh the grandmother came over crying, thanking us. Um, I said, Look, they're not gonna let you spend the night here because it's smoldering. The fire department will stay here all night, but you're gonna have to go somewhere. So I got in my wallet and took the money out of my money clip, which was a little over$600, and I said, Take this. You're gonna have to get a hotel, you've got to get some food, and they'll let you back into your house tomorrow. And she just fell. And I caught her, and she says, You don't know us, and you're doing all this stuff. And I and I said, Well, there's a reason I'm here.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

The mother of the island.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

No, this is the grandmother. The grandmother. The mother came and thanked us and everything, but she was a little more composed. Um, but here's what happened that's that's the micro. This is the macro. Um, Rob and I are never late to anything. Even when Rob and I were dating, we were on time. We were, we had just left visiting with some friends uh that were having some uh problems in their life, and um which we visited with them, and we just had we had just enough time to go home, get the hors d'oeuvres that Robin had made to go to this function. I got behind a huge tractor uh on 509 with this huge cultivating instrument, and he was blocking a lane and a half, so we're going 20 miles an hour, and then he pulls over and stops to let other cars go by, and then he gets back on. And we lost 15 minutes, so we were going to be late now to the function by 15 minutes. For the first time in my life, I wasn't bothered by that thing. Before, a day before, I would have been trying to get around him, I would have been making turns, I would have been doing something, I would have been really upset. I was a complete peace. Didn't bother me. We got the stuff at the house real quick, we took off, and that's when going down 106, between 803 and 1847, that's when Robin saw the fire. And it was just barely gone at that time. Had God not put that tractor in front of me, we would have never seen it. Uh when he woke me up Sunday morning, when I wake up an hour, half hour normally than I earlier than I normally do, it's he's got something to talk to me about. So, okay, what's going on? First, you were right. There was no way those hoses were going to put out that fire. I put the fire out. But I had to have you there so I could get the message out, and this is what you said a minute ago, to tell people about people, strangers helping other people. We need more of that. So that's why I put you there. Furthermore, Bobby, go back and read the article and see how I had it written. I it didn't say some people passing by helped. It said some good summary, and stopped. And I'm going, wow, it did say that. And uh Robin called and checked on them the next day, and they were all fine. That's the end of the story. Unless you want to ask me a question or something. But that is one of the most powerful things that happened to us. Now, when we were in church Sunday morning, I'm telling people about the story, and I said, You get you can't believe what our Valentine's was like. I mean, we were on fire, sparks were flying, it was just absolutely incredible. The the heat was unbelievable. And then I told the lady sitting next to me, now that sounds like a romance novel, doesn't it? I'm telling you, our Valentine's had nothing to do with romance. This is what happened. And it only happened because God put us at that place. Had we been 30 seconds earlier, we would have never seen that fire. And had we been a minute or two later, we probably wouldn't have been able to stop it. Although I really believe God stopped it because the the sheriff's deputy, who's a super guy, uh, he was off duty. He lives up, he lived about a half a mile on uh east, and he saw it just as he turned around just before we turned around. Um and uh everything else just kind of happened. It's one of those things where you don't practice any of it. It's you just spring into to to uh help mode. And um, but everything came into place when the when the belligerent grandfather came out and wanted to fight everybody in the world, the young guy yelled at him, and so he went over there because they've obviously had words before, and they were arguing, which kept him away so we could do do everything else. Everything fell into place, and that couldn't have been done, uh, or could not have been practiced or orchestrated by humans.

SPEAKER_00 11:07

And the key was you had to understand that God's in charge, and Bobby Parents is not. So when that cracker held you up, you were at peace.

SPEAKER_01 11:20

I was for the first time, I've never in my life. I've always been upset when I get blocked, and I want to be on time, and and and and I would have done anything to try to get around, and I was at complete peace. I knew at that point I knew we were gonna be late. So it is what it is. And uh, but that's he and you know, he had to put that tractor in front of me to slow me down because I had we gone past an hour a minute before, we would have never seen the fire. And the fire got big. It was small. The fire grew really fast because the wind was blowing so hard. And um what was a little fire in one corner was all the way across the front of the house, almost to the front door, and that would have been about 10 feet, 12 feet. And uh so we're there with two little garden hoses, putting this thing that's flaming. And after about 20 minutes we put it out, which was absolutely impossible for a human to do. There was not not pot, there was not near enough water going on that that fire to stop it.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

So God had to be helping. He knew he was. God did it. He told me he did that too.

SPEAKER_01 12:28

He absolutely told me he said you were wrong.

SPEAKER_00 12:30

You said the wind was blowing, I think, when it's over, you know.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

I I I said, I don't know what happened, but there's no way we put this fire out. The sheriff definitely said the same thing. We were trying to hold it. He said, I just wanted to try to contain it until the fire people got here. But we were not gonna put it out. It was out, but the wall was still smoldering. They went in and and and the fire department tore off one of the outside walls so they could get in and spray it. It was uh sigy.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

And another impossibility in the world.

SPEAKER_01 12:59

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was it was uh I've told the story to a few people I work work with, and of course, people at the church. But it's it was absolutely incredible. And Robin, I think, was the only one that could have saved that little girl. Because I'm sure that if I started up those stairs, she would have gotten scared, you know, an older white guy.

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:20

Uh going up those stairs would have scared her and she would have run back into the house. But she was not scared when Robin came running up the stairs. There was about four or five stairs, grabbed her, and then she was she was she was scared, but she was talking to Robin and and stuff. But it we needed somebody like Robin, a couple of guys wouldn't have been able to do it.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

Yeah. And then the grandfather, if he hadn't gotten involved, it would have just turned into a fiasco.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Well, the count being had we lost the fire, the grandfather would have died in there because he he was he was passed out uh in a bedroom in the back of the house.

SPEAKER_00 13:57

Probably from smoke and electric and lack of oxygen, because the fire was consuming oxygen.

SPEAKER_01 14:02

There wasn't much, there wasn't much smoke in the house. There was a little but not much. Now, 15 minutes later with people not throwing water on it, yeah, it would have been burned up. Yeah because everything in that house is flammable.

unknown 14:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

Yeah, the angel of the Lord anointed Robin to see it. Robin, Robin was the king pitch. She saw it, she's the one who saw it. She's been driving the city.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Well, but the sheriff, uh uh the the off-duty sheriff's uh deputy saw it first. He was there probably 30, 45 seconds before we were. Because he was already, he already had the water hose on, and that's when I asked him, is there one around the side of the house? Because I thought it was the owner. I didn't know, I didn't I had no idea who he was. And he goes, I don't know. And I went, okay. So I started around the side of the corner and I thought, I better go get that little girl because she's at the front door. So I went back, and that's when I tried to get her out. But I was very afraid that if I got any closer than I was, uh she'd run back into the house. And that's when Robin showed up.

SPEAKER_00 15:06

So the status of the house today.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

It's fine. It's fine. It's they've repaired the outside wall and it's there.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

Another miracle.

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Yeah. Yeah. It it um uh really the only way we could get to the source of the fire was under underneath the house spraying. Because we could knock it down on the outside, but it's still burning up underneath the house because it was on pier and beams.

SPEAKER_00 15:34

It was not internal to the house, it wasn't up on the electrical system, it was something underneath the house.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

I think. Uh, but I don't know. There was a window air conditioner there, there was a lawnmower there. I mean, I I I don't know what what initiated the fire. I have no idea. I mean, I'm the fire department may know, but I don't know. But the house is there and it's fine. We've been by a couple of times and it's perfectly fine.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

And I can I can we can foretell, we assume that that that little girl that was there scared to death and frozen in fear will become a heck of a fireman. Fire person, fire woman.

SPEAKER_01 16:16

Or somebody that goes into a profession to help other people. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Yeah. That made a big impression on her.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

That by me is the valley I grew up in, and you grew up in. Sure. That's been lost. Yeah. Has it not? To a degree.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

I think so. But uh still I I think most most people would stop to help. Um I think there were other cars going by the street while we were doing what we're doing, but I think they saw uh my car parked, the sheriff's par guy parked, um, the neighbors parked. I think they thought there was enough people and they wouldn't they wouldn't get involved because there probably wasn't much more they could do. I don't I don't know. A whole lot of cars went by and didn't and didn't stop. But we by that time we had maybe there were six or eight people there.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Wow. What a wonderful, wonderful story. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

I mean, how many times do you see in in an article when somebody says there were there were there were uh passerbys that stopped to help? Uh but how many times do they write Good Samaritan? That's the only time I've ever said anyway. That's my