'The baby was dangling'
The Queens woman who sprung into action when she saw her neighbor’s toddler dangling from a third-story fire escape said instinct kicked in when she rushed to save the boy’s life.
“I didn’t know what to do, I just did it,” Sonia Ramirez told The Post on Sunday. “I moved to the place where the baby was coming. It was so fast.”
Ramirez, a cancer survivor, was coming home from her job as a home health aide Saturday night when a neighbor frantically pointed to the third floor of their Woodside apartment building.
There, the 2-year-old was straddling the fire escape.
The neighbor, Delia Chimbay, said she heard a baby crying from her apartment and noticed him precariously perched on the fire escape — but she couldn’t find anyone to help.
So Ramirez jumped in, putting her arms out and breaking the tot’s fall.
The child dangled for “five minutes of anguish” before he dropped, Ramirez said.
“The baby was there on the [fire escape] and he was going up. We screamed to him: stop, stop! And he stopped for a while but then he went down and was like dangling over the [railing] one leg there and one leg hanging. And then he fell.”
Chimbay added: “He was like, over the railing. One leg dangling and the other leg . . . he was sitting over the railing. Then he lost balance.”
With nerves of steel, Ramirez zeroed in on the kid and prepared to catch him.
“I was screaming for help, but I wasn’t that nervous,” she said. “I was mostly focused on the baby.
“I don’t know if I could handle the weight of the baby that fast on my arm,” she added. “When he fell from my arms, he hit his head, so thank God everything is fine.”
Ramirez said she didn’t know the boy or his family.
As neighbors mobbed her outside the building, hugging her and shaking her hand, Ramirez brushed off suggestions she did anything special.
“I don’t understand, I’m not used to this,” she said.
Ramirez, who finished chemotherapy in March, com- mended Chimbay for first noticing the child and pointing him out.
The boy’s 13-year-old sister, who was home on Sunday, said her parents were still at the hospital with her brother.
The girl, named Pranjali, said her mom was busy cooking with music on during the incident — while she was in her room with a friend.
She said their window had been open a crack to let air in, but that her baby brother climbed over a couch and out.
“People almost attacked her,” said neighbor Miriam Castro, saying people yelled at the woman: “What kind of mother are you?”