It was Saturday, so when Wantagh letter carrier David Mikes heard kids screaming in the street, he thought they were playing. But instinct informed him it was something entirely different. When he looked over to where they were standing in the road, he saw smoke billowing out of the attic window of a house on Beech Street. Initially, he thought the chimney had backed up.

"When I looked closer," he said, "it was coming out of basically every window of the house, the seams of the roof. It was bad."

He ran to the house, where a man was trying to talk to an older woman, who was screaming into a cell phone. She was trying to determine if any of her grandchildren were in the house. "We tried to ask her where they were. She wasn't sure. She didn't know if they were with their mother or at religious instruction."

The men began yelling into the house, straining for a reply, but heard nothing. Mikes then entered the side door of the house with the other man, who was an off-duty city fireman. While the other man descended the stairs to the computer room in the basement--where he thought the kids might be-- Mikes stayed in the foyer on the ground level outside of the kitchen, shouting down so the other man would not get disoriented.

"I could stay in the foyer and not get too choked up, but the whole house was full of smoke. It was pitch-black in the basement," Mikes attests. "I was thinking when I was standing in the foyer, 'If someone screamed from the kitchen, I would have to go in.'"

After a few minutes the other man came up and they went around to the front of the house, where a neighbor joined them. The fireman and the neighbor kicked in the front door. The police arrived and Mikes went next door to check on an elderly female neighbor, "She was freaking out," he said. The police asked him to stay with her to calm and instruct her to close her windows.

Mikes asked her if she had the cell phone number for the woman whose house was burning. She did, so he called her and left a voice message, telling her that her house was on fire and asking her to phone back, because they were concerned about the children.

By this time the fire department had arrived and Mikes went out to move his truck and decided it was time to get back to work. He found out later that no one had been in the house and that the family was fine, although the house was severely damaged.

But Mikes, despite going into the burning house - something that most of us might think twice about - said, "I felt like I didn't do anything. There really wasn't anything to do."

Postmaster John Bratta praised Mikes, saying, "It's always great to hear when a postal employee commits an act like that, a brave act, such as what Dave did. It happens very often. Postal employees are the eyes and ears of the neighborhood. They see a lot out there and they help both law enforcement and firefighters on a regular basis."