An American couple are being hailed as heroes after they saved babies from a burning nursery in Spain.
Like many recently married couples, 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.
Finally on their honeymoon, the Bristol, Rhode Island couple decided to take a walk to a scenic Barcelona park and enjoy a tour on what they thought would be an otherwise uneventful day.
It was during their walk that Smith said she noticed something amiss in a nearby building: Women were running out of it and into the street, panicked.
"I saw a flame coming out of the doorway next to the door that these women had come out of," Smith told local Rhode Island news station WJAR reporter Katie Benoit. "So I said, 'Oh my god, there’s a fire.'"
After Smith called attention to the fire, Squillante says "instinct took over." The newlywed ran into the building without a second thought, not realizing that he was running into a nursery filled with sleeping babies.
"I found myself looking at 15-20 babies sleeping and immediately just kind of lined everybody up," Squillante told Benoit. "We started grabbing them and putting them into the cribs."
Squillante said that no one inside the nursery spoke English.
The couple — along with other bystanders and good Samaritans who pitched in to help save the babies — 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, Benoit reported.
"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 estimates that the whole ordeal lasted around 10 minutes, though he told Benoit their heroic efforts felt like they lasted "an instant."
"But yeah, it turned out to be OK, you know?" Squillante added.
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."
It wasn't a normal day, Benoit noted in her report, and now the humble couple have a unique, heroic honeymoon tale to tell for years to come.
“It was wild," Smith admitted, laughing alongside her husband.
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