Christine Rogers’ friends standing in front of the burnt Brownstone at some point after the fire. LeeAnne Dragani is in the middle-left corner, dressed up as Dracula.
Sometimes, LeeAnne O’Shea Dragani’s kids jokingly call her “the drill sergeant” because of her take-charge personality. Lucky for East Dallas neighbor, Christine Rogers, Dragani had that same take-charge attitude when she was a young woman.
In October, we wrote about several East Dallas survivors who had real-life brushes with death. One of the especially chilling stories was the tale of the time Rogers and her college girl friends narrowly escaped a burning apartment building. One person seems to stand out in the story: Rogers’ spit-fire Irish friend, LeeAnne O’Shea Dragani, who (forcibly) woke the group of sleeping beauties and coached them down the smoke-filled fire escape to safety. We know how the story ended for Rogers, but what happened to Dragani?
“I know I’m not going to be the only person who wants to know whatever happened to LeeAnne,” one reader requested. “She’s really the heroine of this story!”
Indeed she was, although she doesn’t seem to see it that way, says Rogers. “She dismisses it as no big deal every time I try to remind her she pretty much saved us,” Rogers says. “She is either really humble or really doesn’t see it the way I did.”
Which seems to beg the question, “How did Dragani see it?” So, here it is, the story from Dragani’s perspective, straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say.
In the story, Rogers visited a group of her friends in Milwaukee, Wis., where they attended Marquette University. During her weekend stay, there was a major fire in the Brownstone apartment building where her friends lived.
“It was our apartment,” Dragani explains. Dragani lived there with a couple other girls in the group. During Rogers visit, the girls spent the night dancing, drinking and carrying on the way college girls sometimes do. They retired late, exhausted and content to sleep through whatever followed — almost.
“Someone kept calling on the phone,” Dragani says. “They were calling and calling and calling. The phone probably rang 30 times before I answered it. It was four in the morning, and with the late night and the drinking, and then once the smoke gets to you it puts you to sleep a little more. So I finally was like, ‘Geez, who keeps calling?’ They obviously wanted something, and of course when I flipped the light on in the room, the room was full of smoke. So I immediately knew, ‘OK, something’s on fire.’ ”
Dragani answered the phone, and someone — she doesn’t know who — told her a fire was headed her way, and that she needed to go out the back fire escape because it was coming from the front of the building. “So that’s when I went through the apartment waking everyone up,” Dragani says.
Some of the girls were harder to wake up than others — including Rogers — but in the end, everyone made it to the fire escape.
Rogers credits Dragani for cheering the group on as they made their way down the smoke-filled stairs. At one point, the girls started to have doubts about whether they could make it. “You literally couldn’t see your hand in front of your face,” Dragani recalls, “and there’s all this trash and stuff along the way, so trying to get down that, you’re kind of thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, am I going to make it to the bottom?’ ”
Dragani wouldn’t let them give up. “I was just kind of leading and talking, saying, “Listen to my voice, we’ve got to go down! Let’s go! Let’s go!” she says.
Rogers says Dragani’s commands infused a burst of energy into the group, and they finally made it to safety just as the fire department arrived to put out the fire. Miraculously, no one in the building was hurt.
Rogers went home after the fire, but needless to say, Dragani and her friends could no longer live in the burnt Brownstone.
“For maybe three or four nights we stayed in different friends’ apartments, and then down the block there was another apartment that had a few vacant rooms, so everyone in the building moved to that building,” she says. Most of her things were fine, although some stuff had to be trashed from smoke or water damage, she says.
Rogers said for months after the fire, she had nightmares and a few other lasting effects. Dragani doesn’t remember having any nightmare, but to this day, whenever the phone rings in the middle of the night — no matter what time it is — Dragani answers it. “Because I’ve learned, if somebody calls you in the middle of the night, something’s up,” she says.
Dragani now lives in Indiana with her husband and four children, although her oldest just left to follow his parents’ lead by attending Marquette in Wisconsin.
True to form, Dragani brushed off claims of heroism.
“I definitely don’t think of it as, ‘Oh I saved your life.’ ” Dragani says. “It’s just one of those things where in the moment, you just think, ‘Holy crap!’ and you’ve got to get everyone up and out. Luckily, it worked somehow, and we all got out.”
