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A pit bull saved a woman from a fire in a Long Island home Friday, barking to alert her as flames began to engulf the house.

Then the woman returned the favor.

Jackie Bonasera said she was drying her hair in an upstairs bathroom of a home in East Norwich when she heard the dog barking. She ran downstairs and saw the flames on the side of her garage, according to NBC Channel 4 in New York

She ran out of the house, but then returned to save her dog, a pit bull named Cain.

“I’m like, ‘He saved my life, I have to save his,’” Bonasera said.

“So I just put my robe over my face and I ran back in and I grabbed the dog and then I stood out here and I watched my house burn,” she said.

Bonasera believes she would have been trapped upstairs if the dog, named Cain, hadn’t alerted her to the fire. Her daughter, Alexus Stallworth, called Cain  “the town hero.”

More than 70 firefighters fought the fire, the cause of which hasn’t been determined.

Nana, a 2-year-old Saint Bernard who helped a New York family of five escape unharmed from their burning house, was honored yesterday.

Nana perished in the fire at an 1819 farmhouse, just outside of Jamestown, but husband, wife and all three kids escaped.

In honor of Nana, the Chautauqua Children’s Safety Education Village, a nonprofit agency that teaches safety education, held a special ceremony.

“We consider her a fire hero just because of her instinct, and that she knew to wake the father, who was downstairs at the time,” said Terri Kindberg, the agency’s executive director, told the Buffalo News.

The Invisible Fence Company donated two pet resuscitation kits to the two local fire companies that responded to the scene in hopes that they will someday save the life of a pet, Kindberg said.

On Jan. 17, Menash Petscher was awakened by Nana licking his face, and woke up to smell smoke and find the house in flames, a result of an ember escaping from the fireplace.

Petscher went upstairs to get his two youngest daughters, and Nana followed them. After taking the children to safety, he went back into the house and called Nana, but she didn’t come.

When state police arrived, it was too late to re-enter the house.

For about a day, the family hoped Nana had escaped the house on her own and would return, but they found the dog’s body inside the house as it was being demolished.

Baltimore brothers Travers and Tremayne Johnson have been found not guilty in the burning death of Phoenix, a pit bull doused with accelerant and set on fire in 2009.

Closing arguments were made today and the jury deliberated for less than an hour before pronouncing the brothers not guilty of a crime that led the city to reexamine and strengthen its animal welfare laws and procedures.

Phoenix — the name the dog was given after her rescue — was euthanized days after she was found, on fire, by a Baltimore police officer.

The first trial for the Johnson brothers ended in a hung jury in February 2011.

Baltimore City State’s Attorney Gregg Bernstein issued the following statement after the verdict:

“While I respect the jury’s decision, I am disappointed we didn’t achieve the outcome that we fought for during two challenging trials. Animal cruelty is a serious crime of violence, and those who commit it too frequently commit subsequent crimes of violence against humans. As we demonstrated in this case, we are dedicated to vigorously prosecuting individuals accused of this appalling offense.”

Defense attorneys for the Johnsons focused their defense on whether police mishandled the investigation and some of the evidence.

Craig Beyler, a fire protection engineer, called to the stand as an expert, testified that police mishandled clothing seized from the Johnsons’ South Baltimore home by mixing two pairs of jeans and a pair of sneakers in one bag. The clothing contained traces of an ignitable substance that could not be identified, but Beyler said it could have been a common chemical used in sneakers that might have transferred from the shoes to the jeans.

Prosecutors’ arguments linking the brothers to the burning centered mainly on a police surveillance video recorded from atop a pole near the crime scene.

No DNA, fingerprints or other forensic evidence connected the suspects to the crime.

A police sergeant identified the brothers in the video, in which two young men can be seen walking the dog minutes before the burning, and running away from the scene afterwards. A bystander, Tiera Goodman, told police soon after the incident she too saw the brothers run from the scene.

But Goodman refused to testify in the retrial. A video of her testimony from the first trial was played instead.

(Photo: WBAL)

For a fourth time, the animal cruelty trial of brothers Travers and Tremayne Johnson — accused of setting a pit bull named Phoenix on fire — has been postponed.

The new trial date  is Feb. 1 – nearly a year after the first trial ended with a hung jury.

Shortly before jury selection was to begin today, the trial was rescheduled because some key witnesses were unavailable this week, the Baltimore Sun reported

Prosecutor Jennifer Rallo requested the delay, saying a key witness in the state’s case has had a family emergency and will be unavailable for two weeks, possibly longer.

The twin brothers, after making bail on the animal cruelty charges, were arrested in connection with other crimes and are both in custody.

In the first trial, 11 jurors voted to convict the Johnsons, but one declined to do so.

Phoenix, as she was named after the incident, died days after she was doused with accelerant and set on fire on a Baltimore street.

No, that’s not the ice cream man rolling down the streets of Lisichansk, a city of 100,000 in Ukraine.

It’s a crematorium on wheels, purchased by the city to more handily dispose of stray dogs — sometimes while they are still alive — as part of the country’s efforts to clean up its streets before next year’s Euro 2012 soccer championship.

(About two and a half minutes into the video above you can see city officials showing off their mobile crematorium.)

The vehicle is staffed by three employees — a driver, an oven operator and another who shoots strays with a syringe gun, paralyzing them.

The crematorium is capable of burning 40 kilos worth of dogs and cats at a time.

Lisichansk is not alone in trying to clear the streets of strays before the soccer championship,  being co-hosted by Ukraine and Poland.

The cities of  Kiev, Lviv, Kharkiv and Donetsk — all of which are hosting matches — have stray removal programs underway. In Kharkiv and Kiev, plans have been made to open shelters for strays found in the vicinity of Euro 2012 stadiums, but some other cities opt for extermination instead.

Sometimes, Lisichansk lends its mobile crematorium to neighboring  jurisdictions. How thoughtful.

Despite protests, from inside and outside the country, the stray removal program continues, and the mobile crematorium — which features temperatures of 900 degrees — keeps rolling.

A petition appealing to Ukrainian authorities to stop cremating live animals can be found on the website Care2.

According to the petition, Ukraine — rather than focusing on spaying and neutering and finding homes for strays — has long opted for less humane practices.

Stray dogs and cats were previously killed using an illegal poison called ditiline that paralyzed their respiratory muscles are paralyzed.

Officials consider the crematorium ” more modern” and “environmentally safe,” the petition says.

Investigators say someone tried to burn 14 pit bulls to death in Alabama.

The dogs were found chained in Jefferson County, with a series of fires burning around them. Sheriff’s officials suspect they were part of a dogfighting operation.

Eight individual fires surrounded the dogs when firefighters arrived, according to Alabama’s 13 News.

Investigators found a treadmill of the type used by dogfighters to force dogs to train.

The dogs were all saved and taken to the Birmingham-Jefferson County shelter.

A Seattle woman who saw two dogs with their noses pressed against the window of a burning home jumped out of her car, hosed her shirt down, broke a window in the house and saved the two dogs trapped inside.

Kim Swanson suffered smoke inhalation in the process and was treated at the scene, a spokesman for the Seattle Fire Department said.

Swanson and Karen Jacobs were driving home after dinner when they saw the fire. Jacobs called 911 while Swanson sprung into action.

After breaking the window, she entered the home, picked up the two small dogs, named Angus and Babu, and passed them through the window to Jacobs. Both dogs escaped injury.

“I had taken off my shirt and sprayed it down with a hose I found in back, and then put it over my face and head,” Swanson told KOMO.

The fire was mostly contained to the attic, where an electrical problem started the blaze.

Prosecutors said today that Travers and Tremayne Johnson, the twin brothers accused of fatally setting fire to a pitbull in 2009, will be tried again.

The first trial ended Monday in a hung jury.

The new trial is scheduled for May 4, ABC2 in Baltimore reported. 

The announcement came after a series of meetings held by the prosecutor’s office this week.

The dog, named Phoenix, was doused with accelerant and set on fire in the summer of 2009 — an act that would make headlines across the country, lead to the formation of a citywide animal abuse task force and provoke outrage from animal welfare advocates.

The five-day trial came to a close Monday after the jurors deliberated for more than 20 hours over three days, but couldn’t agree on a verdict. One juror wasn’t convinced of the brothers’ guilt in the attack, according to news reports.

Will Baltimore twins Travers and Tremayne Johnson be retried on animal cruelty charges in connecton with the setting a pit bull on fire?

A May 4 date has been set aside at the courthouse, but prosecutors, citing a gag order issued by the judge, aren’t saying much more than that.

The trial of the twins charged with setting fire to the dog, who became known as Phoenix, ended in a mistrial Monday.

Deputy State’s Attorney Elizabeth Embry, at a meeting with animal advocates Wednesday, said prosecutors are holding a series of meetings to determine whether to retry the case.

According to the Baltimore Sun, she said the office expects to announce a decision soon.

Jurors deliberated for more than 20 hours over three days, but one juror wasn’t convinced of the brothers’ guilty, making a verdict impossible.

“We want to be very deliberative and are having a series of meetings to discuss the case,” Embry, said at the meeting, noting the gag order. “As soon as the decision is made, which will be shortly … we’ll be making an announcement.”