'Hero' agents 'just doing our job' pull 2 unconscious men from carbon monoxide-filled home
by Pat Reavy ksl · KSL.comKEY TAKEAWAYS
- Two Utah parole agents saved two men from carbon monoxide poisoning in Carbon County.
- Nick Parker and Kelton Larsen performed CPR and rescued the unconscious men.
- The home was filled with carbon monoxide from a generator and faulty insulation.
COLUMBIA, Carbon County — Two Adult Probation and Parole agents in Utah are being recognized for their heroics after pulling two men out of a home filled with carbon monoxide who were moments from death, according to the Utah Department of Corrections.
On Tuesday, agents Nick Parker and Kelton Larsen were in the East Carbon area — about 30 minutes outside of Price — when they heard a call on the local police radio that two men were suffering from an unknown medical condition in a home in Columbia, an unincorporated coal mining town in a remote part of the county. Investigators believe one of the two men inside the home was able to call 911 before passing out.
Because the state agents were close, they went to the residence and were the first to arrive at the scene, said Department of Corrections spokesman Rich Piatt.
Larsen told KSL that when he and his partner arrived, they "heard what we thought was a woman screaming."
The agents then found an open door and went into the house.
"We're calling out, and no one is answering back," Parker said.
That's when they discovered two men, ages 37 and 39, unconscious on the floor. One man lived in the home and the other was visiting from Wellington.
"One of the men had labored breathing and subsequently stopped breathing, leading the agents to immediately initiate CPR," Piatt said.
The two agents assumed they had stumbled onto an overdose situation and began applying Narcan to the victims. But they also smelled a "large toxic smell," Larsen said. That's when they decided to pull out the victims out of the house one by one. By that point, emergency crews from East Carbon had arrived to assist.
After pulling the two unconscious men out of the house, the two agents returned to the home to look for others. Parker says he located two cats, which the agents later determined is where the "screaming" noise came from, and carried them out. Larsen located a dog and carried that animal out of the house.
But by that time, both men were feeling the effects of what was later determined to be carbon monoxide.
"I'm feeling this pretty good and it's not a good feeling," Parker recounted.
Larsen added that he was feeling light-headed and nauseous. Piatt said one agent described his lips "tingling" and feeling sluggish in his movements. Corrections officials estimate the two agents were in the home for 10 to 15 minutes in total
Both victims "regained consciousness outside and were transported to Utah Valley Hospital for treatment. Law enforcement confirmed that the men were moments from death, which Parker and Larsen prevented by risking their own safety to rescue them," Piatt said.
The department on Wednesday said Parker and Larsen "are being hailed as heroes after their quick, decisive actions" and that they "demonstrated extreme bravery."
But both men shrugged off the praise, saying they were simply in the "right place at the right time" and did what any other parole officers would have done.
"Anyone in this profession would have done the same thing," said Parker, who has been with AP&P for five years. Parker also gave kudos to his partner, Larsen, who has been with the department for just a year, for his persistence in searching the home and not giving up once he began feeling the effects of what was later determined to be carbon monoxide.
"It's nice," Larsen said of the praise from his administration. "But at the end of the day, we're just doing our job."
It was determined that the home, which did not have any power, was being filled with carbon monoxide by a generator running all night, "and was exacerbated by faulty insulation," Piatt said. The "toxic" smell was determined to be wires and rubber that were melting due to the way the generator was hooked up inside the home.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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Pat Reavy
Pat Reavy interned with KSL in 1989 and has been a full-time journalist for either KSL or Deseret News since 1991. For the past 25 years, he has worked primarily the cops and courts beat.