At first, Matteo Policano thought the beeping was the front door keypad. But he felt "something off" about the sound, so he woke up his dad, who went to investigate.
Matteo Policano was up way past his bedtime playing video games when he started hearing an unusual beep coming from downstairs. The 10-year-old decided to figure out the cause of it, a discovery that firefighters say saved his entire family from a tragic ending.
At first, Matteo thought the beeping was the front door keypad. But he felt "something off" about the sound, so he woke up his dad, who went to investigate. They found it was the carbon monoxide detector that was going off.
His mother, Whitney Policano, didn't think much of it, and since it was 3 a.m., she chalked it up to needing its batteries to be change and headed back to bed. But then the alarm sounded again, this time upstairs.
"I just turned around, looked at my husband and I said, get 'em out of here," she tells Inside Edition Digital. The family rushed outside of their Clarksville, West Virginia, home and onto the patio, where they called 911.
Firefighters rushed to the home and inspected the basement. One first responder "looked at me and said, 'if [Matteo] hadn't have heard that [beeping] and you hadn't have called us you guys would've probably had about 30, 40 minutes left," she says.
Gas from the pool heater was seeping into the basement. "It was colder that night here where we live, so it was actually sucking the ventilation off of that heater where it actually caught on fire on top of the heater. It was pulling that through the actual windows and back into the ventilation system," Whitney says.
Carbon monoxide is an odorless, colorless gas and known as the "silent killer." It can come from a number of appliances in your home, including furnaces, ranges, ovens, water heaters, clothes dryers along with fireplaces, wood stoves, coal or oil furnaces, space heaters or oil or kerosene heaters, charcoal grills, camp stoves, gas-powered lawn mowers and power tools and automobile exhaust fumes, according to American Lung Association. About 430 people die each year from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Whitney is no longer heating their pool. She also bought about $600 worth of new carbon monoxide detectors for her and her family.
"It's something so frivolous and simple that you don't even think about daily," she says. Matteo has also taken away a lesson from the ordeal: the importance of change the batteries. Fire officials recommend switching batteries out every New Year's Eve as a way to ensure they're changed on a yearly basis.
"I just think this is such a simple task that families take for granted that would help a lot," Matteo says.
Matteo's mom couldn't be prouder of her son for speaking up, and admitting he was up way too late.
"He knew enough to know that something was wrong and came to us. And I can't be more thankful for all my family still being here. He should be in trouble, because I told him to go to bed, but I'm so grateful he wasn't," she adds.
