By Ben Goldberger
Chicago Sun Times
Copyright 2007 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
ELMWOOD PARK, Ill. — Call it family instincts.
When 18-year-old Michael Marino Jr. spotted smoke as he was driving home in Elmwood Park, he went looking for the source, finding a fire a block away and helping three elderly people to safety.
Marino, the son of Elmwood Park’s fire chief, is a fire department trainee who has yet to go out on his first call. “This guy’s been born and raised fire,” said his father, Elmwood Park Fire Chief Michael Marino. “He’s not an expert, but he knows what’s right and wrong.”
About 3:45 p.m. on Monday, Marino Jr. was on his way home from grabbing a hot dog when he saw smoke. Driving around the block, Marino traced the smoke to a two-story brick bungalow at 1708 N. 75th Ave. He pulled up to the house, having called 911 from his cell phone on the way, and banged on the door.
‘I had to get them out’
A disbelieving Dolores Boveri, 74, answered her front door. “They didn’t have any idea what was going on,” Marino Jr. said of Boveri, her husband Louis Boveri, 80, and an elderly friend who was visiting.
The three were sitting at the kitchen table on the first floor, where there were no signs of smoke. The home’s smoke detectors were silent.
“I said, ‘Look up,’ so she went out on the front porch with me and looked up” at the peak of the roof, from which black smoke was spewing. As the young Marino raced into the house to get the men out, his father, Chief Marino, arrived on the scene.
“When I pull up, I see his car, and I’m thinking, ‘Uh oh. Don’t tell me this guy’s in there fighting the fire,’ ” Chief Marino said. “But he wasn’t. He said to me, ‘Don’t be mad. I saw the smoke, and I’m the one who called 911.’ ”
The fire was put out in 20 minutes. The cause of the fire is under investigation, but preliminary reports indicate it was started by a plumber who used a blow torch on copper pipes.
Marino Jr., a senior at St. Patrick High School, said the incident strengthened his desire to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“My dad pulled up and got mad at me ‘cause I went in the house, but I had to get them out. I wasn’t going to let them sit there.”