The ‘hero’ who saved a 9-year-old boy on fire

A fireball had turned the night sky over the Roosevelt Mall an ominous shade of orange. On the ground, a figure emerged from a wall of flames and staggered across the mall’s asphalt parking lot toward Caseem Wongus.

As the shape drew closer, Wongus realized it was a young boy — whose back was on fire. Other bystanders held up their phones and recorded; Wongus yanked off his black denim jacket, wrapped it around the boy’s shoulders, and tamped out the flames.

Moments earlier, Wongus, 25, had been sitting in a restaurant with some friends. Now, nearby Cottman Avenue resembled a war zone. Cars and homes sat burning, while plumes of smoke curled into the air.

A police cruiser screeched to a halt nearby.

“Officer, over here,” Wongus shouted. “Over here!”

Wongus climbed into the back of the patrol car with the boy.

“Can you breathe? Can you breathe for me?” he asked.

The child could breathe, but said he felt smoke in his throat. Wongus banged on the patrol car’s plastic divider, and asked how long it would be before they reached a hospital.

Five minutes, the officer said.

“Where’s my dad?” the boy cried. “Where’s my dad?”

At that moment, as the police cruiser rocketed through Northeast Philadelphia on Jan. 31, Wongus didn’t know anything about Ramesses Raziel Dreuitt Vazquez, the 9-year-old he was cradling in the darkness, nor what had caused the horrific scene that he had just happened upon near the mall.

Wongus, who lives in Kensington, was simply trying to help. In the three weeks since then, some have praised him for his heroic actions. But Wongus remains haunted by the trauma of what he experienced that night, and the enormity of the tragedy to which he is forever linked:

A Learjet medical transport had dive-bombed out of the sky, just minutes after climbing to 1,600 feet. It slammed into the ground and exploded, killing six people on board, including an 11-year-old girl. Flames devoured a car that Ramesses had been riding in, claiming the life of his father, Steven Dreuitt Jr., and critically injuring Dreuitt’s fiancée, Dominique Goods-Burke. Ramesses suffered burns to more than 90% of his body.

“It will sneak up on me out of nowhere,” Wongus said recently at the Fishtown Diner, across from an untouched plate of toast. “It will be dark in the house, and I’ll be staring down the stairs, thinking [Ramesses] is going to pop out of nowhere, on fire again, and I’m replaying it in my head.”

Other times, Wongus’ heart begins to race unexpectedly, and he struggles to calm himself.

“I need professional help,” he said, “because I have to find a way to deal with this somehow.”

That damp Friday had started out like any other for Wongus. He worked a shift at Lyons & Sons, a South Jersey cocoa processing company, where he eased chocolate and cocoa butter into ovens. The sweet aroma clung to his clothes for hours.

Afterward, Wongus drove to Germantown in his dark gray Toyota Avalon, and picked up a friend, Justin Butler. They made their way to the Roosevelt Mall, where another friend, Umiko Webb, worked at a Verizon store and was about to go on a 45-minute dinner break.

The three had been close since they were teenagers, and went to Kensington Health Sciences Academy high school together. A day earlier, they had watched video clips of an airplane colliding with a Black Hawk helicopter on Jan. 29 near Washington, killing 67 people.

Their conversation turned to Final Destination, a movie about a group of young people who have premonitions about dying in accidents and public disasters. Wongus and his friends had mulled over the seeming randomness of life, how a given moment can suddenly be a person’s last.

Now, they were debating where to eat, and decided to walk into Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers. Wongus ordered chicken strips, fries, and a piece of toast.

Then an enormous rumble, deeper than thunder, rattled the restaurant. Wongus and his friends looked through a window and watched a fireball rise over the neighborhood. “It came from out of the sky! It came from out of the sky!” a nearby person kept screaming.

“We went outside,” Webb recalled in an interview, “and it was an ocean of flames across Cottman.”

As a crowd of onlookers amassed outside Raising Cane’s, some noticed a person’s silhouette trudging out of a fire on the ground: Ramesses.

“That’s when Caseem’s eyes just lit,” Webb said, “and he ran over there to help the boy.”

Explosions continued to ripple through the neighborhood; Webb wondered if a gas main had erupted, or if something more sinister had occurred, like a militia attack.

It was then that Webb realized that Wongus was gone. Puzzled, he pulled out his phone, and called his friend. Wongus answered and said he was with the boy, speeding to the hospital in the back of a police cruiser. Webb heard him telling Ramesses: “Everything is going to be OK.”

Inside the police cruiser, Ramesses writhed in agony.

“Is my tongue still there?” he asked.

Wongus assured him that it was.

To help distract the boy, Wongus asked how he’d celebrated his ninth birthday. Ramesses said that he’d gone to the Rolling Thunder Skating Center, on Roosevelt Boulevard.

Wongus told Ramesses that he used to skate there with his family, too.

The patrol car swerved past other motorists. Wongus wrapped his arm around Ramesses to keep him from sliding around the backseat. The boy complained that Wongus’ jacket was hurting his arms and shoulders. Wongus gently removed the jacket, and noticed Ramesses’ burned skin had peeled off.

The boy felt around his body for his missing shirt and tattered red pants. The flames had consumed his clothing.

“Don’t touch yourself,” Wongus said.

The boy asked for his sneakers to be removed. Wongus tugged on the shoes, but they wouldn’t budge — they had melted to Ramesses’ feet.

» READ MORE: A moment-by-moment look at the plane crash that killed seven and injured dozens in Northeast Philly.

Moments later, they arrived at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. Emergency staffers led Ramesses to a stretcher, then wheeled him out of view.

Wongus returned to the patrol car to retrieve his denim jacket. “As I pick it up,” he said, “[Ramesses’] skin is inside the jacket, just hanging.”

The officer who had driven them to the hospital approached Wongus and offered him a cigarette. Inside the hospital, doctors and nurses were frantically working to save Ramesses.

Wongus and the cop lingered outside, exhaling smoke into the night.

Hours after the crash, the weight of the experience began to settle on Wongus, a fog that has yet to fully lift. His thoughts drifted to Ramesses, as they often still do.

That night, Wongus was unable to reach his car in the Roosevelt Mall parking lot, which was still an active disaster scene. He and his girlfriend, who had met him at St. Christopher’s, took an Uber to his home in Kensington.

“I’m staring out the window,” Wongus recalled, “and I just started breaking down crying in the backseat of the Uber, saying, ‘He’s just a little kid. He’s just a little kid.’”

When he walked into his house, he collapsed into the arms of his mother, Michelle Wongus. Footage of the airplane crash, captured by neighborhood Ring cameras and motorists’ dash cameras, played nonstop on the television.

“It was a long, rough night,” he said.

A day later, Wongus saw even more images of the crash on social media — including disturbing clips of Ramesses on fire. He gasped, and dropped his phone.

“That’s a 9-year-old little boy and people were just sharing that all over Instagram,” he said. “I can’t even imagine how his family felt having to see that.”

He deleted his Instagram account.

Wongus worried about Ramesses’ prognosis. He called St. Christopher’s Hospital, but couldn’t get any information.

Then he saw a television news clip about Ramesses. With the help of TV reporters, he obtained a phone number for Jamie Vazquez Viana, the boy’s mother, and an email address for Ramesses’ grandmother.

One week after the plane crash, Wongus called Ramesses’ mother.

By then, the boy had been airlifted to a Boston hospital that specializes in treating pediatric burn victims. Vazquez Viana, perched next to her son’s hospital bed, told Wongus that Ramesses was in stable condition.

Vazquez Viana thanked Wongus for helping Ramesses.

“You will have a seat at my table,” she said. “Forever.”

Wongus has returned to work at Lyons & Sons, and continues to search for a way to manage the complex emotions that swirl inside him.

The day after he spoke with Ramesses’ mother, he emailed the boy’s grandmother.

“I wanted to reach out and let you know how strong and incredibly brave your grandson is,” he wrote to Alberta “Amira” Brown.

A few days later, Wongus’ phone rang. It was Brown. He offered his condolences. She told him that Ramesses’ father, Steven, was her only son. She also said she was worried about Wongus’ mental health.

Brown asked if he needed therapy; when he confirmed that he did, Brown instantly arranged a three-way call with a psychiatric nurse who did volunteer work with the American Red Cross, which is helping to connect people affected by the crash with free therapy sessions.

“She lost her son, and her grandson is burned, and she was thinking about me,” Wongus said.

His friends and family remain awestruck by the tender help that he provided that night to a badly injured boy, when so many others stood by, either frozen by terror or preoccupied with recording the plane crash’s aftermath on their phones.

“He was a hero,” Webb said. “He did what nobody else did. He needs to be seen for that.”

Wongus’ mother, Michelle, a Sunday school teacher, said she felt that her son was meant to be at the crash site.

“I believe that Caseem was strategically placed there, because God knew that he wasn’t going to falter,” she said, “that he was going to move.”

On Monday, Wongus, his mother, and his girlfriend were among the mourners who joined Ramesses’ family at the Ivy Hill Cemetery Chapel in East Mount Airy for a funeral service for his father.

A recording of gospel artist CeCe Winans, singing “Goodness of God,” began to play.

“You have led me through the fire,” Winans sang.

Wongus cried softly.

After the service ended, Brown spotted Wongus and called out: “Everyone! This is Caseem.”

She wrapped Wongus in a tight embrace.

“I want everyone to know that if it wasn’t for Caseem, Ramesses may not have made it,” Brown said, “and had the chance to fight for his life.”