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A Quincy family hopes a 15-month-old girl recovers from burns suffered in a Tuesday morning house fire at 303 Ohio, but they believe the actions of her 5-year-old brother may have prevented multiple deaths.

Ella Cain, a daughter of Elvis Cain and Sarah Ginster, was airlifted Tuesday morning from Quincy to St. John’s Hospital in Springfield. She was listed in critical condition by hospital officials Wednesday morning. Family members say she suffered second- and third-degree burns on 50 percent of her body.

Ella’s brother, Grady, left his second-story bedroom in the home about 6:15 a.m. and unsuccessfully tried to lift his sister out of her crib in an adjoining bedroom, where the fire originated. He then went downstairs and told his mother, who had fallen asleep on a downstairs couch, that he smelled smoke. Sarah Ginster tried to make it upstairs to rescue Ella but could not. She broke out windows in the main floor of the home to get herself and Grady out.

“(Grady) basically saved three lives today,” Steve Eighinger, his grandfather, said. “Sarah said, ‘Without Grady doing what he did, none of us would have made it.’ “

Eighinger, a Herald-Whig Staff Writer, said Ella had collapsed face-down in her crib from smoke inhalation, and many of the burns she suffered were on her back and the back of her legs. Grady also was hospitalized briefly for smoke inhalation.

“He looked up at me (from his hospital bed) and said: ‘Gramps, I tried to save Ella. Honest, I did,’ ” Eighinger said.

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