BOSTON - There was a lot going through Luzmar Centeno's mind when a fire broke out in their Hyde Park home last Sunday morning. "I could burn, be dead with my babies and my husband," she said.

A fire alarm woke up her family and smoke was already coming up the stairs. "My reaction was if it's coming from the stairs we have to jump," Centeno tells WBZ-TV. 

But her 16-year-old daughter Fernanda had already followed her husband Tito Mendez down the stairs where he tried to fight the blaze on his own with a fire extinguisher. 

"When the extinguisher was finished the fire came back and burned my face," he said. It left him with facial burns and other injuries as they recover in a Boston area hotel. 

Luzmar was in a second-floor bedroom clutching her one-year-old daughter Sophia feeling trapped.  She pushed out an air conditioner in a back window and saw her neighbor below, a quick thinking off-duty Boston firefighter. "I saw his head walking and I yelled please help, help, help," Centeno said.

Then a split-second decision to reach out and pass her neighbor the baby. "I gave it to him hand to hand. I was holding her in the arms, and he got his hands on her hips.  He took Sophia with this love and said, 'I got it, I got it,'" said Centeno. Then she jumped herself cutting her leg and spraining her ankle. 

Tito Mendez was fighting his own way out of the house and finding his neighbor again. "He said come, come, he hit the wall, come and grabbed me and helped me out," Mendez said.  

The family has lost almost everything in the fire, what they haven't lost are the images of that morning and words Luzmar says she can't forget. "Those words go in my mind, I got it, I got it," she said.

They're grateful to have made it out, and hope they'll get the chance to say thank you to a guardian angel.

Emmy award-winning Beth Germano is a general assignment reporter for WBZ-TV News.  Born and raised in Massachusetts, Germano has been a New England-based reporter for more than 15 years.  She joined WBZ-TV as a freelance reporter in 1996 after reporting for several local television stations including WCVB-TV, New England Cable News, Monitor Cable Channel, WLVI-TV, and WGBH-TV.

First published on July 22, 2022 / 6:16 PM

© 2022 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

©2022 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.