Cries for Help--Then 2 Rescues : Emergency: Police and neighbors pull sleeping woman and her daughter from their burning house.

Two policemen crawled through smoke and flames to save a sleeping woman in a burning two-story house while outside neighbors used a ladder to rescue her young daughter from a second-story bedroom.

“The adrenaline was really pumping,” said Richard Chun, a neighbor who helped in the Tuesday night rescue effort. “Things happened so fast you didn’t have a chance to be scared.”

The drama unfolded about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday when 9-year-old April Thousand telephoned 911 to report that her home was on fire.

Within minutes, police arrived and broke down the front door of the wood-frame house in the 300 block of 16th Place.

“All you could see was smoke,” Costa Mesa Police Officer William Adams said. “We could hear somebody screaming but it was muffled and we couldn’t tell where it came from.”

Adams, 24, and Officer Ron Tuso, 45, entered the house as a third officer, Mike Cacho, 33, stood by outside.

“We had only about a foot of crawl space,” Adams said. “I went to the first bedroom off the hallway and basically got lucky. I ran into the bed and grabbed the lady’s leg. She was still asleep at the time.”

Adams dragged Linda Thousand, 32, toward the door. “She told me later that she was a heavy sleeper. I said, ‘That’s for sure.’ ”

Once outside, Thousand yelled for her daughter and had to be restrained from re-entering the house. She and the officers were unaware that neighbors were already at work rescuing April.

The first of the neighbors to help was Jim Lauterbach, who lives behind the Thousands’ home. Lauterbach said he was getting ready to go to work when he “heard somebody yell for help and ran outside to see what happened.”

He said he saw April leaning out of the second-floor window. “I jumped over the fence and told her to be calm. I told her to jump and that I would catch her.”

At that moment, however, Ken Peterson, another neighbor, arrived with a ladder and April climbed down safely.

With April safe, Lauterbach grabbed a back-yard garden hose and tried to put out the fire. Chun helped Lauterbach douse the flames with a hose he had grabbed from the front yard.

“I could barely see in there. I was aiming at a bright orange spot,” Chun said.

Meanwhile, Chun’s roommate, Mark Stewart, was on the roof with police trying to save the girl who had already been rescued. “We broke in the window and yelled for her. . . . Everybody was really worried about the child. We didn’t know she was safe,” Stewart said.

Firefighters arrived shortly after the Thousands had escaped. Fire crews contained the blaze within 10 minutes, Steve Feather, an Orange County Fire Department spokesman said. The fire, which authorities said was caused by a kitchen stove that was left on, destroyed the first floor of the house and caused about $125,000 in damage, he said. Thousand and her daughter, along with Adams and Tuso, were taken to Hoag Hospital where they were treated for smoke inhalation and released, police said.