Marine saves homeless man from fire

Cameron Anderson pulled a homeless man from a burning tent Monday morning after a cloud of smoke led him to the campsite.

The Marine Corps master gunnery sergeant ripped through the side of a dome tent with his hands and freed Randolph Tambe, who was calling for help as flames shot through the fabric.

"I figured he wouldn't have had much more than a minute or two the way the fire was going through that area," Anderson said. "You could see the soot all over his face."

Anderson was riding his motorcycle to work at around 6:55 a.m. when he noticed smoke streaming from a patch of vacant land behind the Commercial Shopping Center on Jaycee Street.

"I saw a black cloud of smoke coming up from that small section of the woods," he said, "Walking into the path, I could see that someone lived out there. The front of his tent was on fire. It looked like it was on a deck. The deck was engulfed and a large part of the tent was on fire."

Anderson said he called into the tent and Tambe yelled for help. He pulled the man to safety and waited for Havelock paramedics to arrive.

"Everything he had was inside there," Anderson said. "He kept wanting to go back in. I said, ‘You're not going back in there. Everything that was in there can be replaced."

Havelock and Cherry Point firefighters quenched the flames, and Tambe was treated for minor injuries at Craven Regional Medical Center in New Bern.

Anderson works in the Marine unit of the Center for Naval Aviation Technical Training at Cherry Point. He trains Marines and sailors to repair C-130 transport planes and AV-8B Harrier jets.

The fire was probably caused by an electric device powered with an extension cord, according to John Lewis, Havelock fire marshal. Authorities found a TV, a radio and the coil to an electric hot plate that had been plugged in to a nearby building's electrical outlets.

"He had a lot of stuff in there," Lewis said. "He had a lot of extension cords. It could have been a radio or something else plugged in, but if I had to guess, I'd say it was the hot plate."

Lewis said the extension cords weren't connected to an outlet when firefighters arrived, so authorities don't know which building Tambe received power from. The fire marshal also said it wasn't immediately clear who owned the property where he had built his campsite.

Firefighters found Tambe's name on a piece of mail and were able to identify him. Lewis said his age was not known.

"He just had a few little items that did not get damaged, but for lack of a better term, he lost everything he owned," Lewis said.