The most harrowing footage from the Kemerovo mall fire shows a boy leaping from a fourth floor window. He is now in an induced coma, and when he wakes up doctors will tell him that his parents and 4-year old sister are dead.
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Eleven-year-old Sergey Moskalenko’s grandmother says that the family of four went to the Winter Cherry shopping mall on Sunday to buy a hat. The children persuaded their mother and father to go to the play area, where the rapidly-spreading fire started.
It is unclear how Moskalenko became separated from the adults, but the smartphone video shot from several points on the ground shows a boy climbing out of a window from which thick black smoke pours out. He pauses momentarily, then his hands let go of the ledge.
On the way down, he hits a mounted lamp, which upends him, before he lands stomach first onto the edge of the entrance awning, and falls to the ground to piercing screams from onlookers.
Doctors say that the Sergey was conscious, and well enough to tell medics his name on the way back, saying that his parents are still trapped inside the mall, before he was put into an artificial coma.
His condition remains serious. Sergey has suffered blunt trauma to his heart, lungs, liver and kidneys, broken his pelvis, torn his cheek, and has airway burns from inhaled smoke.
“He has a combination of severe injuries. But we have certain indicators that show that his state is improving,” Konstantin Kovalkov, the doctor treating the boy told Tsargrad TV.
Although his survival is near-miraculous, the deaths of his parents have been confirmed, after a grandmother identified their bodies at the morgue on Monday, Politika Segodnya website reports. Two grandmothers, who will become his legal guardians, have already visited Sergey in hospital, and will now have to decide when and how to deliver the bad news.
As the death toll from the fire stands at 64, there are dozens of similarly tragic stories, being told by heartbroken relatives of the dead.
Aleksandr Lillevyali left his three daughters, aged between five and 11, to watch the cartoon Sherlock Gnomes in the top floor multiplex, with a bucket of popcorn each. He would never see them alive again.
He told news portal Meduza that he received a call from one of the girls, who said there was smoke inside the hall. He attempted to rush up the stairs, a wet cloth covering his nose, but began to lose consciousness from inhaling smoke.
He returned downstairs and begged the arriving rescue workers to save the children. At first they followed him up, but then were given instructions to move to a different part of the building, and began to leave. He implored them to lend him a gas mask, but they refused, saying it was against their rules.
“My girls were left to burn alive because of their rules,” said Lillevyali, crying.