Apr
3
Mother Lost Life After Saving Three Children
Filed Under EN
SIOUX FALLS, SD –
A Sioux Falls mother is being remembered as a hero.
Sulmi Guerra Sandoval, 29, died Tuesday rescuing young children from her burning apartment. Two of the children are Guerra Sandoval’s. Her four-year-old daughter has been taken to Minneapolis for smoke inhalation and her two-year-old daughter is in a pediatric intensive care unit in Sioux Falls. Her condition is listed as stable.
The third child is a four-year-old boy who is in critical condition in Sioux Falls. Guerra Sandoval was babysitting him and his two-year-old brother Eli Galicia.
Little Eli is the boy Guerra Sandoval went back in to get but neither of them made it out.
“Anybody who puts their life in jeopardy like that is a hero,” Sioux Falls Fire Rescue Chief Jim Sideras said Wednesday.
Fire officials believe the fire started in the downstairs living area of Guerra Sandoval’s apartment and spread quickly.
“We know when our firefighters first got there, they were even saying it was pretty much a blow torch coming out of the apartment that they couldn’t make entry right away because of the heat,” Sideras said.
Guerra Sandoval was able to hand her four and two-year-old daughters out of the apartment to some passers-by who stopped to help. She also rescued a four-year-old boy she had been babysitting. That’s when the men helping told her she needed to get out but she refused.
“They had told her, the people that were helping her, that it’s time for her to come out. She went back in for the last child and did not survive,” Sideras said.
Sideras says investigators have narrowed down the origin of the fire to a two-to-three square foot area in the apartment, but because of the severe damage they may never figure out what sparked the fire.
But what Sideras does know is Guerra Sandoval made the ultimate sacrifice to save the children in her care.
“When you are taking those types of sacrifices and you do so without any thought of your own peril I think you are a hero,” Sideras said.
Click here to learn more about a fund set up for the famlies.
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