‘There’s the foot! It’s moving!’ Boy found in rowhouse rubble.

This article was originally published in The Philadelphia Inquirer on June 29, 1988.

There was no way.

It had been almost nine hours now. There had been the gas explosion, the three-alarm fire and the tons of brick and splintered timber from the collapsed rowhouses crashing down.

There seemed no way that the asthmatic 3-year-old boy could survive underneath after all that. They would find him, all right, but his small body would certainly be crushed, the life pressed out of him.

As morning spread over the pile of rubble on the tiny street in Philadelphia's Kensington section yesterday, few of the people gathered there believed that little Harry Mertz could still be alive.

John Clark, an investigator with the city Medical Examiner's Office, stood by with a body tag, number 3095, that he would attach when the firefighters finally found the child they knew was in the wreckage of what had been his rowhouse.

But as Clark, 32, stared at the mound of jagged debris at 7:42 yesterday morning waiting to perform his grim duty, he spotted something.

It was small and sooty, but Clark recognized it right away. It was a tiny human foot.

And it was moving.

"There's the foot! " Clark shouted. "There's the foot! It's moving! "

A dozen firefighters rushed to the spot and began tearing at the debris with their hands. In minutes, they had the boy out. He was lying in a fetal position and was awake, according to Deputy Fire Marshal Bernard Dwyer.

Clark went over to see. The boy had on shorts and a shirt. "He was completely covered with soot and dirt," Clark said. "I bent over him and said, 'Good luck, Harry . ' He opened one of his eyes and looked at me. "

A nearby firefighter remembered it as "the bluest eye you ever saw. "

And as they carried the little boy away on a stretcher yesterday, there were applause and tears from the weary firefighter, and from many lips the same words: "A miracle. "

Harry Mertz's ordeal had begun the night before when a natural- gas explosion, apparently set off by a distraught next-door neighbor, brought down two houses in the 2400 block of Sepviva Street, killing two people and leaving four others hospitalized.

Two other youngsters and a pet dog had earlier been rescued by firefighters who crawled inside the smoldering, crumbling rubble of the collapsed house, knowing that the remaining structure could come down on them at any moment.

After his rescue, Mertz was taken to St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, where he was listed in guarded condition late yesterday in the hospital's pediatric burn unit. He had suffered second- and third-degree burns, smoke inhalation and exposure, hospital officials said.

"He looked like one of the kids you see on the newsreels from Beirut, covered with dust and burns," said Dr. Stuart J. Hulnick, medical director of the burn unit.

Also in guarded condition in the burn unit was Harry 's half- brother, Patrick Odenbreit, 7, who was buried and burned in the explosion.

Harry 's sister, April Mertz, 4, was in good condition in the hospital late yesterday, officials said. She had also been buried and suffered smoke inhalation and minor burns.

"All three of them have been remarkably lucky," said Dr. Max Langham, the hospital's chief pediatric surgery resident.

Killed in the explosion were Bernard Fink, 82, of the 2400 block of Sepviva Street, and the next-door neighbor, Richard Litostansky, 48, who police said ignited the blast. Fink was taken to Episcopal Hospital, where he died at 12:50 a.m. yesterday. Litostansky's body was found in the rubble of his home yesterday morning. He was pronounced dead at the scene at 10:27 a.m.

Harry Mertz; his siblings; his mother, Theresa Odenbreit, 26, and her fiance, David Christmas, 22, had moved in with the elderly Fink to help care for him, Christmas said.

Police said Litostansky had become upset when his wife left him about a week ago. About 10:30 Monday night, Litostansky telephoned the local 26th Police District, at Girard and Montgomery Avenues, and asked to speak to Officer Joseph Milligan, who was a friend and worked with Litostansky when both were plumbers years ago, officials said.

Litostansky was told that Milligan had the day off. "I have a problem and it's important that I talk to him," Litostansky said. He said he had turned on the gas to his house, and then he hung up.

Three officers were dispatched to Litostansky's house: Sgt. Edward Boothman and Officers Thomas McAleer and Joseph Carolyn.

When Litostansky answered the door, he demanded to see Milligan and slammed the door. The officers smelled a strong odor of gas and ran to alert residents of the house next door, the only adjoining house on the tiny block. Officials said later that Litostansky had disconnected or tampered with the gas meter in his house, allowing the building to fill with natural gas .

Next door, in Bernard Fink's house, everyone was already in bed - the children in bunk beds in a second-floor middle bedroom, Christmas and Odenbreit in a second-floor front bedroom and Fink on a first-floor couch.

"I looked out. I was half asleep. The police said something about gas , 'Get the kids out,' " David Christmas said in an interview at the hospital yesterday.

"So I got Theresa. We (woke) the kids and we went downstairs," he said. ''I opened up the door . . . and I went to go back in and grab Bernie,

because he's 82 and he can't walk too good. . . . I hollered over to Theresa to get the kids out because they were coming down the steps, past the coffee table.

"All of a sudden . . . it just exploded, throwing me towards the window and the air conditioner. "

Outside, the three police officers were knocked down and McAleer was buried under some debris. The two other officers, with help from patrons of a local bar, pulled out McAleer. He and Carolyn were taken to Episcopal Hospital. Carolyn was treated and released. McAleer was treated and remained under observation in the hospital. He was scheduled to be discharged today. Christmas and Odenbreit escaped serious injury.

The fire started by the blast brought almost 100 firefighters to the scene.

First to arrive were those from Ladder 3 and Engine 2, based at Second and York Streets. With the fire still burning, six firefighters crawled inside the mound of wreckage to look for the children. It was like a mine cave-in, with bricks and debris occasionally falling on the men as they worked their way into the blackness with handlights.

"It was hot and tight," said firefighter John Voltz, 40. "There was the threat of collapse. Every damn one of us was scared to death. "

Soon, Patrick Odenbreit was found with his dog. Voltz said that they were both alive, but that Patrick was terrified. He was at the end of a rough hole in the debris through which only one firefighter could fit at a time. And the hole was so small that only a firefighter of small stature could make it.

So one man would take off his coat and crawl through to remove debris, while the others held onto him by his belt and boots, Voltz said. "It was one brick at a time," he said.

Firefighter Jack Kelly, of Engine 2, tried to comfort the youngster as he worked.

The boy "was saying he was going to die," Voltz said. "Jack said, 'What's your name? ' He said, 'Patrick. ' And Jack said, 'Well, my name's Kelly and we'll get you out. ' "

Steve Hess, another firefighter inside the collapsed structure, found April Mertz under a door nearby and got her out, Voltz said.

The firefighters also located Fink but couldn't reach him. Another crew of rescuers later pulled him out with a rope.

The fire was declared under control at 12:42 a.m. Seven minutes later, Fink was pronounced dead at the hospital. But there was no sign of Litostansky or of Harry Mertz.

All night in the flat illumination of floodlights, firefighters with the help of a construction crane gingerly removed layer after layer of blasted timbers and broken debris from the houses.

"They had the crane in there," said Kim Cuarto, 22, the boy's aunt. "And I said, 'What if the baby is in there? ' We were all frantic. All I could picture was them picking that baby up in that crane. "

"We thought he was dead," she said. "He had asthma really bad, so we were thinking the worst because of his asthma and the way that (debris) was all over. . . . We thought he was crushed, gone. "

So did Clark, as he waited with the numbered body tag.

"We all thought everyone was dead in the house," he said.

But shortly before 8, as the sun spread onto the small street, Clark spotted the boy's foot sticking out of the rubble. He was alive.

"I've never seen anything like it before in my life," Clark said. "It was a miracle. . . . He was never meant to go. "

Voltz, the firefighter, said: "It was a hell of a feeling. You can't describe it. Everybody there had tears in their eyes. It was unbelievable. "

After Harry was pulled from the wreckage, Clark took the 2-by-5-inch body tag that was intended for the little boy and tore it up.

And back at the city Medical Examiner’s Office, in the big ledger book where deaths are recorded, next to the number 3095 where the boy’s name would have gone, Clark wrote the word void.