DeSOTO -- When Hector Montoya was 9 years old, he wasn't normally allowed to watch the news. But one day, while watching television with his grandmother Sondra Banks in their Grand Prairie home, he saw "the saddest thing I have ever seen."
The story about a Fort Worth mother and one of her twin daughters who died in a house fire deeply upset Hector. And one detail about the fire particularly troubled him: The house didn’t have a smoke detector.
“I asked my grandma why that family didn’t have smoke detectors,” Hector said. “She told me, ‘Some people do and some people don’t.’ ”
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That confused Hector, who has always had a smoke detector in his house. Within minutes of watching the broadcast, he pitched an idea to his family: He wanted to use the $300 he had saved for a PlayStation 4 to buy and donate smoke detectors to families who don’t have them.
That was almost three years ago and, since then, Hector, who is now 11, has donated 6,425 smoke detectors to many cities across North Texas.
On Wednesday, he donated 125 smoke detectors to DeSoto Fire Rescue. The detectors will be distributed to senior citizens in need of proper fire-safety measures.
“I think there’s a little bit of apathy when it comes to smoke detectors,” DeSoto Fire Chief Jerry Duffield said. “No one believes they are going to have a fire until it happens to them.”
Duffield knows what can happen if there is a malfunctioning smoke detector. He lost a friend and her husband in a house fire because the batteries had been removed from their smoke detectors.
“Everyone has done it,” he said. “You’re cooking and the smoke detector goes off, so you take it down and take out the batteries and forget to put it back. I’m guilty of it, too.”
City officials, including Duffield and DeSoto Mayor Curtistene McCowan, thanked Hector. They both expressed surprise at how someone so young could be so generous.
Hector has always been this way, his grandmother said.
“It’s because of his mother,” Banks said. “She used to be a teacher, but now she home-schools Hector. When she taught second grade, she would buy Christmas presents for each one of her students, depending on what the parents said they needed. He has her generosity.”
With the help of his sponsors Wal-Mart and fire safety supplier Kidde, Hector hopes to cross the 8,000 threshold in donations by the end of the year.
“It just really impacted me to see that had happened,” he said. “People shouldn’t lose their life in a fire because of not having a smoke detector.”
Hector also had the opportunity to meet 9-year-old Abigail Segoviano, the girl who lost her mother and twin sister in the Fort Worth fire. He spent a day with her, giving her gifts and hugs.
Hector doesn’t see an end to his generosity. In fact, he aspires to go beyond 10,000 donations to help as many people as he can.
“My slogan is, ‘One life lost in a fire without a smoke detector is one life lost too many,’ ” he said.
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