Holiday Display Brings First Responders

Dawn Murphy

A Gwinnett County homeowner’s annual holiday display got a reaction he never expected.

Broadcast version of this story.

Slim, as he is known, has been hanging around Bubba Murphy’s house in Berkeley Lake for several Christmases now…literally.

The sweatshirt and blue jean-wearing dummy is holding onto the gutters with a string of lights dangling next to him and a ladder that appears to be falling to the ground at that very moment.

Murphy says, “We got the mailman; we’ve gotten neighbors, people just walking by [and then] running up to help. And then they see what it is, and then they start laughing.”

But one night this week, a stranger drove through the neighborhood.

We’d just finished up dinner,” says Murphy. “And I walked through the family room and just looked out in our front yard, and I said, ‘Where are all these red lights coming from?’ I opened the door. There was a fire truck, an ambulance, a police car, and a fire marshal’s car and a yard full of firemen. Then we heard the lady just apologizing so badly. She felt bad for calling everyone out.”

Murphy says he took the display down for a few days, but now Slim is back by popular demand.