3 Killed, 4 Injured in Santa Ana House Fire : Tragedy: As many as five families lived in the two-story tract home. Two of the dead are children.

Three people were killed and at least four others injured Monday when flames exploded through a two-story house that was believed to be home to as many as five families.

At least three women and one man who carried an infant in his arms jumped to safety from second-floor windows. One woman who had climbed to the roof of an adjacent garage balked at jumping to the ground, screaming instead for someone to help rescue “the children.”

Santa Ana fire officials said a woman and two children died in the blaze, which broke out shortly after 4:30 p.m. in the 3700 block of South Alder Street. Names of the dead were not immediately available.

But Marisela Fierro, 24, who had moved to the Alder Street house just three days earlier, said she was certain one of the dead was her son, Jesus Castenada, 5.

It was Fierro who raised a window in her smoke-blackened, second-floor bedroom and clambered to the garage roof to get help. She screamed to fire or police officials on the ground that they should help rescue “the children, the babies.” But they kept urging her to jump.

When she finally complied, Fierro said, “I could still hear my son’s screams.”

Hours after the flames had been extinguished, the small woman stood bewildered and shivering in the cold night, still waiting for someone to retrieve her son’s body. But fire officials indicated that forensic specialists still had much work ahead to determine how the victims died and the cause and origin of the fire.

In the meantime, Santa Ana Fire Department spokesman Karl Ellman said investigators were having difficulty determining who was among the dead or injured, or even the names of all 15 people who lived in the five-bedroom home.

Three of the injured were taken to UCI Medical Center in Orange, including a 4-month-old boy and a 7-year-old boy, both unidentified, who were being treated for smoke inhalation and were in fair condition, a hospital spokeswoman said. An unidentified woman was in guarded condition in the hospital’s intensive care unit with severe injuries believed to have been caused when she jumped to escape the flames.

A fourth victim, a 21-year-old woman, was being treated for broken bones at Coastal Communities Hospital in Santa Ana. Her name was not released, but a hospital spokeswoman said the patient was in “stable condition.”

Ellman said it was the worst fire in Santa Ana since December, 1991, when a Christmas tree ignited in a central Santa Ana home, killing two people, seriously injuring two others and leaving 18 more homeless. Bars installed on the windows apparently blocked escape routes in that three-bedroom home.

Monday’s fire raised anew concerns among some officials about severe overcrowding in homes and apartments in the city, especially in central Santa Ana neighborhoods. But the Alder Street home is in a quiet, ethnically mixed residential neighborhood at the southeastern edge of the city--an area of newer tract homes not generally associated with the overcrowding problem.

Ellman said Monday’s blaze apparently was started by cooking, but he gave no details. The fire caused an estimated $200,000 damage to the the five-bedroom home, he said.

There apparently were no security bars to hinder the residents.

Fire officials credited Carolyn Pike and Joe Niswonger, drivers for Schaefer Ambulance Service, with rescuing several people. Neither Pike nor Niswonger was immediately available, but Schaefer officials said the pair were among the first to report the flames to the Fire Department.

“They apparently saw the smoke as they were returning from another call, and they pulled over to check it out,” a spokesman for the ambulance company said. “The Fire Department had heard about the fire, but I guess we gave them a better location than anybody else.”

Some neighbors reported hearing what sounded like a loud blast, then saw flames and smoke billow from the two-story stucco house. Others reported that smoke from the stubborn blaze could be seen for miles, and from as far north as the interchange of the Santa Ana and Costa Mesa freeways.

“It was . . . almost like an explosion,” said Dolores Ealy, who lives directly across the street from the fire scene. “People were pouring out of the two upper-floor windows.”

Ealy said she first saw one woman jump out of an upper-floor window onto a garage roof. She was followed by a man who had an infant in his arms and then by another woman who began jumping around and screaming about the babies and children left inside.

Benny Nunez, who lives in the neighborhood, said he first noticed huge clouds of black smoke billowing from the house.

“We were standing across the street, and you could feel the heat of the blaze,” said Nunez, 24.

Geraldo Rivera, another neighbor, said most of the soot-covered survivors who fled the flaming house were shoeless.

“They ran out for their lives,” said Rivera, 24.

Eddie Baugh, a 16-year-old neighbor, said that when he arrived just behind the first fire trucks, he saw two infants who had already been carried to safety and laid on a neighbor’s front lawn across from the blaze.

“It was really going up. There was smoke. There were flames everywhere,” he said.

Baugh, a sophomore at nearby Saddleback High School, was worried because he could not find his best friend, Leonardo Sanchez, who lived in the burning house. Neighbors said he lived there with his mother, Rosie Sanchez, a sister and two younger brothers.

Leonardo’s father, Silvestre Sanchez, arrived hurriedly at the fire scene from his mother’s home nearby, where he said he has been living since his divorce.

Shaken, Sanchez stood near the gutted home with his youngest son, Miguel, as he watched paramedics treat his soot-covered son, Octavio, 7, for smoke inhalation. Octavio Sanchez is believed to be the older boy at UCI Medical Center, but hospital officials could not immediately confirm that boy’s identity.

Sanchez said he had gotten a telephone call at his mother’s home to “come quick. . . . But they didn’t tell us anything.”

When he arrived, Sanchez said he spotted Octavio lying on an ambulance gurney, his face, clothes and arms covered in soot, and breathing with difficulty through an oxygen mask.

“It horrified me,” the father said.

Sanchez said he knew little about who lived in the house other than his ex-wife and their children.

One of the tenants, Fierro, said she was in her rented room upstairs with her son, Jesus, who was watching television when the fire broke out.

“It’s as if the house shuddered,” the distraught Fierro said. “I went to open the door and I saw nothing but smoke as I opened the door (to an upstairs hallway).

“It was very dark, black, almost immediately. I couldn’t see anything. I screamed to my son, ‘We have to leave,’ and I held him as we crawled along the floor to the window.”

But once she stood to open the bedroom window and shouted for help, Fierro said she lost her son in the dense clouds of smoke. She said she yelled for him and felt around her to no avail. It was then, she said, that she jumped out of the window to the garage roof below and pleaded with people standing on the ground below for help in finding the children.

A man Fierro took to be a police officer or firefighter told her to jump. She said she finally slid off the roof, reluctantly, still believing that someone would rush to her son’s aid. Once on the ground, she said she told the man again: “The children are inside.” But she said no one seemed to respond to her urgings.

As she stood on the sidewalk late Monday evening, the slightly built woman related how she had rented the bedroom in the home over the New Year’s holiday weekend in an effort to escape a man who she claimed beat her.

As she tried to cope with the knowledge that her son may have died in the place she had sought refuge, she pleaded, “Why don’t they take my baby’s body out of there? What is the problem?”

Meanwhile, Santa Ana fire spokesman Ellman said investigators still did not know for sure how many of the 15 people who resided in the Alder Street home were there at the time of the fire.

“Most of them spoke Spanish and no one could really say for sure who was where,” Ellman said.

Santa Ana city officials have been engaged in a long court battle to try to limit the number of people and families who can live in one household.

City Councilman Robert L. Richardson, a longtime advocate of stricter state laws that would make residential overcrowding illegal, said Monday’s fire was yet another reminder of what he called the “unacceptable” current law. The state permits as many as 10 people to live in a one-bedroom apartment. The city sought to reduce that limit to five.

“I just get the chills hearing about that,” Richardson said. “The folks that continue to insist that no standard is OK can have these kinds of things on their conscience.”