Emotional Rescue : Fire Department Honors 5 for Saving Man From Burning Apartment

By the time help arrived, Ildefonso “Pancho” Rivera had already led the charge to put out an apartment fire, fought smoke inhalation, and had gone back to his regular job mowing lawns.

Rivera and four other men who managed to drag Reseda resident Melvin Cohen out of his burning apartment last May and quell the blaze--all before firefighters came on the scene--were honored Monday by the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Cohen, barely conscious, was covered with second- and third-degree burns. Trapped in his bedroom, unable to trip the safety release on bars covering his windows, he finally ran through his burning kitchen to the patio, said Battalion Chief Mike Littleton at a lunchtime ceremony at a Reseda Boulevard fire station.

“We could hear him calling, very slowly, ‘Help me, help me,’ ” Rivera said in an interview.

Brando Ramirez Bautista and Severiano Fonseca, who work with Rivera at the 170-unit Sherman Way apartment complex where Cohen lived, broke down the fence around the patio with a two-by-four and carried him out.

Rivera ran around to the front of the apartment and grabbed a firefighting hose that had been installed in the hallway wall. Keeping low so he could breathe amid the flames, he kept the fire contained in Cohen’s apartment.

While he was working there alone, cousins Chuck Barrow and Glen Sartian came careening up from Sartian’s nearby house. They’d seen flames and Sartian, who has jumped in as a volunteer to fight five fires and once applied for a firefighting job, suggested that the two drive over to Sherman Way.

Barrow and Sartian grabbed two more fire hoses. Sartian used his to push the suffocating smoke out of Cohen’s apartment through the open door to the patio. Barrow fought the flames.

With the front of the apartment covered, Rivera ran around and battled the fire from the back.

By the time firefighters arrived, all three men said, the blaze was nearly out.

“By the time I got there,” said property manager Ray Dapp of Pacific West Management in Irvine, “Pancho was already back cutting the grass.”

Paramedics took Cohen to Northridge Hospital Medical Center and then to the Grossman Burn Center at Sherman Oaks Hospital, where he underwent eight surgeries over two months.

“He looked like a mummy when I first saw him,” said Cohen’s sister, Shifra Shear.

The 50-year-old Cohen is still in serious condition, and living with Shear in Canoga Park. The Michigan-born accountant lost his freelance accounting business and his home of 20 years in the blaze.

“He lost everything,” his sister said.

Cohen, who did not attend the ceremony, is just beginning to walk without assistance, his sister said, but his skin is still “as thick as a wetsuit” and so tight on his body that at times it makes him feel as if he is suffocating, she said.

“We probably wouldn’t have him if it weren’t for you,” Shear told the men at the ceremony, her voice choked with emotion. “Thank you.”