By JUDY RATTNER
Giallombardo and his wife, Marie, village residents for 26 years, were driving back to their home on St. Mark’s Place at about 1 a.m. Slowing to a stop across the street from 219 Lakeview Ave., Giallombardo, 54, a former maintenance worker at Aqueduct Raceway who is battling prostate cancer and out of work on disability, wasted no time. He told Marie to call 911 on his cell phone, jumped out of the car, ran to the house, rang the doorbell and pounded on the door.
"Do you realize that your house is in flames?" he recalled shouting at the people he could barely make out in the darkness through the frosted glass on each side of the door.
Giallombardo was joined by another man who was passing by when he saw the fire, and the man told him he had already called for help. At that point someone inside opened the door, and as the men ran inside, Giallombardo said, he found a woman and two girls. According to the woman, Janice Moore-Caputo, the girls were her daughter and her niece, and her son was also in the house.
Giallombardo and the other rescuer, whom Moore-Caputo later described as a young African-American man, made their way into the dark house, which was rapidly filling with smoke, as Moore-Caputo and the two girls shuffled outside.
Giallombardo recalled that Moore-Caputo had a dazed expression, one of the girls was crying and the other was holding a gray dog. Once outside, one of the girls said, "My brother's upstairs," confirming what Marie Giallombardo later said she could see from the sidewalk: A boy who looked to be about 14 was silhouetted by a dim blue light, perhaps from a television.
Sal dashed up the stairs, he said, calling for the boy, but there was no answer. "Right then I thought the worst," he said, "but I kept calling." He looked in a bedroom, saw no one and called for the boy again. Finally, he said, he heard a faint, "I’m in here" from a bedroom down the hall.
"I told him, 'Come on, we've got to get out of here, the house is burning,’ and he's going through his dresser drawers, he said he's looking for his shirt," said Giallombardo. "I told him 'Your house is burning, there's no time, let's get out of here.'
"So I grab him," he continued, "and we go to the steps — we're halfway down and he turns around and runs back up to his room again. So this time he's looking for his socks. At this point I grabbed him by the arm and I pulled him down the stairs.
"So we get downstairs, we're going toward the door and he turns around again and runs into the dining or living room, I really couldn't tell what it was. And I ask him, ‘What is it now?’ ‘My shoes,’ he says, and he finds them and puts them on. I finally got him out of the house.” Giallombardo took the boy across the street, where his mother, sister and cousin were.
From her vantage point near the South Side Middle School track, Moore-Caputo said she could see the other man hurrying through the house. After he came back outside, she said, she shook his hand and thanked him, and he replied, “I'm glad you're OK.”
“When I turned around,” she continued, “he was gone.”
By this time police and firefighters had arrived, and firefighters were attacking flames that had engulfed a newly-completed addition to the house . One ran into the house and emerged with the family's pet cockateel. According to fire officials, one firefighter suffered a minor injury fighting the blaze. The extension was destroyed, and the rest of the house had water and smoke damage.
Moore-Caputo’s husband, Robert, who was in California on business, flew home as soon as he heard about the fire, and the couple and their two children, Julianna, a senior at South Side High School, and Donovan, a freshman at Kellenberg High, are staying with relatives in Baldwin until other arrangements are made. "I'm grateful for everybody," Moore-Caputo said several days after the fire. "God gives you angels."
‘Super Sal’
Marie Giallombardo, 54, a dietary aide at Mercy Medical Center, said her husband was gasping after the ordeal, but he refused firefighters’ offer of oxygen.
"I never saw him move so fast," she said, "I said, 'Sal, you still have it.'"
This wasn’t the first time her husband had saved someone, Marie said, noting that their three daughters — Jennifer, 34, of Hicksville, Janice, 33, of South Hempstead and Gina, 21, a junior at Manhattan College — sometimes refer to him as "Super Sal." When he worked at a Foodtown supermarket in Freeport about 10 years ago, Marie recounted, Sal and a co-worker performed CPR on a colleague who was having a heart attack, restarting his heart and keeping him breathing until an ambulance arrived.
About 20 years before that, when the family lived in Long Island City, Giallombardo helped a man at a bus stop who was having a seizure, keeping him from choking on his dentures.
Asked what made him stop and run into the burning house on Lakeview, Giallombardo, clearly a reluctant hero, said only, "I don't think about it, I just do it. I could never just walk away."
