3 Young Children Pulled to Safety From Burning Car

A hospital security guard and three maintenance workers on Tuesday pulled three unattended children to safety from a car that had caught fire in the parking lot of a Santa Ana hospital.

Police said 3-year-old Guillermo Clausell of Fullerton started the fire inside his mother’s car while he was playing with a butane cigarette lighter. The mother, Saydie Smith, said she had left her son and her 4-year-old daughter, Natasha, and 20-month-old nephew, Rashim Bolder, in the car at Coastal Communities Hospital for “just five or 10 minutes” while she visited a sick friend in the hospital.

All three children suffered second-degree burns and smoke inhalation but were in stable condition Tuesday night, police said. Santa Ana Battalion Chief Timothy J. Graber said the fire broke out at 1:23 p.m. in the hospital’s south parking lot at 2701 S. Bristol St.

“It seemed that I left them for a couple of minutes in the car--I was just going to run in and out,” a tearful Smith said in a phone interview Tuesday night. “There was a lighter in the car that I didn’t see. I bought a sheepskin seat cover at a swap meet, and it caught on fire. That’s what started the whole thing.”

Smith, who is 23 years old and unemployed, said she had heard a page over the hospital loudspeaker while in her friend’s room but ignored it.

“I said to myself, ‘No way it’s me. No one knows me here,’ ” she said. “When I heard it the second time, I ran out to the front desk. A woman took me to the emergency ward, and I freaked out. It was like a nightmare. . . . I looked at my young son and then my daughter and then my nephew, and I started crying. I thought I would faint.”

Hospital security guard Edward Rodriguez said he radioed for help on his walkie-talkie when he noticed smoke in the parking lot and then went to the car.

“The little girl opened the door, and a lot of smoke came out behind her,” said Rodriguez, 57. “I helped her out and noticed a child about a year old on the passenger side, laying down. The car was full of smoke and flames. I pulled the baby out, sat him down on the ground, and then there was another baby in the back seat of the car. They weren’t crying. They were making no noise.”

Smoke Inhalation

Rodriguez, who also was treated for smoke inhalation at the scene, said that although he feared the car was going to blow up, he kept reaching inside the 1975 Mercury Cougar, blinded by smoke, to feel for other children inside.

“I started pulling kids out, and I thought it would never stop. I was pulling out little hands from the car. It was like a nightmare.”

“Everybody helped,” Rodriguez said. “It was all timing. God was with us.”

Paramedics transported two of the children to UC Irvine Medical Center by ambulance. The 3-year-old, who police said developed complications, was taken there by helicopter.

“We’re just tickled the little guys are OK,” said Al Bolsten, a 60-year-old maintenance worker from Santa Ana, noting that the flames were shooting out of the car windows and over the roof. Once able to determine that there were no more children inside, Bolsten, along with David Howard, the hospital’s chief plant engineer, and Daniel Dowell, the assistant chief maintenance engineer, extinguished the flames.

Reached later at the UCI burn unit, Smith said: “Look what could happen--just like that. I guess I learned my lesson now.”

Smith said she visited Rodriguez in the emergency room, kissed his cheek and thanked him for saving the lives of her two children and the life of her sister’s child.

The sister, Norma Smith, said she was not angry and understood that it was an accident.

‘A Freak Accident’

“We baby-sit for each other a lot,” said Norma Smith, 37, who lives across the street from her sister. “This is the first time she left them alone. If it was something she did all the time, that would be something else. Then I would not have trusted her with my son.

“Things do happen. This was just a freak accident.”

As for the future, Saydie Smith said, she “will be like glue” to her children. “I guess they will hate it, but I will love it better like that.” She added that she had caught her son playing with matches once before and “spanked him on his hand, but I guess it wasn’t enough.”

Maureen Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Santa Ana Police Department, said the incident is under investigation by the department’s juvenile investigations section.

Although Smith was not arrested, the three children have been placed in protective custody and will be taken to Orangewood Home when they are released from the hospital, Thompson said.

“That is going to hurt,” Smith said. “What scares me more than anything else in the world is that I won’t be able to have them around. But I won’t give up. I won’t let them take them.”

Smith said she and her sister planned to spend Tuesday night at UCI Medical Center.

“I will be right here until they leave this hospital,” she said, adding that “I have nothing waiting for me at home.”

Times staff writer Nancy Wride contributed to this story.