2 Children Perish in Blaze at House : Tragedy: Three boys and their grandparents escape the fire in Inglewood. Children playing with matches may have caused the destruction.

An Inglewood woman returned home from work Wednesday evening to discover that her two young daughters had perished in a fast-moving house fire moments before she arrived.

“My babies! Where are my babies?” Vika Sitani shrieked at firefighters when she saw the burned-out remains of the small house she shared with another family in the 3700 block of West 111th Street.

Authorities said three small boys and their grandparents survived by fleeing out the back door of the house, but Sitani’s children, Nesi, 2, and 15-month-old Peti, suffered massive burns. As a crowd of several hundred neighbors looked on, firefighters recovered the sisters from the blazing house and took them to Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital, where they were pronounced dead on arrival.

“The front half of the house had flames coming out of the living room and front bedroom, where the girls were, when we arrived,” Battalion Chief Rem Bowder said. “We did get word that there might be children inside, but we had to knock the fire down before we could make entry.”

Authorities said Sitani moved from Texas with her husband and daughters about a year ago to stay with a friend in Inglewood. Her husband was in Texas picking up a car Wednesday, investigators said.

Inglewood Battalion Chief Kenneth Mays said the 4:30 p.m. blaze, which was “fully involved when we arrived,” may have been started by children playing with matches. It appeared that the fire began near a living room couch and spread up the wall to the roof, he said.

Investigators said they were also checking the possibility that recent roofing work on the house may have been a contributing factor. Neighbors said workers who had spread tar on the roof had left the house about a half hour before the fire broke out. Bowder said preliminary evidence indicated that the roof work was “probably a coincidental thing.”

Authorities had difficulty piecing together details because the two adults in the home when the blaze broke out were from the South Pacific island of Tonga and spoke little English. Through a translator from a Tongan church in Lawndale, the grandmother said she did not know how the fire began. The woman, whose name was not released, told officials the children were playing when smoke filled the house.

Neighbors credited Chris Miller, 24, a deliveryman for a local freight company, with keeping the blaze from spreading to other properties. Miller, a former New York City firefighter, said he was making a delivery when he saw the smoke. When he pulled his van up to the house, he said he saw a woman spraying the house with a garden hose and several hundred other neighbors looking on.