A lot of people sneer at the garbage pickers you see around the city searching through recycling bins for returnable bottles and cans. CBC producer Meghan Griffith-Greene remembers a time a few years ago when a neighbour yelled at her husband Jeromy Lloyd for running into the house to grab more bottles from a recent party to give a guy working the bins on their street. “He said, ‘Are you actually helping him?’ He couldn’t believe it. There’s a general attitude that they shouldn’t be doing that, they’re treated with derision. But he’s a neighbour. A member of our community.”

That faith proved justified in the very early morning of July 24, when a man out picking through recycling bins may have saved the lives of Griffith-Greene and Lloyd and the six others who were asleep in the house they live in.

Every morning, David Dearman gets up at 4 a.m. and rides his bike to Tim Hortons for a coffee, and then rides around the neighbourhood and through local parks, picking up returnable beer and liquor bottles in a bag he slings over his shoulder as he rides. Sometimes he finds scrap metal that he sells to a local salvage shop. He collects enough to buy a meal, some smokes, maybe a beer each day. This is according to his best friend, Arthur McIsaac, who says Dearman is a “humble guy who doesn’t want accolades.” Dearman was shy of talking to the press, but passed along the business card I left at his home to McIsaac, who was eager to talk about his friend.

A 52-year-old transplanted Nova Scotian who has lived in the Junction for decades, Dearman is a labourer — he’s done woodworking, has a forklift driver’s license — who picks up odd jobs doing just about whatever he can. He’s the kind of hard worker, McIsaac says, who once went back to a job operating a jackhammer the day after having a cast put on a broken wrist, but also the kind of guy who might not accept any money for a day’s work painting a storefront.

McIsaac says Dearman’s had a tough time of it recently: No steady jobs, but gigs that sometimes don’t pay him after he’s done the work; a good friend who died after an operation; a car that hit him on his bike a few weeks ago. But he loves going fishing in local rivers and lakes with a cheap rod someone gave him, and he loves riding that bike. Every morning he has “quality time” before the sun is up, out riding and smoking and scavenging when most people are still asleep.

On July 24, just after 5:45am, Dearman was just returning with a few dollars in recyclables to his home on Dundas Street West. Looking south just as the sun was about to rise on the horizon, he saw smoke billowing into the sky from a house on Runnymede. He left his stuff there on the sidewalk and ran.

Griffith-Greene and Lloyd were asleep in their apartment on the top floor. The house is divided into five apartments in which nine people live. Eight of them were home that morning, all of them sound asleep. “We heard a crash just above us on the rooftop deck, just above our bedroom,” Griffith-Greene says. “We thought someone had come home late, or there were raccoons. It woke me up, but I didn’t think anything of it.” They were going back to sleep, she says, when there was another crash, and then they heard another sound, “a really aggressive banging on the door.” They thought another tenant was banging to complain about the crashing noise, assuming it was them. Lloyd got out of bed and put on a robe to go explain that it was probably a raccoon. “Jeremy was about halfway down the stairs when he heard the guy say, ‘The house is on fire, get out of the house, get out of the house!’”

They threw on some clothes and ran outside to the front — and they could see a giant and growing plume of smoke and flame on the roof. “I thought, oh God, the house is going to burn down.” Dearman was frantically running around to the doors of the other apartments, making sure to get everyone out with the help of another two neighbours who’d been awakened by then. “He was much more aware of what was happening than we were, we were stunned.” He ran into a basement unit to get a woman who was refusing to leave without her cat. “He tossed furniture aside and helped the cat, to make sure the cat got out. I’m just amazed, I’m just astonished with how devoted he was, with how determined he was to make sure we all got out.”

Dearman had called 911 before originally kicking in the exterior door to get to the multiple apartment doors, McIsaac says. The call came in at 5:53 a.m. — a two alarm fire. At 5:59 a.m., according to Toronto Fire Captain Adrian Ratushniak, engines arrived and confirmed that everyone was already out of the house.

“There were six fire trucks in front of the house in minutes, they came so fast,” Griffith-Greene says. “The firemen went in through the house and put up a ladder and then the fire was out fairly quickly. We went out and thought, ‘It’s going to burn down,’ but they put it out quickly.” Still, it had burned a hole right through the roof directly above their bed. Total disaster may well have been minutes away.

“The guy who pounded on our door, I can’t ever say how much he absolutely saved our lives that morning,” Griffith-Greene says. “He probably saved eight people. We would have been dead.”

Dearman wandered away shortly after the firefighters and police arrived to handle the situation. McIssac has spoken to the fire department about a commendation, and they are prepared to put in a submission for one — something Griffith-Greene says she heard about through her landlord, as well — but Dearman has been unwilling to talk to them about it so far, just as he didn’t want to talk to the press.

“The only thing that I’d add is that I think we’re still struggling with one thing: How do you thank someone for something like this?” Griffith-Greene writes in a follow-up note. “It’s just too big. We owe him everything and I don’t know how we could ever express that enough.”

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McIsaac describes Dearman as the kind of guy who’s hard to thank — he often jokingly delivers an insult when he does you a favour to defuse any overly-sappy moments. McIsaac thinks he deserves some accolades and should soak up the gratitude, but that doesn’t come naturally for Dearman. He shows me a short video of Dearman talking about the incident. “All I want is,” he says in the video, “if I’m in the same situation, for someone to do the same for me.”