Couple on their honeymoon hailed as heroes for saving babies from burning building: 'It was wild'

When Doran Smith and David Squillante finally got to go on their honeymoon after putting it on hold for two years due to the pandemic, all the couple had in mind was to enjoy Spain's architecture, food and the beach. However, a few days into their late September honeymoon in Barcelona, Squillante—who works in food sales—and Smith—a software engineer—found themselves helping rescue babies from a fire. According to The Boston Globe, the couple was on their way to a guided tour at a scenic park when they noticed some women running out of a nearby building and into the street in panic.

"I saw a flame coming out of the doorway next to the door that these women had come out of," Smith told WJAR. "So I said, 'Oh my god, there’s a fire.'" Right at this moment, "instinct took over" Squillante and he ran into a different entrance of the building to a room where he saw around 20 babies. Although the room itself wasn't on fire yet, it was starting to get smoky, so the honeymooner immediately started putting kids into cribs and rolling those cribs to the entryway where his wife was. Smith then pushed the cribs across the street to get them out of the burning building as more bystanders intervened.

"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. Meanwhile, Squillante tried his best to calm down the nursery workers who were there despite only speaking kitchen Spanish. "Tranquilo. Tranquilo," he told them, Squillante recalled. "We couldn't speak the language, but there was a universal language—we were all just trying to help," Smith added. They believe the ordeal lasted around 10 minutes before Barcelona fire crews arrived on the scene and got the situation under control.

Once they'd done their bit, Squillante and Smith picked up right where they'd left off before they stumbled across the burning building. They actually went on their park tour, showing up about a half-hour late. It was only part of the way through it, that the gravity of what they'd just experienced dawned on them. "We looked at each other and said, remember that time we saved a bunch of babies?" Smith said. "It felt like we watched it in a movie," Squillante chimed in. "It just didn't feel real."

"It was wild," Smith admitted, laughing. However, this wasn't Squillante's first time being a hero. The 38-year-old, whose father and grandfather were both firefighters, once stopped a man from jumping from the top of an overpass. Another time, he went out in a thunderstorm to look for a friend's lost dog and came across a man passed out next to a bicycle. He called 911 to help the man and also managed to find the dog, all in less than half an hour. "Dave is always in the right place at the right time," Smith said. He might soon have more such stories to share as he is currently looking into following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and becoming a volunteer firefighter in Bristol.