Families try to cope after day-care fire

HERMOSILLO, Mexico (AP) — Relatives and friends watched the tiny white coffin lowered into the ground. They each dropped white roses into the grave. Somebody attached a Dora the Explorer balloon to the cross marking the resting place of 2-year-old Maria Magdalena Millan.

“I love you and I don’t want to leave you here,” her mother screamed at the funeral Saturday.

Maria Magdalena and 34 other children died in a fire at the ABC day-care center in the northern Mexican city of Hermosillo on Friday, despite desperate attempts to evacuate babies and toddlers through the building’s only working exit.

One man crashed his pickup truck through the wall to save his child.

Delfina Ruelas, 60, said her grandchild German Leon died of his burns Saturday morning, three days after his fourth birthday. She and her husband saw television news reports that the ABC day care was on fire Friday and rushed over.

“I thought he wasn’t that burned and that we would find him OK, but he was very burned,” said Ruelas, dissolving into tears outside the morgue in the northern city of Hermosillo, where she waited along with 30 other relatives. “They operated on him yesterday, and he held on, but today he couldn’t hold on.”

Firefighters carried injured children through the front door — the building’s only working exit — and through large holes that a civilian knocked into the walls before rescue crews arrived, according to a fire department official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the fire.

Noe Velasquez, an employee at a nearby auto-parts store who helped pull out five toddlers, said the father of one of the children rammed his pickup truck through a wall. Velasquez did not know if the man’s child survived.

The tragedy once again raised questions about building safety in Mexico: Officials cracked down on code violations after a deadly stampede at a nightclub last year and a fire at a disco nine years ago.

A May 26 inspection found that the day-care building — a converted warehouse with a few windows mounted high up — complied with safety standards, said Daniel Karam, the director of Mexico’s Social Security Institute, which outsourced services to the privately run day care.

Asked if the single functioning exit constituted a safety code violation, Karam only repeated that the building had passed the inspection, although he conceded that the security requirements might have to be re-evaluated.

Guadalupe Arvizu, who was visiting her injured 2-year-old grandson at a hospital, said the building has an emergency exit but it could not be opened on the day of the fire. She did not know why.

The death toll rose to 35 after several children died overnight. At least 41 children and six adults were hospitalized, Sonora state Gov. Eduardo Bours said. The adults included staffers at the day care and civilians who tried to help. Some of the children had third-degree burns, the Hermosillo fire department official said.