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by BRIAN HARMON
Two city firefighters saved a Bronx child from certain death yesterday by tearing a hole through the wall of a smoke-filled apartment to rescue him.
"When you see that kid's face, it's like looking at your own kid's face," said Capt. John Sullivan of Ladder Co. 44, who used his standard-issue ax to chop his way into the hallway of the smoke-filled apartment at 1269 Sheridan Ave.
"That's what you do the job for."
Sullivan and Firefighter Thomas Maxwell raced up to the fifth floor of the South Bronx apartment house in response to a 10:31 a.m. alarm.
They found the hallway filling with smoke and Yvonne Reid crying hysterically that her 21/2-year-old son, A.J., was locked in their burning apartment, where the fire had apparently started in the kitchen.
Reid said later that she and A.J. had gone to visit her father in the next-door unit, and when they returned A.J. ran into their own apartment and slammed the door behind him.
"He was right in front of me," Yvonne Reid said. "It locked. I yelled, 'A.J., open the door!' As soon as I said it, the alarm went off."
Frustrated by the locked door, Reid ran downstairs to a neighbor's apartment, went out a window and climbed the fire escape back up toward her apartment, only to find her way blocked by flames. Neighbors saw the tot at a window, frantically waving his little hands.
Someone dialed 911, and within minutes Sullivan and Maxwell came racing up the stairs. With the apartment entrance blocked by fire, Sullivan quickly decided to go through the wall of an adjacent apartment.
He chopped a hole 14-1/2 inches wide, then he and Maxwell squeezed through.
"The apartment was banked down with smoke. It was pretty hairy," Maxwell said. "The captain went to one bedroom. I went to the other."
Maxwell went to the bedroom A.J. shares with his older brother and two sisters. "I felt the bed. He wasn't there," he said. "Then on the way out I felt him on the floor."
Maxwell carried the limp boy down to the street and handed him to a waiting Emergency Medical Service crew, who rushed him to Lincoln Hospital. He was transferred to a hyperbaric chamber at Jacobi Medical Center.
By late afternoon, A.J. was out of the chamber and apparently out of danger, his mom said.
"He's a beautiful boy," said neighbor Frances Torres. "He loves rice and beans."
"The greatest thing is that my son is alive," said A.J.'s father, Andrew Reid, who was at work at Hale and Hearty Soup in midtown when the fire broke out.
"I call it a miracle," said the relieved mom. "I thought from the fire I saw, I can't believe a baby could still be alive."
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
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