VAGRANT, BRAVEST SAVE FIRE FAMILY

By IKIMULISA LIVINGSTON and CYNTHIA R. FAGEN

February 18, 2008 -- A Brooklyn vagrant on a breakfast beer run unexpectedly became the hobo hero of the hour yesterday when he raced into a Brooklyn apartment and rescued a father and two sons.

Three other family members - including a baby - were saved by a selfless firefighter who gave them his oxygen mask.

A seventh relative trapped in the blazing apartment was rescued by other firefighters, but later died in a hospital.

The homeless man, Andre Nash, 45, kept his wits about him, using a beer-soaked rag as a mask and forcing his way through choking smoke in the burning apartment at the Lafayette Gardens housing project in Fort Greene.

Nash admitted that he had just bought two cans of beer at a deli shortly before 8 a.m. when he stumbled upon a hysterical boy begging for help and pointing to the 11th floor, where a panicked mom, Sheohna Taylor, 20, was dangling her 14-month-old son, Roshawon, out the window.

Nash, who often calls a park bench home, raced up to the apartment and, through billowing, black smoke, guided Terence Taylor and his two school-age sons, Brandon and L.T., out into the hall and to safety.

"I wasn't even worried about my life," Nash said. "I am the guardian angel of the building. I just reacted."

He said Taylor tried in vain to go back for his wife, Geraldine; his stepdaughter, Sheohna; her boyfriend, Tyree Sands; and the younger couple's baby, Roshawon.

Nash then pulled the two brewskies out of his coat pockets, poured them over a rag and covered his face as he tried to force his way inside for a second time.

"I tried to go back in. I draped a rag over my face. I was walking along the [hallway] wall to get to the door, but it was too hot," Nash recalled.

Within minutes, firefighters arrived.

One of the Bravest, Belgico Rodriguez, 29, handed his gas mask to Sheohna and Sands as he poked his head through a broken window next to theirs.

"There was heavy smoke," said Rodriguez, a four-year veteran with Ladder 102, said.

"They were scared."

"I just told the mother, 'Here you go. Give the baby fresh air.'

"I handed the mask over to the mother and that's what she did."

The couple and the baby took turns breathing through the mask until they were brought to safety.

Firefighters later pulled out Taylor's wife, who had gone into cardiac arrest. She was revived by paramedics and taken to Brooklyn Hospital, where she later died.

"She was a wonderful, beautiful mother who died trying to save her daughter and her grandson," Sheohna said.

The cause of the fire was not immediately known.

Additional reporting by Tim Perone and Jamie Schram

ikimulisa.livingston@nypost.com

A family and one of NYC's Bravest hang partly out the window of an apartment building on Dekalb Avenue in Brooklyn.

Firefighters and members of the family are seen through the windows of the burning building.

The mother from the building is taken away by rescue services.

Tyree Sands and little Roshawn Taylor are flanked by firefighters.

Hobo hero Andre Nash gives the camera a wry smile after helping to save the day.