When Horace Oates, Jr., of Toledo woke up in the wee hours of April 7 in a burning house, he made sure all eight of his family members and friends made it out alive.
The 60-year-old Marine Corps veteran of Operation Desert Storm got the mother of his children, her 3-month-old foster baby, and an older child down the stairs and out of the house and rushed back into the house to save the rest as flames spread throughout the structure.
Once back upstairs, he pushed some of them out of the windows and dropped the younger children into the arms of the adults who had already made it out of the house…