‘Our Only Thought Was to Save Our Children,’ Rescuer Says : Courage: Tales of cooperation and bravery emerge after the panic subsides. People formed human chains and caught children tossed from apartment windows.

When the flames were upon them and the smoke too thick to breathe, the residents of Apartment 203 realized that teamwork was their only hope.

Between them, Isabela Diego and Maria Cristobal had four small children in the second-floor apartment, and the fire was gaining on them. From the hallway, it had leaped into the living room, forcing the two Guatemalan women and their small children into a bedroom.

Diego, 19, was the first to fling herself out the window to the street below. Cristobal, 37, tossed each child--a 2-month-old, a 14-month-old, a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old--to Diego. Then Cristobal leaped herself.

Only Cristobal was hurt, and her injuries were minor.

“Fear wasn’t entering our mind at that moment. Our only thought was to save our children,” Diego said later, as she stood barefoot and dazed outside her fire-swept apartment complex in the 300 block of Burlington Avenue. Working together, she said, had saved their lives.

Many who gathered outside the stucco complex in the wake of the deadly blaze told similar stories of cooperation and bravery. Some residents of neighboring apartments brought ladders, witnesses said. Others, including 20-year-old Melvin Ordonez, clambered up the balconies, forming human chains to pass children and adults down from the upper floors.

Ordonez, from Honduras, was sitting with friends in front of the building when the fire broke out.

“We heard screaming, turned around and saw thick black smoke coming from the windows,” he said. He and several other young men rushed to help. Ordonez said he managed to get five people out.

Susan Martinez, 17, who lives in a complex just south of the one that burned, said she watched a man jump from an upper floor and land on sharp pipes attached to the complex’s gas meters. Immediately, she said, neighbors rushed to the aid of the badly injured man, dragging him to a nearby doorstep and staying with him until paramedics arrived.

Anna Rivas, 20, told of a heroic man who stood below her second-floor apartment and caught her 1-year-old daughter, Katherine.

“I had to throw the baby out the window. A man caught her. He was catching a lot of babies,” she said. She later climbed down a ladder to safety.

“I would just like to thank that man,” she said, as she clutched her daughter in her arms.

Seferina Cruz de Gomez, a grandmother who lives nearby, stood in the street, handing out towels, socks and sweaters for the children--many of whom had fled their apartments barefoot and partially dressed.

“I’m just trying to do what I can to help these people who have been through such a horrible tragedy,” she said. “My little ones are grown now and they don’t need these things.”

A shelter for those displaced by the fire was set up at nearby Belmont High School. On the bus ride to the shelter, the displaced residents embraced and grasped each others’ hands. Friends exchanged information about who was injured and about their searches for friends and family members.

“I am worried. I can’t find my wife, “ said Jairo Morales, 26. “She’s pregnant. She wouldn’t have been able to run. She was due.”