By Cara Tabachnick
Newsday
Copyright 2007 Newsday, Inc.
NEW YORK — Hours after firefighters’ dramatic rescue of toddler twins from a burning Harlem apartment building, members of the Davis family profusely thanked the city for the men’s bravery. And then yesterday, family members started putting the pieces of their lives back together.
Windows were shattered, large pieces of glass and debris littered the building’s steps, and the acrid smell of smoke hung in the air at 110 Lenox Ave. Workers from the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development were boarding up the windows with plywood, and the whole side of the building was blackened.
After a night in the hospital, twins Taylor and Delilah Davis, 2, were staying at their aunt’s house and doing well, said their grandmother, Patricia Davis, 52.
“They are doing better,” Davis said as she scrubbed soot on the fifth-floor apartment’s walls. “They are playful now.”
The family had moved to the apartment just two weeks earlier and still was settling in, she said.
“We still had a lot of stuff packed up,” she said. “Now we just have to get rid of all of it.”
Vincent Coit, 47, the twins’ grandfather, said he was sleeping Sunday afternoon when the doorbell rang and he opened the door to a rush of smoke and saw flames.
Coit, panicked, ran down the fire escape with his grandsons Donte, 4, and Imani, 5, but when he reached the ground, he realized that his granddaughters still were in the apartment.
“I went to rush back in, but the firemen wouldn’t let me,” Coit said. “It was crazy. I was stressed, crying. We thought all was lost.”
Firefighter Jimmy DiSciuilo, 32, from Squad 41 in the Bronx, was one of the men who rushed inside the building during the three-alarm fire.
“We were forced to crawl,” DiSciuilo said. “We couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces.”
By chance, he said, firefighters entered the right apartment and found the girls in their crib.
“When they saw the [firefighter’s oxygen] mask, they started to cry, but we took it off and calmed them down,” DiSciuilo said.
The twins, accompanied by firefighters from Ladder Company 14, were lowered by bucket to the ground, fire officials said.
The girls waved when they saw the crowd below, said Firefighter George Baade, 35, who was in the bucket with them.
“Sunday was a great day,” said Lt. Mickey Conboy, 41. “We are just happy those kids got a second chance at life.”
A department spokesman said the fire was caused by a 5-year-old in a third-floor apartment who was playing with matches.