A family is left without a home this Labor Day, after their apartment went up in flames Monday morning. It happened in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood. The family woke up from a dead sleep to smoke and flames all over, and they were forced to jump from the second floor to safety. “It was horrifying. You just never want to go through something like that. We were pretty much trapped. We had to break a window and throw the kids out the window,” Kelly Hirschfeld said. Hirschfeld, her two teenage kids and her fiancé were trapped on the second floor of their home on Bremen and Clarke early Monday morning. They had no way out because they believe the fire started in the back, near the exit. "I never seen anything like it man. It was intense,” Willy Young said. Young was one of a handful of neighbors who helped catch Hirschfeld and her kids as they jumped out of the window. "We're just yelling, ‘jump, jump,’ and everyone just ran up and we caught her son, her daughter, her dog and her,” Young said. Firefighters rescued her fiancé, and her cat apparently had one more life to spare. "They just found him in there after the fire. He was hiding. He survived. It's good to have him back,” Hirschfeld said. Investigators remained on the scene Monday morning as they tried to figure out what happened. We're told the family is staying at a shelter in Waukesha until they can make other arrangements.
