Father’s heartbreak
Heard son in fatal fire
A day after a fire ripped through his little boy’s bedroom, an anguished Brooklyn dad recalled frantically trying — and failing — to save the 10yearold’s life.
“I tried to rescue my son! The fire would not allow it!” the exhausted father, Moses Guobadia, sobbed Friday morning in the parking lot outside his charred apartment in East New York’s Louis Pink Houses.
“I tried to get to the bed and pull him out,” Guobadia said of his boy, Clint, whose voice he could hear through the bedroom’s flames and smoke.
“The fire came on my head,” the father said.
“It just pushed me back. It went down my back. My skin was smelling. My head is still warm,” he said.
Officials said the fire was accidental, caused by a pinched electrical cord. There were no working smoke alarms in the home.
The child had been asleep when the flames erupted at about 10 p.m., according to the sources.
The father had been sleeping, too, and was awakened by his wife’s screams. “She said, ‘There’s a fire in the children’s room! There’s a fire in the children’s room!’ ” Guobadia said.
The father recalled reaching out to his son, whom he could hear crying out with a muffled wail.
“I called him. He an swered. Clint said, ‘Mmmmm.’ ”
But young Clint, described by neighbors as sweet and respectful, was trapped by the flames. He was taken to Brookdale Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Neighbor Margarita Garcia helped carry out the boy’s three surviving siblings from the building.
“I was in the hallway downstairs and heard a woman screaming,” Garcia recalled.
“I thought it was a lady getting beat up. I ran up the stairs, and on the third floor I saw the kids in front of the door, and the mom was laying down screaming. She kept fainting and then screaming, ‘My son!’ ” Garcia said.
The mother had to be dragged from the smokefilled doorway, she said.
“It was just heartbreaking,” she said.