Toddler's cries save family's lives

His parents are awakened to a house filled with deadly gas.

By REBECCA CATALANELLO
Published July 27, 2007

TAMPA - It started with a 2-year-old screaming.

Nicholas Gagliardo's cries reverberated through the house after 4 a.m., echoing through the video baby monitor into his parents' sleeping ears.

Groggy, Janice Gagliardo, 42, made her way to her toddler's bedroom. Any parent knows this ritual.

She picked Nicholas up, rocked him, placed him back in his bed. He was acting strange.

And she felt suddenly weak.

"I feel really nauseous," she told her husband, Sal, back in the bedroom. "Take me to the bathroom. I can't walk to the bathroom on my own."

Sal Gagliardo, 37, helped his wife to the bathroom, set her down on her knees before the toilet, and started to feel dizzy and disoriented himself.

In the next few minutes the two found themselves vomiting, blacking out. Their heads pounded. Sal walked clumsily, running into a wall.

"I smell gas," Janice said.

As Sal regained consciousness, he heard his wife's words and ordered her to leave. "Get him and get out of the house!"

Maybe it's the oven, he thought as his family retreated to the front porch.

Sal ran to the first floor of his Palma Ceia home. The oven was off. Now, all he could think was that the house might explode.

Confused, Sal scrambled through the house to grab his essentials - wallet, cell phone, clothes.

At some point, he called 911 from his land line, and in a breathless voice described their symptoms. "I fear that we are ingesting some kind of a gas that's making us . . ." he told the operator before trailing off.

"I'm going to ask you a few questions, okay?" the 911 dispatcher said.

"Can you hurry?" Sal said, panting. "I want to get out of the house."

Get out of the house, the dispatcher told him. Call from your cell.

Sal made his way out, stopping at the enclosed garage to grab the family's 2000 Infiniti sport utility vehicle in case they needed to leave.

What he found was almost surreal, he said.

The vehicle was running.

"It was like waking up on another planet," he said of that moment. "I could not understand how that could possibly happen."

Two weeks earlier, in neighboring Pasco County, investigators made a similar discovery. In that case, a mother awoke disoriented to find her teenage sons dead in their beds.

In the attached garage, New Port Richey police found a minivan with the key in the ignition, turned to the on position, the gas tank empty.

In both cases, carbon monoxide filled the houses and poisoned all the occupants. But what became a tragedy at a house on Pasco's Caswell Drive July 9 was either miracle or luck at 3406 W Bay Vista Ave. on Thursday, depending on whom you talk to.

"They were maybe minutes or a few breaths away from never waking up again," Tampa Fire Rescue Capt. Bill Wade said of the Gagliardo family. Fire investigators ruled Thursday's incident an accident.

Physicians at Tampa General Hospital, where they were taken by ambulance, found exceedingly high toxicity levels in each of the Gagliardos. They were all treated, released and home by afternoon.

Sal Gagliardo said the reality of his family's near death is still sinking in. He has racked his brain to try to figure out how he missed turning the engine off.

The night before, the family went out for dinner with one of Nicholas' neighborhood friends. They drove home and parked in the driveway. They put Nicholas to bed about 7 p.m.

Sal and Janice watched television for about two hours together before Janice headed to bed.

Sal moved the SUV into the garage, then went to his home office to work for about an hour until retiring about 11:30 p.m., unaware a deadly, odorless gas was leaking into his home.

Usually, he said, he pulls the vehicle into the garage, shuts the door, places the keys in a little basket, turns on the house alarm and heads to bed.

"And obviously," he said, "I missed a step."

As the sun dropped Thursday, Sal Gagliardo sat on the front porch of his house, windows and garage flung open wide for air, his little 2-year-old carbon monoxide detector seated in his lap.

Thank God for that boy's early morning cries, Sal said. But installing a real carbon monoxide detector is suddenly first on the family's to-do list.

Times researcher John Martin and staff photographer Zach Boyden-Holmes contributed to this report. Rebecca Catalanello can be reached at rcatalanello@sptimes.com or 813 226-3383.

[Last modified July 27, 2007, 00:57:20]