5 Honored for Rescuing Man in Apartment Fire

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

Rivera and four other men who dragged Reseda resident Melvin Cohen out of his burning apartment in May and quelled the blaze--all before firefighters arrived--were honored Monday by the Los Angeles Fire Department.

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

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

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, cousins Chuck Barrow and Glen Sartian came careening up from Sartian’s nearby house. They grabbed two more fire hoses.

With the front of the apartment covered, Rivera ran around and battled the fire from the back. By the time firefighters arrived, the blaze was nearly out.