Monday, October 21, 2013

Ex-Marine saves family in fire: ‘It’s how I live’

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Marcus Santos// New York Daily News


Mark Atkinson credits Marine training for his instinct to catch four kids leaping from a Queens house fire.



The hero who caught four children as they leapt from a second-floor window to escape a house fire in Queens said his military training took over when he saw the smoke.


“My Marine Corps training kicked in and I just wanted to save the family,” said Mark Atkinson, 45, who lives in the neighborhood and drove to the Jamaica home Sunday when he noticed thick smoke.


“I started to call 911, until I heard, ‘Help me! Help me!’ I saw the wife and husband in the window. . . . Everything was chaotic,” he recalled. “That’s when I started catching all the kids.”


RELATED: QUEENS APARTMENT FIRE LEAVES 1 DEAD, 1 SERIOUS: OFFICIALS


He said the home’s first floor was filled with black smoke, and he directed the parents to start tossing the children out the window.


“I said, ‘Okay, give me the children first — throw them to me,’ ” Atkinson, a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, recalled.


“There was an older boy who was crying hysterically,” he said. “The younger kids were so small they didn’t understand it.”


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He believes the children ranged in age from about 7 to 14, but he didn’t have time to take names.


After saving them, he was summoned to the side of the house by next-door neighbor Horace Palmer, 43, who was trying to rescue the family’s grandfather from the basement.


“He was trapped in the bathroom and the smoke was coming out of the house billowing around him,” said Palmer. “He only had enough space just to put his head through the hole. So he was asking, ‘Please help me. Break the window!’ ”


RELATED: FURNITURE DESIGNER DIES IN QUEENS HOUSE FIRE


Palmer and Atkinson tore out the window frame and pulled the grandfather from the fire-trap. Palmer was left with cuts on his hands.


The family was treated for smoke inhalation. An FDNY spokesman said investigators found that the fire was sparked by an iron left on a bed in the basement.


Atkinson, who came to the U.S. from Jamaica and became a citizen in the 1980s, said he doesn’t feel like a hero.


“They thanked me very much, but I don’t want any accolades,” he said.


“That’s how we are in the Marines, and that’s how I live.”


With Edgar Sandoval


tmoore@nydailynews.com





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