At 9:35, when Newark firefighters arrived, they saw Mayor Cory Booker. He was doubled over, struggling to breathe. Rescue workers immediately treated him with oxygen.
But by 10:15, Booker, his right hand singed by second-degree burns, was tweeting that he had just saved his next door neighbor, Zina Hodge, from a kitchen fire and was on his way to University Hospital.
Though firefighters doused the flames in short order Thursday night, Booker, who also suffered smoke inhalation, fanned a conflagration of media attention today, elevating his social media cachet from the Oprah-dubbed "rockstar mayor" to somewhere between Chuck Norris and Superman.
Booker gave a handful of interviews Thursday night, then appeared on on "CBS This Morning" today. After that, he summoned dozens of reporters back to Hawthorne Avenue for a press conference in front of the charred house.
Booker’s act of heroism was the latest in a series of well-publicized feats the 42-year-old two-term mayor has performed — some of them verified, some more legendary.
There was the time he chased down a bank robber, the mysterious tale of "T-bone," the street thug whom Booker counseled to a better life and the well-tweeted story of the mayor personally clearing driveways for Newark residents after the 2010 blizzard.
But according to police officers, firefighters, witnesses and the family he saved, Booker’s brush with death was more than just shoveling snow.
Booker said that as he arrived home from a television interview Thursday night, he noticed a member of his security detail leading two women out of the house next to his South Ward apartment. The officer, Alex Rodriguez, told the mayor there was a fire in the second-floor kitchen.
Booker and two other officers helped the women out, then went inside the burning building where they found a man trying to douse a kitchen fire. The man was rushed downstairs, but Booker said Jacqueline Williams, one of the women who was already out, told him her daughter was still upstairs.
Instantly, Booker tried to run back in. But Rodriguez, charged with protecting the mayor, forbade it. He was quickly overruled.
"It wasn’t easy," Rodriguez said. "I was trying to hold his belt, but he gave me an order."
Fighting through flames and thick smoke, Booker tried to locate the 47-year-old Hodge.
"When I got through the kitchen and was searching for her and looked back an saw the kitchen in flames it was really a frightening experience for me," Booker, his hand still bandaged, told a throng of media outside the house this morning. "I didn’t think we were going to get out of there."
Booker said he fell to the floor, gasping for breath.
"Just as I was looking down, finding somewhere to breathe, I heard her," he said.
Then the mayor lifted the woman from her bed and carried her to safety.
"Every time I breathed in, I just a felt a blackness," he said. "We were just fighting for our lives."
Fire Director Fateen Ziyad said embers falling from the ceiling burned Hodge’s back and Booker’s hand.
The two-story home was boarded up today but did not appear to have sustained significant exterior damage. Ziyad said the cause of the fire was still under investigation but appeared to be the result of unattended cooking.
After the press conference, Williams arrived at the house.
"She’ll be well," Williams, 65, said of her daughter. "I’m very grateful."
Hodge remained in serious condition tonight at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, though her injuries are not considered life-threatening, Booker and other officials said.
Patrick McCoy, Hodge’s cousin, said his family has always been close with their high-profile neighbor.
"The mayor had a very good relationship with the family for all the years that he’s lived there," McCoy said.
He said his uncle was the man upstairs when the fire broke out and verified the ferocity of the blaze.
"He said the flames were just so high that he couldn’t go in," said McCoy, who owns Gino’s Pizzeria in Irvington. "For the mayor to risk his own life and go in there, that was heartfelt."
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