Erick All Jr. was only five months old when his life almost ended.

His parents and older sister had just moved to Richmond, Ind., from Hamilton to find work and get a fresh start on life, said his mother Kelly All. She took a job at a Village Pantry next door to the house they were sharing with friends. That’s where on a February morning her baby almost died.

Two children of All’s friends, ages 2 and 4 years old, were upstairs playing with a cigarette lighter. Infant Erick was asleep in the next room in a play pen.

Erick Sr. heard the commotion of the children when a mattress caught on fire. He ran down the stairs to get some water, got halfway there, remembered his sleeping baby and started to go back up to get him. Before he got turned around, however, a police officer came in through the front door and ordered him to evacuate.

Meanwhile, Richmond firefighter Shawn Phenis had just finished his shift at Company 4 and went straight to his second job with an ambulance service. He was sitting down for some breakfast with his partner when the call came in about the fire, and they went to the scene.

Just as they arrived, the firefighters from Company 4 had already gotten the toddlers from the house and were pulling Erick from the window of the second story bedroom and gave him to Phenis.

“He wasn’t breathing when they brought him out,” Phenis said, and he immediately started performing CPR and giving the baby mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Phenis had only been a firefighter for about eight months. “He was crying by the time I got him to the ambulance. If they hadn’t gotten him out when they did, he wouldn’t have made it.”

Kelly All said that they kept Erick in the hospital for about 10 days and released him, warning that he may be susceptible to respiratory infections but would otherwise be OK, although he still has a scar on his wrist from a botched IV job that left him with chemical burns from the medication.

The fact that he was in a play pen close to the floor and not a regular crib probably saved him from dying, Phenis said.

Kelly said Erick, now a seventh grader at Garfield Middle School, had always been curious about the incident, and recently began asking if he could meet the man who saved his life.

So for his birthday on Thursday, Kelly All tracked down Phenis through Facebook and invited him to the party. Phenis shared with him the newspaper clippings from the incident, which included photos of him carrying Erick from the scene and performing mouth-to-mouth.

“I’ve been on the fire department for 12 years, and this is the only life I’ve ever saved,” Phenis said.