Firefighters Tuesday testified in heartbreaking and sometimes grisly detail about the chaos of trying to save seven toddlers in a fatal home day care fire in west Houston last year.
"I had to do CPR on two children simultaneously," said Billy Harris, one of the first responders to the Feb. 24, 2011, blaze that killed four children. "When you've been in a fire that long, your skin sometimes starts to melt. It comes off in your hands."
Harris and other firefighters were testifying in the murder trial of Jessica Tata, who is accused of leaving the toddlers alone at home to go shopping as a pot of oil on a hot burner caught the day care on fire.
Tata faces life in prison if convicted.
Other firefighters testified they crawled through thick black smoke as the structure fire raged to find limp bodies of babies in cribs.
Capt. David Swanson and firefighter Jonathan Robinson testified they could not see each other across the room as each found a non-responsive child in a back bedroom.
"I lifted it up and cradled it," Robinson demonstrated for the jury.
Swanson handed the child he found to Robinson, and broke out a window to climb out of the back of the house.
Once outside, he took both children to the front yard where paramedics and other firefighters were performing CPR on other children.
"It was chaos in the front yard," Swanson said. "There were multiple CPR situations going on."
The men who carried the children out of the blaze and tried to get their hearts pumping again could not discern gender or race because the toddlers were covered in soot.
During the confusion, Tata hysterically insisted there were nine children inside when there were only seven.
That meant search teams risked their lives by continuing to go in to the fire for no reason, a point prosecutors hammered Tuesday.
Tata is accused of abandoning the children, a felony that resulted in death, because receipts and store video show she was shopping at a nearby Target while the children were burning.
Tata's defense team is expected to argue that she intended no harm to the children or the firefighters, and tried to go in to the fire herself several times.
Contradicting testimony last week showed Tata may have pulled two children out. They also may have run out on their own.
Three children survived the fire.
The trial, in its second week in state District Judge Marc Brown's court, may last two more weeks.
Copyright 2012 - Houston Chronicle
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
