Srujana McCarty woke up just before 4 a.m. on Thursday to what sounded like “two crashes.” She said she “shot right up,” alerted her husband, Ben McCarty, checked on her two young kids who were still asleep and ran downstairs to see what happened.
“I went toward the living room, toward the noise, and the floor was just covered in debris,” she told NBC 7. “Orange glow everywhere, like someone had turned a light on. You could see the living room, but no lights were on.”
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WATCH HEREWhen she said she could “see the night sky” on the other side of the room, she knew she needed to act swiftly to get her family out of the house.
Srujana and Ben grabbed their 2 and 4-year-olds and their two dogs, one of which is named Lola, and looked for exit routes. Ben shared that his white Ram pickup truck was initially parked on the street outside of their living room but had since been pushed across the lawn and came to a rest nearly inside of it.
They ran into the backyard, Srujana recalled, and a neighbor named Gilbert tried to help them get to safety by holding a ladder steady along a tall, plastic fence. In a video obtained by NBC 7, you can hear the neighbors working with the McCarty family to hoist the dogs over the fence and to safety while a large fire burned right on the other side of the McCarty’s home.
It wasn’t until the next morning, Ben told NBC 7, that he saw a clip on the news and realized that their house was damaged the most severely in the neighborhood.
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“A lot of things had to happen for us to be safe, like if that truck hadn't been there and the plane had hit our house instead, then it probably would have been a different story,” he shared.
The McCarty family has been moved into another home within their same Liberty Military Housing community called Santo Terrace. There are 2,300 homes, and some of them are vacant or considered “displacement homes” that are fully furnished, according to Capt. Bob Heely, the commanding officer of Naval Base San Diego.
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SIGN UP However, the couple said, as they look ahead, they do want to stay within military housing but not under the flight path.
“The smallest sounds, like the fan in the bathroom, was really triggering for me 'cause it sounded like right after the engine hit, and that's what it sounded like,” Srujana said, “and the water drops in the shower on the floor sounded like the popping of the explosions that continued even after the crash had happened.”
They agree it is going to take some time to recover from the shock of it all. Ben added there is a silver lining in all of this — that they are all safe.
“Honestly, we grabbed what I would grab, our kids and our dogs. That's really the only thing I would get out of the house,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re out alive, right?”
Overall, Heely added that an estimated 40 to 50 families are displaced from the Murphy Canyon neighborhood. Many of them are staying on-base, while others are staying in hotels paid for by the Navy, he added. As for when they will be able to return home, Heely said it is much too soon to know.
