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HEROES: Deon Johnson, 13, with his Russian great-grandmother Rimma Mussina, 86, as they recount a house fire at their Burnaby home.
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PHOTO CORNELIA NAYLOR
Asahousefireraged,theysavedeachother
Cornelia Naylor
cnaylor@burnabynow.com
A Burnaby house fire a few weeks ago could well have ended in tragedy if not for a pair of unlikely heroes. Ever since 13-year-old Deon Johnson can remember, he and his Russian great-grandmother, Rimma Mussina, have lived in the same house. She doesn’t speak English, so he has learned to speak Russian.
“We both love each other,” he said. “We have a really good relationship. She’s a really nice, caring person.” Since contracting polio at age three, the 86-year-old Mussina has had only limited use of her legs. Going to school and work in Russia and later Turkmenistan, she got around with braces and crutches. At home, among family, however, she would sometimes do without her arti-
ficial supports, using only her upper body to make her way around the house. “To me, it’s normal,” said her granddaughter,Victoria Aganova, Deon’s mother. “When I was little and my mom was away, she would have a dress on and she would put me between her legs on the dress, and, because we had hardwood floors, then she would take me with her, drag me around with her on the dress.”
Her grandmother doesn’t like using a wheelchair, Aganova said, because she finds it “belittling,” so, when a fall and a broken leg made it impossible for her to continue using crutches about five years ago, she preferred making her way around the house with her hands. To cook meals, she pulls herself onto a wheeled office chair. Mussina moved to Canada about 13 years ago to live with her daughter’s
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family. When fire broke out at their Mark Crescent home last month, Mussina’s mobility challenges put her life in jeopardy, but they didn’t stop her from saving her great-grandson. On Nov. 21, she woke up at about 6:20 a.m. Her daughter and sonin-law had already left for work, and Deon – her only great-grandchild – was asleep in the room next to hers.
The house was dark, but she could see an orange glow reflected on the wall outside her room. She pulled herself out of bed and into the hallway, where she witnessed an arc of flames shooting out of a hallway closet and across the ceiling to the opposite wall, she said. She called to Deon, whose room was quickly filling with smoke.
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