More than three months after a gas explosion demolished the Boomsma family home in Porter, a deputy with the Porter County Sheriff’s Department received the department’s highest honor for his work saving a toddler pinned under the home’s debris.

The seven members of the multigenerational home who all suffered some level of injury in the blast, meanwhile, are piecing their lives back together, still recovering from their injuries and living in a rental home until they can rebuild.

“I couldn’t be more honored. The amazing thing is the whole family was able to walk away from that. So many police and fire and medics came together, and the community, to help a family they didn’t even know,” said Lt. Kevin Van Kley, who received the Medal of Honor on Dec. 22.

“At the end of the day, they’re all safe and healthy and it happened so quickly. Without the help of all those first responders and family and neighbors, we wouldn’t have the ending we have now and I think that’s a really important thing to focus on. It’s just a miracle it turned out the way it did. It’s a blessing everybody was able to help the way they did,” he continued.

Van Kley was on U.S. 20 on his way to serving a court order with Sgt. Michael Piazza, who was driving a separate car, the afternoon of Sept. 10 and the two were near the scene in the 400 block of North First Street when they heard the call come over the radio about the explosion.

“We went flying over there. We just happened to be close, which is incredible. We just happened to be at the right place at the right time,” Van Kley said.

Van Kley is only the third officer to receive the department’s Medal of Honor, said Sheriff David Reynolds.

“Our job is to protect and serve but sometimes we have to be at the right place at the right time and there’s no training manual for when you get to a house explosion and the roof is on the ground, what you’re supposed to do,” Reynolds said.

Piazza and Sgt. David Murray received the department’s Life Saving Awards for their roles at the scene as well.

Van Kley, who started with the sheriff’s department as a jail officer in 2005 and moved to patrol about a year later, said it was a two-minute drive to the scene and Porter first responders were already there, as well as those who lived nearby.

“The amazing thing is when the house blew up, all the neighbors went running, the whole community. It was amazing. I just remember people flocking to the house,” he said.

The original call through dispatch was that up to seven people were still in the house. When Van Kley arrived, he had no idea if they were still inside. When he got there, the back of the house was on fire and the front of the home had collapsed.

He heard a scream from the front of the house from a woman on the ground who said her leg was broken.

“The house was just in pieces. The whole thing collapsed. It was just chaos,” he said, adding a neighbor digging through the debris found Ela Laster, 3, homeowner Jason Boomsma’s granddaughter.

The neighbor held up a door that had fallen so Ela wouldn’t be crushed but a beam was across her leg.

“I was able to move that and pull her out from under the door the neighbor was holding,” Van Kley said, adding he passed the girl to a Porter police officer.

He then helped rescue Amie Boomsma, Jason’s wife and the woman with the leg injury, shortly before the rest of the house erupted in flames.

The extended Boomsma family moved from Lake Station into the house on North First Street more than six years ago, renting it for two years before buying it. The family is now renting a home in Chesterton with the hope of rebuilding; the site of the fire has been cleared of debris from the family’s former home.

At the time of the explosion, all seven members of the family were taken to area hospitals for initial treatment, though some were soon released. Investigators told Jason Boomsma that a rotted gas line in the crawl space under his home caused the explosion.

His wife, Amie, “is still in worse condition than most of us,” he said, adding her hip and leg below the knee were shattered.

Ela, who was in a full body cast after the explosion, is “doing really good,” Boomsma said, adding she recently started walking.

Boomsma, a crew leader at Central Coil Processing at the Port of Indiana, didn’t return to work until Dec. 14 after dealing with infection and other injuries, as well as handling his family’s injuries and homelessness.

The family stayed in a Portage hotel for about two months before moving into their rental home. Various family members are still undergoing physical therapy and Boomsma said they’ve relied on each other and friends and family to work through the mental and emotional aspects of what they’ve been through, including their injuries and losing everything they own.

“Just to be alive is all you thought about, ‘How did I survive this?’” he said. “It’s a life-changing situation.”

The first responders involved in the family’s rescue, including Van Kley, came to visit when the Boomsmas lived in the hotel, and Boomsma said he can’t thank them and their neighbors enough for working to save the family without thinking twice about it, calling the rescue “a miracle.”

“Something put us in the perfect place at the perfect time to survive this,” he said. “There’s a reason we’re still here.”

Amy Lavalley is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.