Her Last Act Was Typical of a Selfless Life

At 7:15 a.m. Thursday, Patricia Munoz of Monterey Park telephoned her sister to make sure she wouldn’t be late for a traffic court appearance.

“She always called to wake us up,” Anna Munoz, 25, said. “It used to bug me. She’d go, ‘You guys sleep too much.’ I used to go, ‘It’s too early. Call me back later.’ ”

Less than an hour later, Patricia Munoz was dead.

She was trying to rescue her landlord’s family from their burning house, a selfless act that family members said was characteristic of the 27-year-old East Los Angeles College student.

Munoz was asphyxiated minutes after entering the wood and stucco house at 801 S. Garfield Ave., authorities said. The front door had slammed shut behind her, trapping her in flames and intense heat.

Apparently, Munoz had seen the smoke from her apartment behind the house and rushed inside, mistakenly thinking the residents were still in the house. All the residents had escaped safely.

“It’s very sad,” Monterey Park Battalion Chief Ernest Pruett said, surveying the wreckage. “They missed each other by a matter of minutes.”

Pruett said faulty electrical wiring--made potentially dangerous by too many Christmas decorations and candles nearby--may have triggered the blaze, which caused an estimated $150,000 in damage.

Five residents of the house--Lilia Taboada, 64; her sister, Mercedes Guzman, 54, and Guzman’s three children, Lilia, 33, Julio, 27, and Miguel, 22, suffered minor burns. Taboada and Mercedes Guzman were taken to Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park, where they were in stable to good condition late last week, Pruett said. Neither Taboada nor the Guzmans could be reached.

Sylvia Aventura, 31, niece of Mercedes Guzman, said Munoz’s death “is a tragedy.” Aventura, who had talked with her relatives at the fire scene, said Julio Guzman heard screams coming from the house and ran over, but could not see Munoz because of the smoke.

Anna Munoz said this wasn’t the first time her sister tried to save a life in danger. When they were growing up in Texas, she recalled, Patricia, then 11, saved a little girl who had fallen in the water near a dam and was about to drown. In her senior year at Garfield High School in East Los Angeles, Patricia was awarded the title “best personality,” her sister said.

At East Los Angeles College, she was studying child development and planned to counsel handicapped preschool children, Munoz said. She had been working part time at a McDonalds restaurant and going to school at night.

“She was something else,” Munoz said. “She was very kind-hearted. She would put someone else’s feeling before hers. She’d sit there and listen to you. She was a good sister.”