By MaryAnn Spoto

and Mike Frassinelli/Star-Ledger Staff

Joe Frystock still can’t believe it, but diabetes saved his life.

Asleep in Room 107 on the ground floor of the Mariner’s Cove Motor Inn, he awoke around 5 a.m. Friday to use the bathroom — as he does several times a night — because he is diabetic.

Displaced by Hurricane Sandy, Frystock, 57, had been living in the Point Pleasant Beach motel since Christmas Eve. As he got out of bed, he heard a lot of commotion and looked out the window to the other side of the L-shaped motel. He opened the door and saw an orange glow, then realized he was looking at flames roaring out of Room 125, on the second floor, where Keri Anderson was living.

Frystock and his son, Matt, rushed out of the room and frantically began knocking on doors, alerting others before turning back from the intense heat and smoke.

"I really feel bad because we couldn’t get up to the second floor," Frystock said Friday afternoon, still visibly shaken. "When I came out that door, 125 was an inferno."

The Frystocks were able to save at least one person from the inferno, which killed four men and left eight other people, including Anderson, injured. Authorities said an investigator from the Ocean County Sheriff’s Department was among the injured, with a broken ankle.

Anderson, 42, suffered from smoke inhalation, which damaged her esophagus and vocal cords, her mother, Barbara Reinhardt of Brick, said in a telephone interview Friday night. Doctors at Saint Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston intubated Anderson and put her on a ventilator to help her breathe, her mother said.

"Evidently, she has not sustained any burns to her body or her face," Reinhardt said.

Anderson was listed in critical but stable condition Friday night, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Reinhardt, who learned about the fire around 8 a.m. when she received a call from an emergency room nurse, said doctors are "optimistic" her daughter will recover, but the medical staff is evaluating her condition "day by day."

Anderson had been living in the motel since September, Reinhardt said. "She lost her belongings, but her belongings are nothing compared to her life. I’m thankful that she came out of this situation."

'THE HEAT WAS AWFUL'

The blaze leveled the two-story motel on Broadway, about two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. An estimated 40 people were staying in the 25-unit motel, authorities said.

Survivors described a chaotic scene.

Frystock said he raced back toward his room to retrieve his iPhone, which he’d placed on top of one of the outside air-conditioning units. When he found it, the screen had shattered from the heat, he said. His son tackled him when he tried to go back into their room to retrieve his wallet. Soon after, burning shards of the building started to collapse around them.

Later, one of his neighbors said to Frystock, "You beat on my door. You woke me up. You saved my life."

Frank Smith, 72, whose room was on the first floor, said he was awakened by noises and thought there was a fight upstairs. When he threw open the door to his room, he said, he was met with a rush of flames. He fled, dressed only in his underwear, sparks and embers raining down on him, burning the back of his shoulders.

"It looked like a volcanic eruption with lava coming down in big gobs," Smith said. "The heat was awful."

Smith said he could hear Anderson — whom fire officials and neighbors said crouched in the bathtub in her room under a pile of wet blankets to protect herself from the flames — yelling in terror.

"I heard her screaming when I was standing outside," Smith said. "A sound I’ll never forget."

DEADLY COMBINATION

Flames blowing out the windows of the motel made most of the residents unreachable until firefighters spotted Anderson.

"There were a lot of flashovers," Point Pleasant Beach Fire Chief A.J. Fox said. "There was no way we could even get to the windows. The only rescue we could make was that one woman. … She saved her own life being in the shower, water running, and everything just came together right for her."

Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph Coronato said he was not surprised by how quickly the fire spread.

"You have a wooden structure, you’re close to the beach, it’s early morning," he said. "It’s a combination of these things that’s going to cause it to be engulfed. Just common sense would tell you that the wind probably caught it."

DOUBLE TRAGEDY

Like the Frystocks, Smith was displaced by Sandy. He had stayed with friends in Seaside Heights before moving into the Mariner’s Cove Motor Inn last December.

Friday afternoon, Smith, dressed in green-checkered pajama bottoms and a black sweatshirt that had been loaned to him, was still coughing from the smoke he’d inhaled. He lost his cellphone, car keys, driver’s license and wallet after the upper floor collapsed onto his first-floor room.

"First I got creamed by the hurricane. Now whatever I got left is destroyed in the fire," he said.

Gary Wardell, 19, was staying in Room 104, but was at work when the fire broke out. He had been living with his grandparents at the motel, where they were living after the home they were renting was damaged by Sandy.

Wardell said his father called him at work to say, "The motel’s on fire. We can’t find your grandfather."

Turns out his grandparents’ room was at the opposite end of the motel from Anderson’s room and they had made it safely out.

"I had a dream last night that something bad was going to happen," he said, "I just couldn’t picture it."

Michael Loughran, a former Point Pleasant Beach councilman, said the motel had sustained significant damage when its first floor was flooded during Hurricane Sandy and repairs were completed last year. The motel had since hosted families displaced by that storm.

"It’s unfortunate, after what everybody’s been through," Loughran said.

Shawn Wardell, 22, and his brother Adam, 26, cousins of Gary Wardell, were staying in a first-floor room when they were awakened by their grandmother who heard someone yelling "Fire!"

"I looked outside and it was all smoke and flame," Shawn Wardell said. "Probably 10, 15 minutes later, our motel room would have been up, too."

The smoke alarms sounded only after they had evacuated, he said. Investigators also said they heard from residents that smoke detectors didn’t go off immediately.

HOTEL'S HISTORY

The original owner of Mariner’s Cove, Jean Tallagnon, said her family sold it in 2000. Her mother lived there and the entire family worked at the business. The news of the destruction is devastating, she said.

"We’re very sad over this, there were so many memories — and the people that were lost," Tallagnon said. "It was a wonderful place."

Tallagnon said the original construction had a concrete foundation, but the upper story was all wood. The smoke alarms were initially hardwired, she added.

In 2010, the state Bureau of Housing Inspection issued the motel several citations, including two violations for failure to repair or replace smoke detectors in three rooms, two of them on the second floor. The violations were resolved when the motel was reinspected seven months later, records show.

The blaze ignited on the western side of the building, said Point Pleasant Beach Police Capt. Robert Dikun, but investigators are still trying to determine exactly how and where it started. Authorities have focused on a second-floor smoking lounge and said that until proven otherwise, they are treating the fire as suspicious.

The fire burned quickly through the wooden structure, stirred by a stiff wind, Coronato said. The building was fully engulfed by the time firefighters arrived around 6 a.m.

Of the eight people injured, only Anderson remained hospitalized Friday night, Dikun said.

Those who have been displaced are staying at the White Sands Oceanfront Resort and Spa in Point Pleasant Beach through the weekend.

At the White Sands Friday afternoon, Frystock said he had three bags of groceries from St. Gregory’s Food Pantry in Point Pleasant Beach, and a bag of toiletries given to him by a neighbor.

The only thing he had been able to grab was his insulin kit.

Staff writers Naomi Nix, Seth Augenstein, Amy Ellis Nutt and Lisa Rose contributed to this report.

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