A disabled Fife couple owe their lives to the quick action and courage of their daughter and a teenage neighbor who braved smoke and fire Monday afternoon to pull them from a burning home.

Smoke and flames had trapped Richard Dever, 63, who uses a wheelchair, and his wife Glenda, 54, inside the small converted garage at 5614 Fourth St. East.

That’s when Clayton Steffen, 18, who lives next door, sprinted into action.

Still looking shaken up and coughing more than an hour after the 2 p.m. blaze, Steffen recalled seeing the flames coming out of eaves of the small house.

“I went out my back sliding-glass door and saw a whole bunch of smoke, and I knew automatically what it was because my dad used to be a fireman,” he said.

As Steffen ran toward the house his grandmother, Jessie Gray, yelled after him: “Don’t go in there!”

Steffen ignored her.

After first alerting the couple’s daughter Andrea Dever, 30, who was inside the larger house adjacent to the converted garage, he headed for the burning home’s back door.

The door was cracked open, so Steffen stormed inside.

“It was smoky and dark,” he said. “I couldn’t see anything.”

Then he heard Richard Dever yelling for help. Steffen found him in his wheelchair between the kitchen and living room.

“I went up to him and picked him up of his wheelchair, and the whole time he was saying, ‘Get my wife!’” Steffen said.

Steffen set the older man in the backyard and went back into the house for Glenda Dever but couldn’t find her.

The smoke forced him back outside, he said.

He ran around to the front where he saw Andrea Dever pulling her stepmother outside.

Andrea Dever later told a reporter she went up to the front door and kicked it in and plunged into the blackness. She couldn’t find anyone, and, unable to breathe, backed outside. But then heard her stepmother call for help, and she ran back in where she found her stepmother – her hair singed – on a couch.

“I dragged her out and all the way down the driveway,” Andrea Dever said.

If Glenda Dever hadn’t yelled, Andrea said she probably wouldn’t have gone back inside the home, the smoke and heat was so intense.

Together Andrea Dever and Steffen carried the injured woman to the end of the driveway, just as the first of 34 Tacoma Fire Department firefighters arrived. They got the blaze under control in about 15 minutes.

Glenda Dever was taken immediately to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle by a Tacoma Medic One unit. The nature and extent of her injuries were not known late Monday.

Her husband was slightly injured but declined to be hospitalized.

The cause of the fire is under investigation, according to Tacoma Fire Department Assistant Chief Dan Crotty.

Gray said she was glad her grandson ignored her warning.

“I’m very proud of him,” she said. “He acted very quickly.”

Mike Archbold: 253-597-8692

mike.archbold@thenewstribune.com