TOLEDO —- Fire raced through a Toledo apartment building yesterday afternoon, killing six children and critically injuring one other, authorities said.
Five of the children died at area hospitals soon after the fire yesterday afternoon, said Fire Chief Michael Bell. A sixth child died last night, and one boy remained in critical, said Sarah Bednarski, spokeswoman for St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center. The victims were six girls and one boy, ages six months to 7 years old.
Toledo firefighters met heavy flames on a staircase as they fought toward the second-floor rooms where the children were trapped, Bell said. Crews began arriving at the scene about one minute after a 2:38 p.m. emergency call and contained the fire quickly after pulling the children out, Bell said. A fire station is about three blocks away.
When firefighters arrived, screaming neighbors directed them to the apartment where the children were trapped.
“Our chief concern at the scene was getting the kids out of the building,” Bell said.
Joe Jaramillo, 36, said he ran into the two-story apartment and tried to get upstairs where the children were trapped.
“I tried to crawl under the smoke,” he said. “They were yelling ‘Help us,’ but I couldn’t do anything. I had to come back for air.”
Jaramillo said that when he first ran toward the apartment, the mother of some of the children was standing outside the building and screaming that her babies were inside.
“One of the kid’s fathers was trying to go upstairs,” he said. “They grabbed a fire extinguisher but it didn’t work.”
Jarmillo, who was sitting on the hood of a car and watching investigators move in and out of the building, said he and the father tried to go up the stairs a second time, but the smoke and flames were too thick.
“Then it was just quiet,” he said.
Authorities didn’t immediately release the names or relationships of the victims. Neighbors said the woman who lived in the apartment with her children also had two sisters who live in the apartment complex.
Nearly all of the fire damage was limited to one apartment and the roof of the two-story brick apartment building that contained five units, said Battalion Chief Mark Klein.
Investigators didn’t know how or where the fire started. Klein, though, said it may have begun on the second floor because that’s where most of the damage was found.
The outside of the two-story apartment in which the children were found had been decorated for Halloween with green cobwebs sprayed in a bush in the front yard and paper cutout bats taped to the front window.
No adults were injured. Bell said no adults were in the building when firefighters arrived, but he wasn’t sure whether adults were inside when the blaze broke out.
Clay Neal, 32, who lived in the apartment next to the victims’ apartment, said the children were always outside riding bikes and playing games.
He wasn’t home when the fire started and arrived just as paramedics were taking a baby out of the building on a stretcher.
“It just brings tears to my eyes because all of the kids didn’t make it,” Neal said.
