When Gladys Castaneda abruptly awoke one July morning, she heard a loud banging on the front door of her house and immediately thought someone was breaking in. She grabbed her phone and opened the Ring app to see what was happening through her Ring Video Doorbell.

She soon realized the loud banging noises were from her neighbor, who was trying to alert Gladys that a house next door was on fire and the blaze was about to spread to her property. The neighbor used the two-way talk feature on Gladys’ Ring Video Doorbell to let her know the urgency of the situation.

Less than 30 seconds later, Gladys was at the door carrying one of her young daughters. “Can you help me?” she asked the neighbor, handing over the girl to him before going back into the house for her other daughter. Gladys’ husband had left for work at 4:30 a.m., so she was home alone with both children.

“Without Ring, I don’t think I would ever have opened the door, because in my mind I thought they were breaking in,” she said. “When it’s a fire that big, minutes can turn into devastation. Who knows what could have happened?” Gladys credited her Ring Video Doorbell with getting her out of the house much more quickly than she would have otherwise.

In the chaos of the moment, Gladys said, she didn’t even think about the fact that she was handing both of her children to a near stranger. He was a new neighbor and she hadn’t had any contact with him before that moment. But looking back, she said it gave her peace of mind to know that her Ring Video Doorbell captured the action and thanks to her Protect Plan, her video would be saved.

The Good Samaritan neighbor brought Gladys’ kids safely to his house across the street, where they waited until the fire was put out, she said. While her garage and some trees suffered damage, her house wasn’t otherwise touched by the blaze.

That video captured by Gladys’s Ring Video Doorbell was also useful for the local fire department. Gladys provided the footage to assist them in investigating how the fire started.

The Video Doorbell is currently the only Ring product that Gladys owns, although she said she’s so impressed she’d like to get more. She and her husband have been discussing the Ring Security Cams, particularly because of their motion sensor capabilities, so that they’d be able to keep an eye on their backyard pool area. Ring Security Cam products are generally designed to be managed on the Ring app, so it’d be easy for them to monitor their cameras on the app, just as they’re able to do with a Ring Video Doorbell. Gladys said she’s also interested in the Ring Alarm with Professional Monitoring and the Smoke and CO Listener that can be added on, so that if there was ever a fire in her house, the authorities would be notified.