Two men were hailed heroes after helping to contain a fire until firefighters arrived while a mother and her two children were trapped inside.
The fast-acting neighbors noticed smoke billowing out of the home on the 3000 block of South Dalton Avenue in Los Angeles when they came home from work at around 7:24 p.m. Thursday.
After they jumped the fence they saw the family inside through a window and could hear the children crying. Since the stairs were on fire they used a garden hose to quell the flames until reinforcements could arrive.
"I could hear the sirens coming. We just held the fire off - firefighters came and took care of the rest," modest neighbor Danny Rivera said.
It took 51 firefighters 24 minutes to finally extinguish the blaze, and the mother and her two children escaped from the fire uninjured.
However a Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman said if it was not for the neighbors' quick-thinking, the outcome would have been much different.
