Memories of Horror Rack School Janitor |
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The janitor at Our Lady cannot go back again. James Raymond, 43, said from his hospital bed: “I couldn't work alongside memories of those horrible minutes.” |
HE IS recovering in Garfield Community hospital from loss of blood suffered when he cut his wrist while breaking a window. |
In a broken, weary voice he 'talked of the dead. “I don't want to know their names,” he said. |
He described a “peculiar kind of smoke” in the burning school. “I can breathe coal and wood smoke,” he said. “But I couldn't breathe that.” |
RAYMOND is expected to be a central figure in the inquest next week into the deaths. |
He has maintained the school stairwell was free of rubbish. But inspectors have said they found evidence of debris in the stairwell that helped spread the fire. |
From his hospital bed, Raymond insisted, “There was nothing in that stairway that could start a fire. |
HE SAID he was in the boiler room when he first saw “a red glow” through the window in a wall separating the room from the basement section of the stairwell. He ran to the church kitchen, adjacent to the boiler room, and told a cook to call the fire department. He said his next thought was the safe exit of the children. |
He ran into a first-floor room, he said, and lifted 11 children out a window. Then he turned and ran up a stairway to the second floor to open the fire escape door and lower the fire escape. |
BUT BY the time he reached the second floor, children were at windows gasping for air and some were mounting window ledges from which many jumped. |
He lowered the fire escape and turned back to try to lead children to safety. |
But the smoke began searing his lungs. He broke a corridor window with his flashlight. It was here that he cut his wrist. |
FROM THIS point, he said he could only recall dimly what happened afterward. |
He saw blood streaming from his wrist. With nothing to bind it, he rushed back to the boiler room and grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his wrist. |
Then he dragged himself to a door on the first floor, stumbled outside, and fainted. |
The next thing he recalls was the ambulance ride to the hospital. |
HIS OWN five children were in the school when the fire broke out. |
A son, John, 11, is in Franklin Blvd. Community hospital with a broken hip suffered when he leaped from a second-floor window. |
The four others escaped without Injuries. |
Raymond, of 1008 N. Hamlin, had been janitor at the school for 13 years. |