PERRYVILLE, Md. — The small appliance that the family had purchased off of TikTok a few months ago wasn’t even in use at the time, but appears to have been the source of the flames, which spread through their home in Perryville where Kylee Riale was home watching her three-year-old niece.
“Well, I smelled smoke, but you smell smoke around here all the time, because people are always burning things so I didn’t think anything about it,” recounted Kylee, “and then I heard it in the kitchen so I went out there and it was just starting, like the toaster was already on fire and it was moving up towards the cabinets so I just got out and ran.”
Kylee called her father, Harold Riale Jr., who is a captain with the community fire company and he responded to the fire spreading throughout his own home.
“Got to the living room and was overcome with smoke. Came back out,” Harold told us, “I regrouped and went back in again to try to knock the fire out. Couldn’t get any farther again. The smoke was too black. I was trying to find my dog and I thought my friend was upstairs. She stays with us, but she was not home. Thank God.”
The Riales’ terrier mix perished in the fire, and now, the family of eight, is forced to find shelter elsewhere.
While Harold Riale has served as a firefighter for 35 years, he followed in his uncle and fathers’ footsteps, and now, his daughter and son represent a third generation of family members committed to fighting fires as well.
If you’d like to help out the Riale family, you can drop off gift cards at the fire department at Principio Furnace Road in Perryville.
The company’s Facebook page also carries a Venmo code for those wishing to make monetary donations, and people are dropping off clothing at the Police Department’s Outreach Program housed on Elm Street across from the Riales’ burnt out home.
“It’s just overwhelming,” said the veteran firefighter, “I have a lot invested in this community. I’ve helped a lot of people. I’m not looking for handouts, I’m just kind of humbled by all of the support that I’m already getting so my family and I are just very thankful for the people that we live in this community with.”
