Blaze hero
Brooklyn man saves 13 in fatal fire
A BROOKLYN MAN who led his neighbors out of a raging inferno — even carrying an 80-year-old woman to safety — was being hailed as a hero Saturday.
Conrad Mea, 33, stayed behind as the fire raged at 147 Conselyea St. in Williamsburg Friday night, banging on doors and shouting to alert neighbors.
In the end, he helped 13 people get out alive. One resident, Ellie Luckey, died in the third-floor bedroom where the fire originated.
“He’s the hero in my book,” said Mea’s brother-in-law, Martin Freda, 37, who lives in the building. “He reacted the way we wish everyone would in a situation like that.”
Freda and his wife live across the hall from the Meas. After Mea’s wife, Rose, was unable to wake Freda’s wife, Conrad Mea pounded on the door and bellowed for her to get up.
“Then she had no shoes and went back to get them,” said Freda, who wasn’t at home. “He literally had to drag her down the stairs.”
Mea, Rose and his 12-year-old son had been in their kitchen, at the rear of the building, on the fourth floor.
“We heard a big pop and bang in the hallway,” Mea said.
After waking his sister-in-law and getting his family to head downstairs, he and Rose each pounded on doors to apartments on the third, second and first floors.
Rose and their son escaped through the building’s front door, but Conrad Mea stayed inside longer.
By the time he tried to lead people out the front door, flaming embers were falling from the building’s façade, making that route too dangerous.
Neighbors across the street described how the front windows burst and flames shot out, quickly engulfing the front rooms. Rose Mea was screaming for her husband.
Mea’s last stop was the first-floor apartment of a neighbor named Dolores. He hoisted her up, her son followed, and they and other residents escaped through a rear door.
Mea then tore down a 5-foot chainlink fence to make it easier for her to pass. “I laid on it so she could walk over it,” Mea said.
The good Samaritan said he wasn’t scared during the rescue, only afterwards, when friends showed him pictures and video of the raging inferno, which they’d taken with their phones. The fire is under investigation. “I hope anybody would do something like that,” Mea said. “You’d have to be an animal to let people burn.”