Officers rush to rescue kidnapped children from burning RV

ARLINGTON, Texas - Law enforcement officials braved flames and put themselves in a very dangerous situation Thursday to pull two kidnapped children to safety.

It happened at the end of a police chase that started in Hunt County and ended on Interstate 30 in Arlington. A man shot his girlfriend and was in an RV with his two young children.

The officers knew the driver had a gun and had already shot someone. But they also knew two toddlers were still in the RV.

When the RV stopped, the officers could be heard on dash camera yelling for the driver to come out. As the flames slowly began to swallow the front of the vehicle a Dallas County sheriff’s deputy and a Caddo Mills police officer swooped in.

“The flames that were fanning underneath the front of the bus, they were really hot. Some of the fuel had started to burn. You could feel the heat coming from it and there was a lot of smoke just because of all the plastics and everything that were burning with it,” said Deputy Floyd Kincaide with the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department.

In video of the incident you suddenly see the door open up and a toddler getting dropped out. That’s when Caddo Mills Police Officer Alphonso Olivo approached Kincaide.

“He said, ‘Hey are you ready to go get them?’ By the time he said that the younger of the two children had actually fallen out near the steps and that’s where the flames were actually starting to fan towards them,” Olivo said.

The two men ran to the RV and once there, Kincaide then covered Olivo the Caddo Mills officer.

“I covered him while we ran over the guard rail to get to safety,” Kincaide said.

DSO Capt. Chris Smith praised the officer and the Dallas County deputy.

“They were very brave to risk their own lives knowing there was an armed suspect inside the vehicle,” Smith said. “To take that into consideration and then to still run forward to get those children out of the way of the flames, I’m very proud of them.”

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