Matt Lebeis was at work on Saturday night when his Ecobee3 Lite Smart Thermostat alerted him that an unusually high temperature had been detected at his house in Lake St. Croix Beach.

Lebeis, who works at the Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant in St. Paul, had programmed the Ecobee3 to notify him when the temperature in his house went above 79 degrees or dropped below 60 degrees.

“All of a sudden, I got an alert, a text message and an email from Ecobee,” he said. “I watched my house temperature rise. It started at 85 and then went up to 90. I thought, ‘Is my thermostat not working?’ I was unsure of what was happening, and then it dawned on me that it might be a fire.”

Lebeis, who also is a firefighter with the Lower St. Croix Valley Fire Department, called his sister, Jackie, who was in the area, and Fire Chief Jim Stanley and asked them each to check on the house.

Stanley, who lives six blocks away in Lakeland, was on the scene within minutes. He called in the fire around 6:30 p.m. Saturday.

“There was a neighbor outside when I got there, and he didn’t have a clue. The smoke wasn’t even coming out of the house,” Stanley said. “If he had not had the thermostat, it would have been a total loss.”

The highest temperature recorded by the Ecobee was 131 degrees, Lebeis said.

Stanley said he and another firefighter were able to deploy a fire-suppression device through the back door of the house, located in the 1800 block of Quello Avenue.

“That knocked down the fire long enough for us to get the engine set up with an attack crew,” he said. “Fortunately, there was a (fire) hydrant right outside their house – within 100 feet.”

Two dogs lost

The cause of the fire, which started in the kitchen, remains under investigation, according to Stanley. There was smoke and soot damage throughout the house, but the actual fire damage was contained to the kitchen, he said.

Neither Lebeis nor his fiancee, Danielle Vinson, were home at the time of the fire. Vinson’s sons, Jay Ashley, 11, and Miloh Ashley, 9, were staying at the grandparents’ house.

Rescue dogs Boots, left, and Hank Williams died in the fire. (Courtesy of Matt Lebeis)

Sadly, the family’s two dogs, Boots, a 9-year-old Bluetick Coonhound, and Hank Williams, a 9-month-old mutt, perished due to smoke inhalation, Lebeis said. “They were both rescue dogs,” he said. “We laid them to rest on Monday, and we are working on mending our hearts from their untimely departure.”

Lebeis, who graduated from Northern Dakota Training Academy in Inver Grove Heights in August 2023, and Vinson, who works as a medical support assistant at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System, are getting married on June 22. They are staying in a hotel in Hudson, Wis., until temporary housing can be arranged, he said.

Friends and family have organized a GoFundMe online fundraiser for the family. “We lost pretty much everything in the house, including a good amount of the things we had purchased for the wedding,” he said.

Any money raised is going to buy clothes and necessities, he said. As of Wednesday afternoon, the fundraiser had raised more than $4,000 of its $25,000 goal.

Lebeis said he will be “eternally grateful” for his Ecobee smart thermostat, which he bought at Costco about three years ago.

“It was, like, $150, but it’s worth thousands more,” he said. “It saved the inside of our house. We can rebuild there, and that’s thanks to the thermostat. They are going to have to clean out from the inside, but it’s not a fresh build from the bottom. … It was the best case of the worst-case scenario.”

Lebeis said Wednesday that he hopes sharing his story “can help save someone’s house or, more importantly, their loved ones.”

“Imagine if someone had elderly parents living on their own, and they had a notification that was able to get the fire department there two minutes earlier,” he said. “That could literally be a life or death difference. $150 is a very cheap price of mind.”

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By CHRISTOPHER WEBER (Associated Press)

Angela Chao, a shipping industry CEO and sister-in-law to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, was intoxicated when she drove into a pond and died last month in Texas, according to a law enforcement report released Wednesday.

The investigation by the Blanco County Sheriff’s Office concluded that Chao’s death was an “unfortunate accident” and her blood alcohol level was nearly three times the state’s legal limit.

Chao, 50, died the night of Feb. 10 after having dinner with a large group at a ranch near Johnson City, west of Austin. The report describes a frantic scene as friends and deputies tried to pull Chao from her Tesla after she backed it into the pond near a guest lodge on the property.

A friend, Amber Keinan, told detectives that Chao called her at 11:42 p.m. and said the car was in the water and she was trapped inside. The conversation lasted 8 minutes as the car slowly sank.

“Chao told Keinan the water was rising and she was going to die and said ‘I love you,’” the report says. “Chao then said her good byes to Keinan.”

Friends swam to the car while another paddled out with a kayak, according to the report. Someone else called 911 at 11:55 p.m. and remained on the phone for 11 minutes.

When law enforcement officials and firefighters arrived, they went into the water and attempted to enter the Tesla, the report said. They broke the window on the driver’s side, and a deputy felt around until he located Chao’s hand.

Emergency crews pulled her out of the car and brought her to shore, where she was pronounced dead at 1:40 a.m. Feb. 11.

A toxicology test determined that Chao had a blood alcohol concentration level of 0.233 grams per 100 milliliters, above the legal limit in Texas of .08, the report says.

Chao was the chair and CEO of her family’s shipping business, the Foremost Group, and the president of her father’s philanthropic organization, the Foremost Foundation. She lived in Austin, which is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Blanco County.

Chao was the youngest of six sisters to immigrant parents who moved to the U.S. from China in the late 1950s. Her eldest sibling, Elaine Chao, is married to McConnell and served as transportation secretary under President Donald Trump and labor secretary under President George W. Bush.

“Angela’s name in Chinese sounds like the characters for peace and prosperity,” her father, James S.C. Chao, said in a family statement shortly after her death. “Her absence leaves a void not only in our hearts, but in the Asian-American community.”

Her father was named chairman of Foremost Group following her death. Michael Lee, a former president, became president.

Chao is survived by her husband, father and four sisters.

By ANDREW DALTON (AP Entertainment Writer)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — M. Emmet Walsh, the character actor who brought his unmistakable face and unsettling presence to films including “Blood Simple” and “Blade Runner,” has died at age 88, his manager said Wednesday.

Walsh died from cardiac arrest on Tuesday at a hospital in St. Albans, Vermont, his longtime manager Sandy Joseph said.

The ham-faced, heavyset Walsh often played good old boys with bad intentions, as he did in one of his rare leading roles as a crooked Texas private detective in the Coen brothers’ first film, the 1984 neo-noir “Blood Simple.”

Joel and Ethan Coen said they wrote the part for Walsh, who would win the first Film Independent Spirit Award for best male lead for the role.

Critics and film geeks relished the moments when he showed up on screen.

Roger Ebert once observed that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”

Walsh played a crazed sniper in the 1979 Steve Martin comedy “The Jerk” and a prostate-examining doctor in the 1985 Chevy Chase vehicle “Fletch.”

In 1982’s gritty, “Blade Runner,” a film he said was grueling and difficult to make with perfectionist director Ridley Scott, Walsh plays a hard-nosed police captain who pulls Harrison Ford from retirement to hunt down cyborgs.

Born Michael Emmet Walsh, his characters led people to believe he was from the American South, but he could hardly have been from any further north.

Walsh was raised on Lake Champlain in Swanton, Vermont, just a few miles from the U.S.-Canadian border, where his grandfather, father and brother worked as customs officers.

He went to a tiny local high school with a graduating class of 13, then to Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.

He acted exclusively on the stage, with no intention of doing otherwise, for a decade, working in summer stock and repertory companies.

Walsh slowly started making film appearances in 1969 with a bit role in “Alice’s Restaurant,” and did not start playing prominent roles until nearly a decade after that when he was in his 40s, getting his breakthrough with 1978’s “Straight Time,” in which he played Dustin Hoffman’s smug, boorish parole officer.

Walsh was shooting “Silkwood” with Meryl Streep in Dallas in the autumn of 1982 when he got the offer for “Blood Simple” from the Coen brothers, then-aspiring filmmakers who had seen and loved him in “Straight Time.”

“My agent called with a script written by some kids for a low-budget movie,” Walsh told The Guardian in 2017. “It was a Sydney Greenstreet kind of role, with a Panama suit and the hat. I thought it was kinda fun and interesting. They were 100 miles away in Austin, so I went down there early one day before shooting.”

Walsh said the filmmakers didn’t even have enough money left to fly him to New York for the opening, but he would be stunned that first-time filmmakers had produced something so good.

“I saw it three or four days later when it opened in LA, and I was, like: Wow!” he said. “Suddenly my price went up five times. I was the guy everybody wanted.”

In the film he plays Loren Visser, a detective asked to trail a man’s wife, then is paid to kill her and her lover.

Visser also acts as narrator, and the opening monologue, delivered in a Texas drawl, included some of Walsh’s most memorable lines.

“Now, in Russia they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory, anyway,” Visser says. “But what I know about is Texas. And down here, you’re on your own.”

He was still working into his late 80s, making recent appearances on the TV series “The Righteous Gemstones” and “American Gigolo.”

And his more than 100 film credits included director Rian Johnson’s 2019 family murder mystery, “Knives Out” and director Mario Van Peebles’ Western “Outlaw Posse,” released this year.

Johnson was among those paying tribute to Walsh on social media.

“Emmet came to set with 2 things: a copy of his credits, which was a small-type single spaced double column list of modern classics that filled a whole page, & two-dollar bills which he passed out to the entire crew,” Johnson tweeted. “’Don’t spend it and you’ll never be broke.’ Absolute legend.”