Two Rhode Island honeymooners are being called heroes after rescuing up to 20 babies from a burning building during a sightseeing tour in Spain.
David Squillante and Doran Smith, who married in 2020, were on their way to a park tour in Barcelona on September 28 to celebrate their belated honeymoon when Smith saw women screaming from a burning doorway, prompting the couple to to take action.
Squillante, 38, immediately “dropped his backpack and ran across the street” into what turned out to be a daycare center.
“I just ran in and saw some babies sleeping and crying,” Squillante, who comes from a family of firefighters, told NBC News.
The groom, who speaks very little Spanish, said “instinct took over” as he ran into the burning building and straight into the smoky playroom.
David Squillante and Doran Smith, both 38, from Bristol, were on their way to a park tour in Barcelona when Smith noticed a nearby nursery was on fire and women were screaming from a burning entrance, prompting them on September 28 to be in to take action
Squillante immediately dropped his backpack and ran across the street into another entrance and immediately began handing his wife children and putting more in cribs to roll them out (pictured).
The kindergarten staff helped them to get the children out of the kindergarten. When asked why staff have not yet evacuated the building, Smith told : “There were no flames in the children’s room so I think the staff were just trying to figure out where the smoke was coming from and trying to decide what to do’
They managed to get the children to safety at a local high school across the street, and the couple believe no one was hurt
Smith, also 38, told she didn’t know how the fire started or how long it lasted before the couple arrived, but they believe it was an “electrical fire in the walls”.
“It seemed like we walked right past when the chaos started.”
Squillante began placing about 20 children in cribs as the smoke grew thicker and rolling them to his new wife while he tried to calm the nursery staff.
He found one of the children in a playhouse and gave the child to his partner, who said the baby was scared but not crying like the others and squeezed her finger as she held him.
Smith told that staff probably haven’t evacuated the building yet because “there weren’t any flames in the children’s room”.
“I think the staff were just trying to figure out where the smoke was coming from and decide what to do.”
“We couldn’t speak the language, but there was a universal language — we were all just trying to help,” Smith, a software engineer, told the Boston Globe.
As others got on, they began leading babies down a row, out of the building, and into a local high school across the street. The whole process took about 10 minutes, the couple said.
The honeymooners left shortly after firefighters arrived and believe no one was injured.
The couple then went straight to their park tour and showed up about 30 minutes late.
They said the surreal experience hit them later.
During the tour, they turned around and said, “Remember the time we saved some babies?”
“It felt like we saw it in a movie, it just didn’t feel real,” Squillante, who works in grocery sales, told the Globe.
Immediately afterwards, they continued on to their park tour, which they showed with a delay of up to 30 minutes. They wouldn’t realize it until later, when they turned to each other and said, “Remember when we saved some babies?”
The couple married in October 2020 but did not honeymoon until September 2022 due to the pandemic
Smith said the moment her husband ran into the building without a second thought, she knew he was the person to have around in an emergency.
Squillante has a knack for being in the right place at the right time – because this wasn’t his first experience of accidentally saving lives.
In another close save, he and a paramedic stopped a man from jumping an overpass while Squillante just rode his motorcycle around unfamiliar roads.
The selfless viewer also once went out into the rain to help find his friend’s missing dog – only to find a man who passed out during a bike ride and the missing pooch.
Since the fire, the grocer said he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and become a volunteer firefighter.