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by RALPH R. ORTEGA and DAVE GOLDINER
It was the most heart-wrenching conversation a firefighter could have with a father grieving the loss of his two children.
As he lay in his hospital bed, FDNY Capt. Michael McAndrew looked Sam Sanclemente in the eye and said, "I'm sorry. I did my best. I wish I could have done more."
The distraught father assured him no apologies were necessary.
"Thank you for everything you did," Sanclemente told the injured McAndrew, a father of three girls.
"Thank you for trying."
Sanclemente, 35, told of the wrenching meeting in an emotional interview with the Daily News yesterday at Weill Cornell Medical Center, as he mourned his 10-year-old son, also named Sam, and daughter, Sachiel, 2, and kept a 24-hour vigil at the bedside of his wife, Selena.
Selena Sanclemente, 35, who desperately tried to get back inside the Kingsbridge, Bronx, house to rescue her children, suffered severe burns and lung damage from smoke inhalation.
The Ecuadoran immigrant emerged from a coma yesterday but remained in critical condition and under sedation at Weill Cornell Medical Center.
"I lost my life. Now I'm fighting for my wife's life," the grieving husband said. "She's always been a fighter, and I hope she always will be."
After the loss of their only two children, Sanclemente was praying he would not leave the hospital without the high school sweetheart he married 11 years ago.
"I'm going to wait here as long as it takes," Sanclemente said, tears rolling down his face. "Hopefully, God will do something. Hopefully, he'll change it for the better."
Selena's mother, Dolores Zuleta, said her injured daughter lived for her two children and would have done anything to save them.
Given her condition, relatives told her only that her children were injured in the blaze.
"She is everything good that you would want in a woman," said Zuleta, 59. "She adored her two children. She's going to go crazy when she finds out."
"Her children were her life," Zuleta added.
Selena Sanclemente and the kids were sleeping inside their home on Kingsbridge Terrace when the fire erupted after dawn in an overloaded electrical outlet on the first floor.
Battling smoke and flames, Selena Sanclemente raced downstairs searching for a fire extinguisher and then could not get back up to reach her children.
"It was too late," said Sanclemente, who, unaware of the danger, had left for work shortly after the fire started.
McAndrew led firefighters into the burning building and quickly plucked out Sachiel, who suffered burns over nearly 90% of her body.
It took eight minutes for them to find little Sam, who got entangled in a curtain near a window in a desperate effort to escape.
"Mike was crawling on the floor looking for my baby," Sanclemente said. "He looked for eight minutes and then he had to jump out a window because he couldn't take the heat anymore."
FDNY chaplain Rev. Christopher Keenan visited both families and offered a special Mass for them at his church in Harlem. "We're praying for Selena and the children," the chaplain said.
But even amid his grief, Sanclemente paid tribute to the bravery of McAndrew and his FDNY comrades.
"He's a strong man," he said. "He has a beautiful family. God bless him for that."
"All the firefighters are great guys," he added. "My thanks to all of them."
Sanclemente, who runs his own limousine company, said his biggest regret is that he never had enough free time to spend with his children.
Now, he wishes he could turn back the clock and squeeze out a few precious seconds.
"All my son ever asked me for was time," he recalled. "He would ask me, 'Daddy, stay home. Take a day off.' And it was something I was not able to give him."
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