11-Year-Old Boy Averts Potential Carbon Monoxide Tragedy

“We were all having headaches for three or four days, but we didn’t communicate it with each other,” Anika said.

They got home around 9 p.m. and had dinner. While Mukesh Kumar, Milind’s father, was feeding his daughter, 3-year-old Rohini Kumar, she passed out, so he put her to bed.

Mukesh said he and Anika went to bed and he still had a headache, but he chalked that up to the stress of the day or even indigestion. But after taking some medicine, he still wasn’t able to sleep.

He finally went to bed at 1:45 a.m. Feb. 4, but then Rohini got up. He took her to the bathroom, where she threw up.

“She threw up, and I thought she might have eaten something and her stomach was upset,” Mukesh said.

Anika said, “She had thrown up once in the morning also.”

Mukesh thought Rohini might be better after vomiting, so he put her back to bed.

“But then, by that time, I was also feeling dizzy and I fell on the floor. Then my wife, hearing the noise, she got up. She was feeling dizzy and she fell beside me. Then (Milind) got up – he was fast asleep but got up because of the noise. Then he felt dizzy, he fell three times,” Mukesh said.

Milind said, “I just fell a bunch of times, and then I went into the bathroom and I hit my head really hard.”

Mukesh asked him if he was feeling dizzy, and that’s when Milind suggested it could be carbon monoxide. They opened a window, and Mukesh said the air might have provided them with some strength.

Anika commented about there being vomit everywhere and she wanted to wash it up. Mukesh suggested she go to bed instead.

“But maybe that saved us, too, because she was very persistent. She said, ‘No, I need to wash the clothes.’ So she took the clothes and went to the washing area – that’s at the front entrance of the house – but she couldn’t do anything. She fell there and she couldn’t get up,” Mukesh said.

He went to help her, but he just sat beside her because he was feeling dizzy.

Milind took Rohini in his arms. He told his dad she was throwing up again. “Then he lost his patience. He took his mother’s phone and called 911,” Mukesh said.

Kosciusko County Dispatch Center Director of Operations Sarah Lancaster said the call came in at 3 a.m. Feb. 4. Lutheran EMS, Warsaw-Wayne Fire Territory and Warsaw Police Department were sent to the Warsaw home.

Lancaster said Milind was very calm and focused on the phone. “He impressed me. He used all the terminology properly,” she said.

Fortunately, she said, the dispatch center has not had many calls this year for that level of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Warsaw-Wayne Fire Territory Chief Mike Wilson said the carbon monoxide levels were in excess of 700 parts per million. “That is extremely high,” he said. A carbon monoxide alarm sounds at 35 parts per million. “It was a very dangerous situation,” he said.

Wilson also said, “The whole point is have carbon monoxide alarms in the home. It’s odorless, so you don’t know you have it. The alarm gives an early warning. It’s not required, but we’re seeing them more and more in homes. We recommend people have them in their homes.”

The alarms can be picked up at any hardware store and the fire station has a supply of them.

Milind said he thought it might be carbon monoxide poisoning because he’s had nightmares about it. The dream is often like a video game.

“Sometimes I just dream that I wake up and that I have a ‘health’ bar to my left. And then there’s like carbon monoxide everywhere, it says at the top, but it’s green. And I just see my health bar going down,” he said in describing his dream.

Mukesh said Milind reads a lot, so maybe he read about it and it was just in his mind.

Milind said he decided to call 911 because what they were experiencing felt so familiar. “Literally, it was the exact same thing. We were all falling down. My sister was puking,” he said.

He had heard about carbon monoxide poisoning and how it was odorless and colorless and can kill. “So I was freaked out and I started to have nightmares about it, and then it happened,” Milind said.

Mukesh said his son pays attention to detail so that might have helped save them.

Mukesh said the EMTs put them on oxygen in the ambulance. They were taken in two ambulances to the hospital ER and put on oxygen for about four hours. Their carbon monoxide levels were checked and everyone’s was high. Mukesh said his was the highest, followed by Anika’s and the kids’.

The problem was attributed to a furnace leak in the rental house. Last year, they complained about that same furnace, Mukesh said.

After the Feb. 3-4 incident, the Kumars stayed in a hotel room for a week before moving into an apartment. No one is staying in the rental house because the broken furnace hasn’t been fixed, though insurance and gas companies have inspected it.

As of Monday morning, Mukesh said they’re better but they’re scared.

“We don’t know what is there inside our body, so we need to get it checked. My wife complains about a lot of issues, so we are following up with the doctor with all of us,” Mukesh said.

Before moving into the apartment – owned by the same company that owns the rental home – he said they were given a carbon monoxide tester and he demanded a fire extinguisher.

“Maybe we’ll be paranoid about our safety throughout our life now that we’ve survived instead of died,” he said.

Milind shrugged off being recognized for his actions.

Mukesh said, “For him it’s more important that his family survived because we read on the internet that if levels are so high, some people die within two to three hours.”

Edgewood Principal JoElla Hauselman said she learned about the incident after “Milind called himself in absent on Monday (Feb. 4), and he had perfect attendance. He said the family was in the emergency room and that they had been victims of carbon monoxide poisoning, so that’s when I found out and thought there was more to this.”

When Milind returned to school Feb. 5, she called him into her office and asked him to tell her more about what happened. He gave her a brief overview, and then she called his home. Once she knew more, she contacted the Warsaw School Board and requested to recognize him.

“I felt he was a hero, so we are going to do that. And then the sheriff’s department, fire department, 911, all the area people that service our county, they also felt it was heroic so they’ll be at the board meeting, too,” Hauselman said.