BRAVEST ALWAYS ON DuTY
Saves 3 on way home
AFTER SEEING her intrepid husband pluck a Queens grandmother and two kids from a burning house, Crystal Duge was surprisingly unsurprised.
“It’s just who he is,” she said Friday. “He’s Superman.”
Off-duty firefighter Roben Duge took a dramatic detour on his walk home one night earlier, springing into action when their next-door neighbor’s two-story house went up in flames.
“He ran into the house and he just pulled the kids and (the grandmother) and pulled them out,” said Duquan Williams, 27, father of the rescued children. “Good thing he’s there when it happened.”
The mild-mannered firefighter was headed home from the subway when he noticed the thick black smoke pouring out of his neighbor’s house.
A child playing downstairs in the basement accidentally started the fire — and was too frightened to tell his grandmother as the flames spread quickly, sources said.
Duge, a five-year FDNY veteran assigned to Ladder 103 in Brooklyn, started sprinting toward the residence when he saw the smoke. Visions of his own three kids flashed through his mind.
“I’m not a hero, I’m just reacting off instinct,” the fearless father said Friday at his Jamaica home, right next door to the fire-damaged house.
“When I heard the kids screaming, it hit home,” Duge told the Daily News. “I thought, ‘If I can only get in deep enough’ — and I don’t have any gear, and I don’t know how dangerous it is.”
The grandmother, a stroke victim who walks with a cane, was barely able to move on her own once he made his way inside.
“I live to see another day,” said Linda Mitchell, 54, after wrapping Duge in a hug. “He helped me out. And that was a blessing . ... He did what he had to do.”
After getting the three residents outside, he steered them over to his home — where EMTs treated the trio on his couch.