By Jordan Carleo
The Times-Union
GREEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Firefighters burst into a Hudson Avenue home Friday morning and plucked an unconscious six-year-old boy to safety as his panicked father and helpless neighbors looked on in horror.
Assistant Fire Chief Matthew Lansing, with firefighter Ryan Bouchey on his tail, scooped up the child from a smoke-filled second-floor bedroom and hauled his unconscious, soot-blackened body from the two-story brick apartment building at 113 Hudson Ave., authorities and witnesses said.
The child, identified by neighbors as Daniel Dingley, was taken by ambulance to Albany Medical Center Hospital and later flown to Upstate University Hospital in Syracuse, where he was listed in critical condition Friday evening.
The desperate scramble to save the young boy began with a haunting scream.
“It was this God-awful, guttural scream,” Leslie Ryan recalled Friday morning, tears welling in her eyes as she sat on her stoop and recreated the panic-soaked scene that had unfolded hours earlier in front of her home.
Ryan, 46, was in her kitchen making breakfast just before 8 a.m. when she heard it. She emerged to find her neighbor, the boy’s father, also named Daniel, dressed in the clothes he’d slept in, his feet burned, rushing back in forth as smoke and flames poured from the second floor.
“He was jumping up and down and saying, ‘My son, my son!’” Pete Torrisi, another neighbor, recounted.
Three times the man charged back into the burning building.
“It was just too hot and black.” said Ryan, who also tested the interior stairway once only to be pushed back by the flames.
But was the boy actually still inside? Nobody seemed to know for sure.
Ryan — if only for the sake of the boy’s father — held out hope that he was not.
Not long before, Ryan had spoken to the child’s mother as she left with the couple’s daughter for work.
“He asked me if I saw the son leaving with the mother,” Ryan said. She had not.
By the time firefighters and police arrived on the scene, summoned by a 911 call to authorities in Rensselaer County, the panic was spreading.
“The horrifying part was that he didn’t know if the kid was in there,” said neighbor George Schneidmuller, 69. “The longer it went on for, the more he freaked out, and when the firemen brought that kid down, the father lost it.”
It was Lansing, who despite the blinding smoke, located the boy with Bouchey in minutes and emerged with Dingley’s limp body in his arms.
“It was close,” said Lansing, a firefighter for 12 years who has a four-year-old son of his own, “I just happened to be the next guy through the door ... I really can’t take credit for it. It was a group effort.”
Fire Chief Robert Bourgeois, also among the first on the scene, said investigators believe the blaze was accidental and are focusing on a clothes dryer in a utility room as a possible cause. He said the father told investigators he was asleep when the flames broke out.
“The last thing that you want to hear when you pull up is that ‘My son is in there’ — but that’s what we heard,” Bourgeois said.
Shaeona Overton, 6, surveyed the scene from her grandmother’s stoop across the street. Overton, who said the younger Dingley was a classmate in first grade at Heatly Elementary School, said the two often played tag and hide-and-go-seek and had play-date scheduled for later in the day Friday.
“We’re praying for her friend,” said her grandmother, Michele Hotaling.
Another six-year-old may have given rescuers the narrow window of time they needed to pull the boy to safety.
While everyone else in her family’s second-floor home next door slept, Michealla Gepfert spotted flames leaping from the neighboring building.
“She saw it, came in and got us out bed and said, ‘Mommy, there’s a fire,” said Gepfert’s mother, Melissa Mattoon, who dialed 911 on her cell phone.
Bourgeois said investigators found no trace of smoke detectors in either the upstairs or downstairs apartments.
“We just can’t stress enough he importance of smoke detectors,” he said. “If you’re asleep, nine times out of 10 you don’t wake up to the smell of smoke. You don’t wake up.”
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