| Joe Wasn't Hurt, He Saw Only Horror |
| CHICAGO, Dec. 1 - (AP) - “I can't stop shaking.” |
| Joseph Brocato, 11, said this to a doctor who stopped Monday afternoon to look at him in busy St. Anne's Hospital where victims of the Our Lady of the Angels Parochial School fire were brought. |
| The words gushed out. |
| “We heard it. We were emptying the wastebasket in the basement. |
| “It was a boom in the furnace room. And the janitor ran out. |
| “He shouted to get upstairs.” |
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| Joseph and his companion - he didn't name the other boy - ran upstairs. They were herded out of the school. Later his father brought him into the hospital because the shaking wouldn't stop. |
| Joseph wasn't burned. He didn't have to jump. He only saw the horror. |
| It was a heart-breaking thing as firemen carried victims down into the milling throng of youngsters and older people. Clothes were burned off of some of the charred bodies of boys and girls. |
| It began with deceptive excitement. There was the noise, and some smoke. |
| A priest, Father Joseph Ognoibene(sic), said he drove up to the school shortly after the fire began. |
| “I thought it was a fire drill. Then I saw the smoke and knew it was the real thing,” he said. |
| The trapped children were mostly seventh and eighth graders whose classrooms were on the second floor. |
| While ambulances and fire trucks jammed the street, and mothers sought frantically for their children, Mrs. Mary Jalowietki stood weeping outside her house across the street from the school. |
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| “I saw the kids come out of the school,” she told a reporter. “My son, Ronald, was one of the first out.” The boy was unhurt. |
| Again she sobbed. |
| “The kids on the second floor were leaping out the windows. At least 10 jumped. This was after I went into the school. It was full of black smoke. The smoke hit me and I came right back. |
| “And there they were - five or six sitting or laying on the ground. They were full of blood. It was awful.” |
| Thomas Raymond, 12, who was trapped briefly in an eighth grade classroom on the second floor, said he and several classmates were rescued by firemen who lifted a ladder to the window. |
| “We thought at first that the yells came from some kids playing in the corridor,” he said. “Then, we heard someone shout: 'Fire! Fire!” |
| He said the fire bell rang, and his teacher said, “Get up and get out fast.” |
| Raymond said he was the last of the class to reach the corridor. |
| “There was lots of smoke,” he said. “I couldn't breathe or nothing. I was going to jump, but just then some girls came in. I told them to get down on the floor because of the smoke.” |
| “I kept thinking how I'd look dead,” Raymond said. He was not hurt. |
