A baby was trapped upstairs inside a burning row house Sunday night in East Baltimore. One firefighter carried out the 6-month-old infant.
Then an ambulance took the child to the hospital in serious condition, said Sam Johnson, a fire department spokesman.
The fire burned about 10:45 p.m. through the first and second floors of the home on Gough Street in the Eastwood neighborhood.
Afterward, the neighbors sat on their porches and spoke quietly about what they said they saw: The police officer who arrived first and was trying to kick in the front door. The man who ran over with a garden hose. The boom when fire blew out the glass window, and they could feel it across the street. The child's mother screaming on the lawn and the woman who comforted her, a neighbor named Martha.
Firefighters extinguished the flames within 30 minutes and no one else was hurt, Johnson said.
The mother had left for the hospital, and Martha Herman sat past midnight in the darkness of her back porch. Thunderstorms had knocked out power on the street earlier that evening.
In front were the fire engines and flashing lights and neighbors. Out back was just Herman in the dark with her pugs, Sam and Clara.
Herman said she comes from a family of firefighters and never again wants to come so close to the flames.
"To open my door and to see that house fully engulfed, that's scary. That's scary," she said. "To know that baby is in that fire, that's why I keep praying, please, please."
She was lying down for bed Sunday night when she heard someone outside. She ran out and saw flames in the windows next door. She went to her neighbor and called 911.
"She's screaming, 'My baby. My baby.' I reached for her and tried to hug her and she just went down," Herman said.
The firefighters came and Herman watched them thinking, "My God, get that baby out of there."
Next door, the blinds were melted in the windows. The curtains were burned and strewn on the bushes.
Herman stood in her blue nightgown with her dogs in the dark, saying, "I'm just praying for that baby."
Her hands were trembling.