US Couple Save Babies From Fire While On Honeymoon

An American couple are being hailed as heroes after they saved babies from a burning nursery in Spain. Doran Smith and David Squillante had to wait over two years before going on their honeymoon in Barcelona, Spain, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The Bristol, Rhode Island couple decided to take a walk to a scenic Barcelona park to enjoy a tour on what they thought would be an otherwise uneventful day.

During their walk Smith said she noticed something amiss in a nearby building: Women were running out of it and into the street, panicked. Smith said “I saw a flame coming out of the doorway next to the door that these women had come out of So I said, ‘Oh my god, there’s a fire.'” After Smith called attention to the fire, Squillante says “instinct took over.” The couple ran into the building without a second thought, not realizing they were running into a nursery filled with sleeping babies.

Squillante said “I found myself looking at 15-20 babies sleeping and immediately just kind of lined everybody up. We started grabbing them and putting them into the cribs. We were just literally taking cribs with a few kids in them and rolling them across the street to the high school lobby,” Smith explained.

Squillante said that no one inside the nursery spoke English so they didn’t understand what was probably being explained to them. The couple — along with other bystanders and good Samaritans who pitched in to help save the babies. Everyone worked quickly to move all the young children out of the nursery as the room filled with smoke from what appeared to be an electrical fire.

Squillante estimates that the whole ordeal lasted around 10 minutes, though he said it felt like an instant. Once Barcelona fire crews arrived on the scene and the situation was under control, the couple said they continued their walk toward the park as planned, “as if it was a normal day” leaving them with a unique, heroic honeymoon tale to tell for years to come.