More than a week after the New York Fire Department  put out the flames, the fire that claimed ten lives in Highbridge rages on in the memories of two of the civilian rescuers.

On the night of March 7th, neighbors and good friends David Todd, 40,  and Edward Soto, 28, were playing video games in Todd’s first floor apartment on Woodycrest Avenue when an upstairs neighbor alerted them:  a fire had broken out in the house next door, where an extended family of Malian immigrants lived. Todd, who tends to a community garden lot that divides the two buildings, opened the garden gate and rushed with Soto  to the back of the house while the flames shot out.

When firefighters arrived, Soto and Todd were already hard at work, and the two continued to help—even at times, to lead—in a gallant and prolonged rescue effort.
Todd and Soto saved the life of a child by catching him after his mother, Aissa, threw the child out the window of a flame-engulfed room.  They comforted and cared for Assia when she leaped from the window to avoid the flames, breaking both legs. And they led firefighters to the back of the house, its only access point, through the community garden to save others trapped inside.

The two neighbors were subsequently awarded their proverbial fifteen minutes of media fame for their uncommon bravery, but unlike the reporters who covered the sidewalks, and the TV trucks that carpeted the curb for several days following the inferno, Todd and Soto are still around. Their lives have returned to some semblance of normality, but normal now takes on different proportions than before.

“The thing that messed me up, I thought everybody was out the house,” Todd reflected, recalling the moments after Soto had caught the child, and Aissa  had jumped. “It kinda irritates me that I was in my house that day, ‘cause I’m usually outside in front. If I’d’ve been outside that night, I could’ve got everybody out the house.” 

Some people on Woodycrest Avenue refer to Todd as “Super” because he always seems to be involved in repairing or maintaining the building, or because of his reliable, protective presence on the ground floor. Others know him as “Easy,” for his affable and helpful nature.

“Easy brought out the key to the fence,” Soto remembered, turning red and springing agitatedly off Todd’s couch as he remembered details of the rescue. “I said, ‘c’mon, Ease! C’mon, Ease! There was a 6-foot gate between the garden and the house, but Easy pulled it down and stood on it so the firefighters could get there. I don’t know how he pulled down the gate, but he did.”

“I don’t know how I did that,” Todd agreed. “That had to be God.”

“I caught the first kid and passed him over to Easy, and Easy ran with him to the front of the house,” Soto continued. “But the second kid came down at a weird angle. Then the lady came out of nowhere. She bounced once, then she bounced again.”

“I’ve still got her blood on my pants,” he said, showing the stains. “I wiped the blood off her legs with my t-shirt and covered her up with my sweater. I was freezing. I was in thermals. There was water everywhere.”

Todd recalled one of the firefighters going into the house and coming out carrying a child.  “He fell while he was holding the baby,” he said with a calm that seemed endless. “I looked at his eyes. He looked young. He didn’t know what to do.”

Todd’s upstairs neighbor Josue Grullon, who had alerted Todd and Soto that the fire had broken out, has the image of falling children etched in his mind. His bedroom provides a direct view onto the back of 1022 Woodycrest. From his bed, you don’t have to crane your neck to see the window from which the bodies fell that night.

“There’s no clearer view than this,” Grullon said grimly in Spanish, pointing through his window toward the eerily glassless windows on the rear of the charred husk. “You feel as if you’re worthless when you see something like that…children falling to their death…and you can’t do anything. My wife was watching it from here in bed…then she couldn’t bear it anymore and she had to go into the other room.” 

Edward Soto hasn’t had a solid night’s sleep since the blaze.

“I slept two-and-a-half hours last night,” he said. “That’s better than before. The other day I was sitting with my girl, watching American Idol until my girl snapped her fingers and says, ‘baby, are you okay?’ I zoned out. I can still hear the screams. I can still see the baby falling.”

Despite the haunting images that endure, Soto thinks he chose the only acceptable option.
“If you’re a good person from the jump, you’re gonna be there to help another human being,” he said. “There’s no heroes. In a real emergency, things come naturally.”

Todd, too, is still processing what he saw. “I think about it all the time. It goes through my body. I just want to roll up in a ball and not come out,” he said.

Todd has hopes of converting the fenced-in lot that divides the two buildings into not only a workable garden, but a gathering place where kids can see movies on  Saturday afternoons. He hopes to get funding for a movie projector and some folding chairs, after ridding the lot of the rats that presently plague it, and having steps built from the street to the entrance.

Edward Soto, who has worked for several years as a cook, will soon be starting a job in a new midtown establishment.

First, they will both need to get some sleep.