Roddick Assists in Hotel Rescue

U.S. Open champion Andy Roddick was instrumental in rescue efforts at a luxury hotel where a deadly fire broke out before dawn Saturday.

Roddick, the world’s No. 2-ranked player, assisted seven other people, including fellow player Sjeng Schalken of the Netherlands and his wife, Ricki, to safety before he got out of the Grand Hotel Parco dei Principi, which was housing players preparing to play in the Italian Open this week. Three people -- a Canadian couple and a Georgia man -- died in the blaze. None of the players was injured, said Nicola Arzani, communications director of the ATP tour.

Roddick helped the others, trapped a floor above, get down to a large balcony outside his suite. From there, they were rescued by firefighters.

Roddick said he lost everything in his sixth-floor suite to the fire, which gutted the third floor of the exclusive five-star hotel. His rackets were melted.

“I woke up to go to the bathroom and noticed it smelled a little bit like fire in my room,” said Roddick, of Boca Raton, Fla. “I couldn’t figure out what it was. So I opened the front door and a cloud of black smoke came in and pushed me back a little bit.... I went out to my balcony, which kind of went around the whole hotel.

“And when I got out there I saw Sjeng Schalken up on the seventh floor, which was probably about 10 feet above. I guess he had four American tourists with him and an Italian guy. So they basically jumped from the seventh floor to my balcony area so they could get away from the smoke.

“I just kind of caught them, caught Sjeng first and then his wife.... I wasn’t thinking about it too much during the actual thing, I think it was instinctive and there was a lot adrenaline going.”

The fire started at about 5:15 a.m. on the third floor, police said. Two American women were questioned because the fire started in their room, but police said they were being treated as witnesses, not suspects.

Police identified the dead as James Lawery, 58, from Georgia, who fell as he tried to climb down from his fifth-floor room using a rope of knotted sheets, and a Canadian couple in their 60s, Bernice Mary Joan Busque and Paul Emile Busque. They apparently suffocated after trying to seal themselves in their bathroom.

The fire forced evacuation of the hotel’s 350 guests, including other players Marat Safin of Russia, Mariano Zabaleta of Argentina, Max Mirnyi of Belarus and Robby Ginepri of Marietta, Ga.

Ginepri escaped after being awakened by his coach, John Thompson, and lost nothing in the fire.

“People were all yelling in the hallway ‘fire, fire,’ and he thought it was kids doing a prank at the beginning,” Ginepri said of Thompson.

“There was a ton of smoke in the corridor and you couldn’t even see more than five feet ahead of you. Everyone was running frantically, trying to find the exit. We didn’t find Andy for a while, though, because he couldn’t get out. He was on the sixth floor so he stayed on the balcony. Some people were on the seventh floor and he helped them come down because the ladder on the fire truck didn’t reach that far....

“Once we got outside we saw flames coming from three different sides of the building and the windows were shattering, with glass everywhere.”

The Italian Open begins Monday.

Associated Press contributed to this report.