Amid the rubble, a boy's bloody face and hand

New York: He was a few blocks away, at the 25th Precinct in East Harlem, getting his day going, when he heard the jarring explosion. Police officer Paul Pastorini immediately knew something was terribly wrong. Noise like that, well, it shouldn't happen.

He and several other police officials ran to addresses that had been 1644 and 1646 Park Ave. and had become flaming piles of wreckage. Crumpled buildings that had to have people buried in them.

It was just after 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday. They were among the first of the scores of emergency personnel to arrive. At once, they noticed a van stuck in the rubble, a passenger trapped inside. As they struggled to free the person, Pastorini looked up and spied a bloody face and hand poking out of an imposing mound of debris.

Along with two other police officers and a civilian, he scrambled up six feet of broken building. They discovered a boy wrapped in a blanket and curled on top of a mattress. It struck them that he must have been asleep when everything around him came apart.

The blast that collapsed two adjacent five-story buildings Wednesday morning, killing at least eight people, brought the city its latest round of stories too sad to hear. Stories of people in their apartments doing what people do - sleeping or frying an egg or perhaps brushing their teeth - when death arrived without enough warning for them to get out of its way.

One of those cruel stories is about the Hernandez family. The news for them was unbearable. The father had been at work. His 4-year-old daughter had been in school. But his wife and older daughter were gone. And then there was a 15-year-old son named Oscar.

In the horrible outcome that visited the Hernandez family, in the awfulness of that morning, there was also a story about a rescue that couldn't have come a moment later.

As the officer looked down at him, the boy on the mattress said nothing.

"He was conscious," Pastorini said. "He was covered in blood. His eyes were moving around."

Oscar.

They picked him up, still wrapped in the blanket, and carried him down to the street. Within an instant, the flames shooting from the leveled buildings grew so intense that the rescuers were forced to retreat. They chose not to think about what would have happened if they had run to the site a little slower, and not seen that face and hand when the officer did.

A civilian carried Oscar to the cruiser of police officer Lisette Pedrosa. When she looked at him, he seemed so small that she thought he was an infant. He was moaning and in pain. The man laid him in the back of the cruiser, and Pedrosa sped off to Harlem Hospital Center. The man did not come

 along, and she never found out who he was.

In a faint voice, Oscar told Pedrosa his name and said he had been out walking with his mother. She said she wondered if he actually knew what had just happened.

She turned Oscar over to hospital personnel. She took a moment to call her mother to let her know she was unhurt, then hurried back to the blast site. When she looked at the time it was 9:48. All told, no more than about 15 minutes had passed.

The Hernandez family lived in apartment No. 4 at 1644 Park Ave., on the fourth floor. On the ground level was the Spanish Christian Church, where they worshipped.

Jose Cecilio Hernandez and Rosaura Barrios Vazquez arrived in New York more than two decades ago, part of the pronounced push of Mexican immigration into the city and its environs over the last three decades.

Their three children were born in New York, and the family hoped to follow the path of immigrant success. Hernandez found work as a line cook. His eldest child, Rosaura Hernandez Barrios, wanted to be just like him. As a teenager, she worked at a Manhattan tea shop and restaurant, the same place where her father was a line cook. Her friends called her Rosey.

Last year, she enrolled in the Star Career Academy culinary school. Theodore Evans, 30, a fellow student, remembered her as "this small woman with a big heart."

"She never backed down from a challenge," Evans said. "She burned her cookies, she'd make them over."

After graduation, she was hired for an internship at the Triomphe Restaurant at the Iroquois Hotel in the theater district. In short order, she was promoted to line cook.

Life was not easy for Oscar. He had a skin condition that affected his diet and other aspects of his life. He is in 10th grade at the Coalition School for Social Change in East Harlem. Layla Helou, 14, a ninth-grade student at the school who knows him, said that he needed to wear gloves.

"He's quiet and funny," she said, and likes soccer and video games.

Some time after Oscar arrived at the hospital, his sister's body was pulled from the wreckage. She was 21. The next day, rescuers found his mother's body. She was 43.

At Harlem Hospital Center, multiple specialty teams are caring for Oscar. He has intense burns, internal injuries and bone fractures. The hospital lists him in critical but stable condition. His father has been with him but has been too distraught to talk publicly.

The Mexican Consulate in New York said it was offering him economic help and arranging for a humanitarian visa so that a close relative in Mexico could come to New York.

On Friday, the principal at Oscar's school told students and teachers that Oscar had just had a second surgery and was able to recognize his surviving relatives.

The next day would be his 16th birthday.

(Reporting was contributed by Daniel Krieger, Mireya Navarro and Julie Turkewitz.)