Stafford, Vernon Men Help Rescue Fire Victims In Hartford

HARTFORD, CT — A pair of north-central Connecticut residents are being lauded as heroes after they helped save several children and adults from a burning apartment building adjacent to their Hartford machine shop Thursday morning.

Dan Tripp of Stafford told Patch he had just arrived at work at Metal Industries Inc. on Wethersfield Avenue around 7:18 a.m. when a co-worker, Joe Lauzon of Vernon, told him the building next door was on fire, and "people were hanging out windows."

The men grabbed an extension ladder from the shop and ran to the apartment building, but initially had difficulty getting the ladder to open up properly.

"It seemed like it took forever, and a mother was in the second-story window begging us to hurry, making it seem like it took longer and longer," Tripp recalled.

When the ladder was finally operable, the two were joined by their boss, Vinnie Zito, and a neighboring tenant of the shop, Miguel Rodriguez. They stood directly under a window where a woman was holding out a young child.

"I saw her drop the first kid, and Joe was right there to help catch him," Tripp said. "Then she dropped the second kid, a girl, out the window."

Lauzon said he was holding onto the young boy, so Rodriguez caught the girl. He added the rescue effort was hampered by difficulty getting the ladder to latch into proper position.

"We finally got the ladder up, but couldn't get it in the right position due to frozen tree branches, so I'm kicking the branches out of the way until we could get to the window," Tripp said. By then, a third child, in his early teens, climbed out the window and down the ladder, followed by the woman, who escaped as firefighters arrived at the scene.

The children, cold and frightened, were taken by Tripp to the machine shop, trailed by their mother, while Lauzon, Zito and Rodriguez moved the ladder and continued to help evacuate people. The evacuees were provided hot chocolate and snacks at the machine shop.

Ten residents of the building sustained non-life threatening injuries. All 42 apartments were deemed uninhabitable and residents were displaced.

Hartford's fire marshal's office determined the blaze was arson. Eladia Vazquez, 38, was charged with first-degree arson, first-degree criminal mischief, first-degree reckless endangerment and risk of injury to a minor. She was also arrested on a violation of probation warrant.

Tripp said he and his colleagues did not give a second thought to helping at the fire scene.

"There was no thinking at all; nature took over and we just did it," he said.

Lauzon concurred, "I saw they were trapped and we just ran over there."

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