Tuesday, March 18, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
The cheerful children rarely strayed more than a door or two from their southeast Las Vegas home, always ready with a smile and a wave to greet their neighbors while playing in the yard.
Rollerblading was the 8-year-old's favorite thing; her 3-year-old sister was never far from her side.
Yet their father's sobbing moans were all that were heard from the family early today as the young girls' bodies were wheeled on gurneys to a waiting mortuary van.
Fire investigators have determined the 1:21 a.m. blaze that killed the girls and destroyed the family's two-story split-level home at 3915 Belleville Ave., off Sandhill Road and Harmon Avenue, started accidentally in the downstairs northwest corner -- a combination bedroom and living area.
What physically caused the blaze has not been released.
Authorities are withholding the children's names until all relatives are notified.
"The grandfather awoke and smelled smoke, then started banging on a downstairs bedroom door to wake up the girls' mom and dad," said Bob Leinbach, Clark County Fire Department spokesman.
The three got out, along with another man believed to be the girls' uncle and their 2-year-old sibling the mother cradled in her arms, "but no one got the kids upstairs," Leinbach said.
Jerald Cox said he and his wife, Margie, awoke to the girls' barefoot father knocking on their front door across the street.
"He was just frantic," Cox said. "He kept saying that he couldn't get to his kids."
Cox dialed 911, then ran outside with a garden hose to the house where a handful of other neighbors were helping the girls' father feed streams of water through windows.
One woman lost her shoes trying to combat the blaze; an unidentified man cut his forehead when the heat and flames shattered a window.
"It looked like a bomb had gone off when we arrived," said Capt. Jonathan Leavitt, a 14-year veteran who was with the first team to arrive eight minutes after receiving the call at Station 14, a few miles away off Topaz Street and Desert Inn Road.
"We could see flames inside the windows and the front door," the two sites where firefighters entered the home, he said. "We knew from the call that there were children inside. Everyone was hysterical -- we had to ask the family to get back. The father kept trying to go back inside."
Within minutes of starting a fast attack, firefighters found the 8-year-old's severely burned body in her bed near an upstairs window. Investigators believe she suffered smoke inhalation before being burned to death.
Fire crews found the 3-year-old's body in a hallway just outside her sister's bedroom, burned beyond recognition, Leavitt said.
"Everybody is pretty torn up about it," Leavitt said of his crew. "It's what we do. Every one of us wants to save lives and stop fires. But when the odds are against you, there's not much you can do. We hoped to get there, to save the girls, but it was just so hot."
The intense heat burned the ears of one firefighter involved in trying to rescue the girls; another was sent home from his shift, overcome with grief, said Russ Cameron, emergency medical services supervisor.
"There's a special place in a firefighter's heart for all children," Cameron said. "We're taking every firefighter involved in the call through a debriefing to try to help them get through this."
The fire was officially put out at 1:49 a.m., shortly before the girls' family was told of their deaths.
"My babies, my babies!" their father moaned from a curb across the street outside a neighbor's home where relatives were taken to stay warm. Cox stayed next to him, offering a supportive hug.
The extended family had lived in the house for at least 10 years and the girls' father had recently become its official owner, Cox said.
"Tony (the father) had been working on the house and had laid the rock down in the front yard," Cox said. Improvements slowed in the past year, he said, when the girls' grandmother died.
"They are a very close family. The grandmother had lived with them," Cox said. "They had a very elaborate Filipino funeral ceremony for her, like a family reunion for many days. They really hadn't bounced back from her death, I don't think."
American Red Cross workers arrived in the neighborhood this morning to offer food and shelter, but friends said the family probably would stay with an aunt who lives in Las Vegas.
Paramedics examined the surviving relatives for smoke inhalation, but said the only injuries suffered were emotional.
"There were lots of combustibles inside the home," Leinbach said. "It appeared that they had collected many things over their life. They were not sloppy, but all of the things they had in their home made for a big fuel load, which didn't help the situation."
Leinbach said there was no evidence of smoke detectors, but added that the older white wooden home may have been built prior to 1974 when codes were changed to require that fire detection devices be installed in all new homes.
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