One man carried a 79-year-old woman from their burning apartment building in Mission Hill early Wednesday, while a neighbor who lives next door and owns both properties pulled a fire alarm box to alert authorities, according to relatives of fire victims.
Robbie Wilson said his mother, Evelyn, was rescued from the bedroom of her third-floor apartment by a tenant who lived on the second floor of 808 Parker St. Wilson and his relatives identified the rescuer as Rob, but did not know his last name.
“I went to him to thank him for what he did,” said Wilson, 56. “I said: ‘God bless you, man. Thank you.’ ”
The two-alarm blaze, believed to have been started by the careless disposal of a cigarette on the first floor, broke out about 3:20 a.m., Fire Department spokesman Steve MacDonald said. Two of the eight displaced people suffered injuries that were not life-threatening, including a man on the first floor who was hospitalized for burns to his arm.
Wilson said his mother was the other person injured. He visited her at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where she was treated for smoke inhalation.
He said his mother recalled the terrifying moments before she was rescued. “She told me, ‘I was ready to die,’ ” he said.
Wilson and his mother’s sisters — Maureen Mucci, Marine Cotton, and Shirley Rhodes — collected belongings from the charred home.
Wilson and his aunts identified the man who pulled the alarm box as Ian Cotterell. City records show he owns the building that burned and the home next door.
On Wednesday afternoon near the scene of the fire, Cotterell recalled he had been awakened by noises and at first thought there had been a break-in. So he ran outside and saw the orange glow from the blaze, which was so intense that it was melting the siding on the house.
After initially trying to call 911, he remembered the nearby alarm, which he said the city had removed in the past but eventually replaced.
“I ran out in my underwear straight to that fire box,’’ he said.
Cotterell, a Mission Hill native, is the chief operating officer and longtime coach of the Brookline-Jamaica Plain Patriots Pop Warner organization, which struggled until Cotterell helped turn it around in recent years, including a national title run last December.
In early 2011 he was nominated for an annual NFL award honoring coaches at all levels of the sport for “integrity, achievement, and leadership.’’
MacDonald commended Cotterell for pulling the alarm, a still-useful relic of a time before cellphones.
The alarm system in Boston is the first ever established in the country. It is connected by an underground telegraph system that does not require electricity. When pulled, a box immediately alerts staff at an emergency response center.
“If the electricity goes out and the cell towers go out and if you don’t speak English, it doesn’t matter,” McDonald said. “If you pull this, we’ll come.”
He said there are at least a couple thousand outdoor boxes across the city. About 600 businesses and institutions connect to the system, which is maintained regularly by firefighters, he said.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mucci sat in a chair along the sidewalk in front of Cotterell’s home. Her cellphone rang. It was her hospitalized sister.
“Evelyn was crying,” she said. “She’s thankful to be alive.”