Fear Becomes Joy as Boy Is Found Safe Under Burning Mobile Home

When the fireman brought the little boy out from beneath the smoking, burned-out mobile home, once-grim faces instantly beamed with joy.

The neighbors, the firefighters and the sheriff’s deputies all had believed that 3-year-old Gerald Voloso had died in the blaze, which on Tuesday consumed the mobile home on Martin Street in Carson.

The boy’s grandmother, Rosario Bristol, 57, and his great-grandmother, Narcissa Bristol, 85, who had been baby-sitting him, both were hospitalized with burns.

Neighbors Noticed Smoke

Two neighbors at the Paradise Trailer Lodge, Phillip Ford, 19, and Jason Carroll, 18, were among the first to notice smoke rising from the Bristol home at about 4:15 p.m. Ford said Carroll raced into the trailer and pulled the unconscious Narcissa Bristol out.

“She was passed out,” Ford said. “We laid her on the ground. She wasn’t breathing and someone started doing CPR on her.”

Other neighbors brought out their garden hoses in a vain attempt to drown the fire.

Rosario Bristol had been on the other side of the park, collecting her mail. She came running back and cried: “Save my baby, save my baby,” Ford said. He said she knocked out the rear windows to try to gain entry, but the fire was too intense.

Little Hope for Child

After Narcissa Bristol was revived, she and Rosario Bristol tried to reenter the home, only to be restrained by Ford and Carroll.

Another neighbor, Billie Nolan, who called the Los Angeles County Fire Department, said firefighters quickly got the blaze under control, but the home was nearly destroyed.

Capt. John Malenta said that Gerald probably had hidden in a corner of the trailer and held out little hope that the boy had survived. Neither did anyone else.

“Everybody was moping around,” Malenta said.

As the trailer continued to smolder after the flames were out, one of the firefighters, Anthony Moore, walked around to the back.

“He was looking around,” Malenta said, “and saw these eyes looking at him” from underneath the trailer. Then, Malenta said, Gerald “crawled out on his hands and knees” and put his arms around Moore’s neck.

The boy apparently had been under the trailer all during the fire, Malenta said. Nobody knows when or how he got there.

Fire Capt. Donato Dingillo said Gerald wore a shocked expression, almost as if he were “petrified in that state.”

But otherwise the boy, who is in the care of an aunt, was fine.

“There was not a scratch on him,” Malenta said. “It made everybody feel good.”