LOS ANGELES -- Erik Pearson saved the lives of at least a dozen people Monday morning, pulling them out of a black hell hole through a tiny opening in the rubble - but he can't stop thinking about the woman he lost.
"She was going 'Help!' " remembers the 27-year-old paramedic. "I could see her ankle. I knew her lungs were being crushed by a beam. I went to get help . . . and she died on me. I started crying like a mad dog."
It's an image that will linger with him always, one of many horror stories emerging from the worst nightmare in Monday's earthquake - the collapse of the Northridge Meadows Apartments that killed at least 15 people.
Pearson was sleeping in his third-floor unit when the quake's first jolt threw him 12 feet into the air. Within seconds, the building collapsed in pancake fashion, and screams filled the night. Breaking through a jammed door with a fire ax, he escaped over his balcony and began a rescue effort that ultimately drew hundreds of fire officials and even more spectators.
By Monday night, as workers labored under floodlights, dogs sniffed through the rubble, and the roar of generators spread across the smoky scene, this building had come to symbolize the earthquake of 1994 - much as the collapse of the Cypress Freeway did during the 1989 San Francisco quake.
"This one," said Pearson, described by his neighbors as a hero, "was the Big One for us."
The tan stucco building, with one- and two-bedroom apartments ringing a courtyard, was occupied mostly by college students and the elderly. People were neighborly. Chatter and laughter used to fill the hallways. But all that came to a brutal end when the quake hit. The building rose off the ground, and when it came back down, it crushed the first floor.
Hundreds of stories followed.
"All you heard was screaming and crying," said Daniel Gelman, 29. "None of us knew our building was the worst. We thought everyone was experiencing the same thing."
In her confusion, his wife, Mago, thought about the recent loss of a 2-month-old baby to crib death. "I wanted to go get her. That's all I thought about at first."
Grabbing photos of their child, the two escaped through a hole.
Hours after the quake, 75-year-old Syd Dalven sat on the curb outside the building. Wearing a flannel nightgown and a pair of shoes two sizes too small, Dalven had bandages on her legs and left arm.
"I was on the bottom," she said. "I started screaming, 'Help! I'm trapped!' Then some men came to my window to help me out. I've always been terrified from earthquakes."
John and Josephine Winans were saved by a beam. "It made a little cubbyhole just big enough for our bodies," said Josephine Winans, 32.
It wasn't until they scrambled to safety and were on the street that her husband looked down at himself and realized he was stark naked. But that didn't matter.
"It was a miracle," he says. "I can't believe we're alive."
Miracle was an often-used word here. Marge Reichwaldt, 55, credited her own rescue to the prayers she gave in her apartment - and she notes that 49 of the 50 pictures on their wall were destroyed. "The one of the Lord was the only one left hanging."
But if there were miracles here, most had human assistance. Rescuers worked feverishly all through the day and night, risking their own lives through the aftershocks, shouting over the constant hum of generators and engines and chain saws, rubbing their eyes as Santa Ana winds blew debris in their faces.
Frequently, they had to deal with frantic relatives. Among them: Hyun Sook Lee, who kept saying again and again, "My husband and son trapped inside. I hear my son crying." Both died.
And workers had to deal with the tragedies, weeping over the ones who died. After finding one woman killed by her own brass headboard, firefighter Jim Jordan said softly, "If she didn't have that, she'd probably be alive now, and it's just sad."
By late Monday, workers were hoping that the worst was over. "They're hoping not to find anybody," said Battalion Chief Bob Deseo of the Los Angeles Fire Department. "We've had no calls from any family members, or from any of the shelters, so it gives us good hope that there's nobody left."
But he added a grim precaution. "That's not to say we won't come across a complete family."
