Part 2: A 240-Pound Biker Pounded On My Apartment Door At 2 AM Screaming At Me To Get Out — Six Months Later I Found Out Why I Owed Him And Eight Of My Neighbors Our Lives
PART 2
I want to tell you who the biker was — even though, on the night of the fire, none of us in the Aspenwood Apartments knew.
His name, I would find out six months and three days later, is Frank Hollander. He is fifty-five years old. He is white American. He is six foot two. He weighs two hundred and forty pounds. He is a long-haul trucker for a small independent freight company based in Billings, Montana, where he has worked for nineteen years. He has been a patched brother in an independent motorcycle charter that rides out of southern Montana for sixteen of those years.
He has been a widower since 2009.
His wife — a woman named Donna Hollander, forty-one years old, registered nurse at Billings Clinic — Donna had died in a house fire in their small ranch house off South Billings Boulevard on a Thursday night in November of 2009 while Frank was on a haul to Salt Lake City. The fire had started, by the report Frank read at the kitchen table of his sister’s house in Laurel the following Tuesday morning, in an electrical short in the laundry room of the unit below them in their duplex. The smoke had risen up through a shared ventilation shaft into the bedroom where Donna was sleeping at three forty-six a.m.
She had not woken up.
The fire had taken her not by burning her but by filling the bedroom with carbon monoxide and acrid hot smoke from the burning insulation in the shared wall.
She had been sixty-one feet from the actual flames.
The duplex neighbor — a sixty-eight-year-old retired veteran named Walter Pruitt who had been on the other side of that shared wall and who had also died of smoke inhalation that night — Walter Pruitt was not, by any reasonable account, at fault. He had unplugged his laundry. The short in the wiring of the laundry-room outlet had not, by the inspector’s report, been visible until it caught.
Frank had been on the I-15 outside Pocatello at three forty-six a.m. when his wife died.
He had not, in sixteen years of riding with his charter in southern Montana, told the story of his wife at the kitchen table of any patched brother’s house. He had told his charter Reverend in 2010. He had told his sister in Laurel in 2009. He had told nobody else.
He had developed, in the sixteen years since Donna’s death, a quiet specific personal habit that none of his charter brothers had ever asked him about and that he had never explained.
The habit was this:
When Frank Hollander rode through any town in Montana or Idaho or Wyoming or eastern Washington — and he rode through approximately forty-one towns a month, in his work and in his charter — he watched apartment buildings.
He watched the shared ventilation shafts.
He watched the small horizontal vents on the back walls of brick walk-ups. He watched the metal kitchen-fan exhausts on duplexes. He watched the gutter-line of multi-unit buildings for haze. He watched, in particular, for that specific gray-white wisp that the human eye barely registers but that a long-haul trucker who has lost his wife to a fire in a shared vent has trained his eye to register.
He had spotted smoke from a shared vent four times before the night I am writing about.
He had called 911 in three of those four cases.
He had pounded on a door in one of them — a duplex in Sheridan, Wyoming, in October of 2019 — and pulled an elderly man named Vernon Carmichael out of his living room recliner approximately ninety seconds before the fire alarm in Vernon’s kitchen finally tripped.
Vernon Carmichael had been seventy-six.
Vernon Carmichael had sent Frank a Christmas card every year since.
Frank had been riding through Bozeman on his way home from a long charter ride down to Yellowstone on the Tuesday night I am writing about. He had been on North Tracy Avenue at two-oh-six a.m. heading north toward the highway when his eye caught the wisp of gray-white smoke at the second-floor exterior vent of the Aspenwood Apartments building between the kitchen windows of units 2B and 2A.
He had pulled his Road King onto the shoulder.
He had cut the engine.
He had gotten off the bike.
He had walked the eighteen feet to the front sidewalk of the building.
He had looked up.
He had seen, in the moonless cold March night, the unmistakable thin column of smoke he had been watching for since November of 2009.
He had taken the wooden stairs to the second floor two at a time in his motorcycle boots.
He had not knocked on unit 2B.
He had pounded.
PART 3
I want to tell you what happened in the eleven minutes between two-eleven a.m. and two twenty-two a.m. on a Tuesday in March in Bozeman, Montana.
After I cracked the door on the chain and smelled the burning electrical insulation, I unhooked the chain.
I opened the door.
The biker did not come in.
He took two steps back from the threshold so I would not feel cornered.
He said, in a voice that had gone from a scream to a calm low rumble in approximately one and a half seconds: “Ma’am. Get your shoes. Get your coat. Get your cat if you have one. Forty-five seconds. Move.”
He was looking at the small bowl of Otis food on the floor by the entryway.
I do not know how he had seen the food bowl in the two and a half seconds between when I cracked the door and when he had said that sentence.
I went to the bedroom.
I grabbed my parka off the hook by my dresser. I grabbed my Sorel boots from beside the bed. I grabbed Otis off the comforter where he had been sleeping. Otis is sixteen years old and deaf and weighs sixteen pounds. He did not protest.
I came back to the door in forty-one seconds.
The biker was not at my door anymore.
The biker was three doors down at unit 2D pounding on the steel security door of my neighbor Pete Mariano — fifty-three, divorced, civil engineer at the Montana Department of Transportation — pounding on Pete’s door with the side of his fist in the same rhythm of three, three, three, and yelling: “MR. NEIGHBOR. SMOKE IN THE BUILDING. GET OUT NOW.”
Pete opened his door at the same forty-second mark I opened mine.
The biker pointed at me down the hall.
He said, to Pete: “Brother. Help her get downstairs. I’m gonna get the rest.”
Then he went to 2A, the unit between my apartment and Pete’s. He pounded on 2A. A twenty-four-year-old graduate student named Brittany Acosta who I had said hello to three times in eight months opened the door in her pajamas with her phone in her hand at the seventy-second mark.
Then he went down the wooden stairs to the first floor.
He pounded on every door on the first floor.
I was already down on the sidewalk by the time he was on the first floor, with Otis in his small soft-sided carrier and Pete next to me in his bathrobe and slippers. I could hear the biker yelling on the first floor through the open door of the front entry.
I could also, by then, see the smoke.
The smoke was visibly seeping from the kitchen window vent of unit 1B — the apartment directly below mine, the unit where a sixty-seven-year-old retired schoolteacher named Linda Pomeroy lived alone.
The smoke was a pale gray. It was thin. It was, to anyone walking past the building from the street, exactly the kind of haze a person could have mistaken for a furnace exhaust on a cold March night.
The fire — I would find out at four-fifteen that morning — was a slow electrical smolder in the wall behind Linda Pomeroy’s gas range, caused by a forty-two-year-old aluminum-wired outlet that had been failing in heat cycles since the previous October, that had finally crossed the threshold of self-sustaining smoke at one forty-eight a.m. that Tuesday morning.
Linda Pomeroy had not, by Captain Hollister’s report at four-fifteen, been at home that night. She had been at her daughter’s house in Belgrade for the week.
If the fire had continued unobserved for another forty to ninety minutes — by Captain Hollister’s professional estimate at four-fifteen a.m. — the smoke in unit 2B and unit 2A would have reached the level at which I and Brittany Acosta, in our respective bedrooms with our windows cracked one inch and our smoke alarms set to the minimum sensitivity required by code, would have inhaled enough carbon monoxide and acrid insulation byproduct to stop breathing in our sleep without waking up.
I was sleeping in the bedroom that, in the structural drawing of the building, sat one floor above and four feet to the right of Linda Pomeroy’s gas range.
The vent shaft ran directly up the back wall to my kitchen.
My kitchen smelled like dish soap and lavender lotion when I came to the door.
It smelled like that because I had not yet smelled the smoke.
Forty minutes more.
That is what the captain said.
Forty minutes more and I would not have smelled anything ever again.
The biker pounded on nine doors in eleven minutes.
Nine doors. Twelve residents. Three of the doors had nobody home. Nine of the residents — including me, Pete, Brittany, a young couple on the first floor named Sam and Jacob, an elderly woman named Mrs. Halverson in 1A, two undergraduates in 1C, and a single father named Mr. Karp in 1D with his eight-year-old son Henry — all nine of us were standing in the front parking lot of the Aspenwood Apartments at two twenty-six a.m. in our pajamas and coats and boots holding pets and small overnight bags when the first Bozeman Fire Department engine pulled up to the curb.
The biker was standing on the sidewalk.
He had his enormous tattooed arms folded across his chest over his leather cut.
He was counting heads.
He counted to nine.
He said, to me, who was closest: “Ma’am. Who’s missing.”
I said: “Linda. 1B. The kitchen. She’s not home this week.”
He said: “Good. Then we are good.”
The fire engine ladder went up.
PART 4
The Bozeman Fire Department contained the electrical smolder in Linda Pomeroy’s kitchen wall in forty-three minutes.
There was no open flame.
There was no visible burn pattern in her unit beyond a single charred section of wallboard behind her gas range about the size of a sheet of legal paper.
There was a tremendous amount of acrid hot smoke that had filled the shared ventilation column up the back of the building from her vent to the roof, with significant secondary infiltration into units 2A and 2B.
Captain Hollister read the report on the hood of his red command vehicle at four-fifteen a.m.
He looked at me. He looked at Brittany. He looked at Pete. He looked at the biker, who was still standing on the sidewalk with his enormous tattooed arms folded over his leather cut and his bearded face calm and tired.
Captain Hollister said: “Sir. May I have your name.”
The biker said: “Cap. No.”
Captain Hollister said: “Sir. I need it for the report.”
The biker said: “Cap. The report can say a passerby observed smoke and notified occupants. I do not need my name in your report. I am not the story here. The story is that your equipment got here in time because nine people were already on the sidewalk. Please write it that way.”
Captain Hollister looked at him.
He looked at me.
He looked at Pete.
He looked back at the biker.
He said: “Sir. Understood. May I shake your hand.”
The biker walked the four steps across the sidewalk to where Captain Hollister was standing.
He shook the captain’s hand.
Captain Hollister did not say thank you. Captain Hollister, by my read of him at four-fifteen a.m. on a Tuesday morning in March, understood that he was shaking the hand of a man who had done exactly the thing the Bozeman Fire Department’s smoke detectors and ventilation codes had been written specifically to prevent and that no piece of equipment had managed to do for us that night.
The biker walked to his Road King.
He swung his right leg over the back of the saddle.
I want to be honest about this part.
I ran across the parking lot in my pajamas and my boots with Otis in his carrier.
I got to him before he started the engine.
I said: “Sir. Please. Your name. I have to know your name.”
He turned the key on the Road King. The engine caught. He looked at me.
He said: “Ma’am. I was passing through. I saw smoke. I pounded on the door. That is what happened. You don’t owe me anything. Make sure your old lady in 1B gets her wall fixed. Go take care of your cat. Goodnight.”
He pulled out of the parking lot.
He turned right onto North Tracy Avenue heading north.
His tail light disappeared at the curve of the highway off-ramp.
That was the last time anybody at the Aspenwood Apartments saw him for six months and three days.
PART 5
I want to back up to the gray-white wisp.
I told you in the second part that Frank Hollander had developed a habit of watching apartment-building ventilation shafts after his wife Donna died in a duplex fire in November of 2009. I told you he had spotted smoke from a shared vent four times before the night at the Aspenwood. I told you the most recent one had been in Sheridan, Wyoming, in October of 2019, when he had pulled a seventy-six-year-old man named Vernon Carmichael out of his living room recliner ninety seconds before the kitchen smoke alarm finally tripped.
I want to tell you what I have come to understand about that habit.
Frank Hollander did not pound on my door at two-eleven a.m. on a Tuesday in March because he is, in some general sense, a hero.
Frank Hollander pounded on my door because at three forty-six a.m. on a Thursday in November of 2009, on a stretch of the I-15 outside Pocatello, Idaho, in the cab of a Peterbilt tractor pulling forty-two thousand pounds of palletized auto parts, a forty-seven-year-old long-haul trucker named Frank Hollander did not pound on the door of a small duplex on South Billings Boulevard. He could not have. He was four hundred and twelve miles away.
His wife Donna, asleep in their bedroom in that duplex, sixty-one feet from the source of the fire in the laundry room below them, inhaled enough carbon monoxide through the shared wall to stop breathing without waking up.
He has been, in the sixteen years since, riding through every town between Bozeman and Salt Lake City watching ventilation shafts for the thing that nobody had been watching for, for Donna.
Frank Hollander has, by my count after I learned this and after the building manager Carla Vega learned this and after Pete Mariano learned this, saved by his quiet count five lives.
He has saved Vernon Carmichael, age seventy-six, Sheridan, Wyoming, October 2019.
He has saved Hadley Walden, twenty-eight (me), Brittany Acosta, twenty-four, and Mrs. Halverson, eighty-one, Pete Mariano, fifty-three, Sam and Jacob Cordeiro, twenty-nine and thirty-one, the two undergraduates Maya and Jen, both twenty-one, and Mr. Karp, thirty-six, and his son Henry, eight, all on a Tuesday in March in Bozeman, Montana, in 2024.
That is ten people in one building.
That is eleven people total.
Frank’s wife Donna, dead in November of 2009 at forty-one, is the math at the bottom of the column of eleven.
He is, by the most accurate description I can give you of him after fourteen months of trying to understand it, the man who is balancing a number in his own head that none of the rest of us can see.
He does not need it to be balanced for him.
He needs it to be balanced by him.
PART 6
I want to tell you what happened in the six months after the fire.
The morning after the fire, on Wednesday at nine a.m., I posted in a private Bozeman neighborhood Facebook group called North Tracy Neighbors with two hundred and sixteen members. I posted a description of what had happened. I posted a description of the biker. I posted a request for anyone in the neighborhood who had seen him or who knew who he was to please come forward, because nine of us at the Aspenwood owed him our lives and we wanted to thank him.
The post hit four hundred shares by noon.
The post went outside the private group. It went onto the public Bozeman Reddit forum. It went onto the Montana State University student page. It went onto the website of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, which ran a small follow-up article on the front page of the Friday edition with a headline that read Unknown Motorcyclist Saves Nine At Aspenwood; Building Searches For Identity.
The article ran a description.
It included the cut. The patches. The Road King. The two hundred and forty pounds. The gray beard.
It did not generate a single tip.
Pete Mariano organized a small fundraiser through the building. We raised four thousand and seventeen dollars from two hundred and one neighborhood donors over the course of three weeks. Mrs. Halverson, the eighty-one-year-old in 1A, donated forty dollars from her social security. The eight-year-old Henry Karp donated four dollars from his birthday money. We did not know what we were going to do with the four thousand and seventeen dollars. We just kept raising it.
Six weeks in, with no leads, Carla Vega the building manager commissioned a small bronze plaque from a custom shop in Belgrade. The plaque was about the size of a sheet of letter paper. She had it mounted at eye level next to the main entry door of the Aspenwood Apartments on a Saturday morning in early May.
The plaque said, in clean serif text:
ON MARCH 12, 2024, A STRANGER POUNDED ON OUR DOOR. WE NEVER GOT YOUR NAME. WE OWE YOU NINE LIVES. THANK YOU.
The plaque is still there.
I look at it every time I come home.
PART 7
Six months and three days after the fire, on a Sunday morning in late September of 2024 at ten-oh-seven a.m., the small security camera at the front entry of the Aspenwood Apartments captured a single forty-one-second clip.
The clip shows a 2014 Harley-Davidson Road King in Vivid Black slowly rolling past the front of the building heading north on North Tracy Avenue at approximately fifteen miles an hour. The clip shows a two-hundred-and-forty-pound bearded biker in a worn black leather cut and dark jeans and heavy black engineer boots looking sideways at the front entry of the building from the saddle.
The clip shows the biker reading the bronze plaque next to the door.
The clip shows him nodding, once, in the saddle.
The clip shows him riding on without stopping.
Carla Vega gave me the clip on a USB drive on a Wednesday afternoon in early October.
I have watched it forty-three times.
The biker does not stop. He does not look at the camera. He does not speak. He does not pull over. He does not knock on the door.
He nods, once.
He keeps riding.
That nod is the only thing I have of him.
He has not, in fourteen months, ridden past the front of the building again on any security camera Carla has pulled. He may have. The camera may not have caught him.
I will not, by his obvious quiet preference, look for him.
I have the nod.
That is enough.
Follow the page for more stories about the bikers America thinks it knows — and the small wisps of gray-white smoke they have been watching for at the back of apartment buildings since their wives stopped breathing fifteen years ago.
