A firefighter reunited with the pregnant woman and daughter he rescued from an elevator 18 years ago.
On an April night in 2005, after Mary Majcunich-Beasley finished her shift as an air traffic controller, she entered the control tower’s elevator and pressed the button for the first floor. When the elevator stopped, Ms. Majcunich-Beasley smelled a burning scent and feared a fire had started.
She used her training in directing planes in dangerous situations to stay calm.
“You compose yourself and you go, ‘You know what? It is what it is,’” Ms. Majcunich-Beasley told the Washington Post. “You can’t change it. You just hope help arrives sooner than later in that scenario.”
In the next hour, firefighters scaled the 12th floor and forced open the elevator doors, allowing Ms. Majcunich-Beasley to climb out and drive home safely.
While organizing her daughter’s high school graduation party, Ms. Majcunich-Beasley called the neighborhood fire department in an effort to track down the fireman who oversaw the rescue.
“It’s always been on the back of my mind; I wanted to get my daughter and him together,” said Ms. Majcunich-Beasley. “We get so busy in life that we don’t go back and acknowledge that person.”
She was connected with Deputy Chief Raymond Sikes, who remembered rescuing her from the broken elevator. The two of them hardly talked to one another that evening 18 years ago, but “he knew the whole story and he told me all about it. It was nice to hear his side because I never talked to him since that day,” Ms. Majcunich-Beasley told CNN.
When they received a call about the elevator jam, Mr. Sikes and his fellow colleagues of the 165th Airlift Wing Fire Department were eating dinner. They evacuated the building and planes were suspended from landing.
Mr. Sikes and his colleagues climbed to the top of the tower in the following hour, unlocked the elevator, and put out an electrical fire in the elevator shaft. Ms. Majcunich-Beasley was released by paramedics a little while later, and by midnight, she had arrived back at her home in Richmond Hill, Georgia.
For Mr. Sikes, the feat came naturally to him as part of the job’s routine.
“Once the emergencies are over with, you don’t really know what happens in those individual lives afterwards,” Mr. Sikes said. “You do have to kind of reset and be prepared for the next emergency.”
Malia, 17, completed high school this month as a homeschooled student, and her family threw a celebration at an airport hangar.
“A lot of people think it would make a big impact. I’m like, oh, that’d be cool, you know. And, like, I’d be able to meet the guy from the journal that [my mom] wrote about,” Malia said. “I had a deeper understanding for Raymond and everything. I was like, oh, he’s pretty cool for doing that and coming out.”
“She looks nothing like the day we met,” Mr. Sikes said, laughing.
“We’re there in some of the worst times in people’s lives during emergencies, and I don’t think everybody wants to remember some of those events,” Mr. Sikes said. “That’s one of the first times that anybody’s ever reached out from an event like that and invited me to something. To me, it was a big deal.”
“You get to the core of most of the guys and, and, they do it just because of the genuine desire to help people,” he said. “And you don’t realize how much you need that recognition until someone does it.”
Over delicious pastries and cake at the party, other family members of Malia and Ms. Majcunich-Beasley hugged and thanked Mr. Sikes, attributing Malia’s healthy life to his help 18 years prior.
Malia will start her studies in criminal justice at Montreat College in the fall. Mr. Sikes is looking forward to the next gathering after the party.
“I guess I’ll see you at college graduation next,” Mr. Sikes told Ms. Majcunich-Beasley.
“Expect that invite,” she responded.
