Policeman Becomes A Tragic Hero In Mexico City.

Heroes are often made suddenly, when tragedy strikes out of nowhere. It did Thursday, when a natural gas explosion flattened a maternity hospital in Mexico City.

It was dawn, and Police Officer Mauro Enrique Vera Suarez was in the middle of suiting up for work. The shock wave jolted his station like an earthquake.

It swung the doors and windows.

Suarez and his colleagues went outside. "They told us there was an explosion," he said.

Only half equipped, he jumped straight into his squad car. "We left as we were," he said. And rushed to the site marked by broad billows of smoke and dust towering over the city.

The hose of a propane-butane truck had burst, while it made a delivery to the Cuajimalpa Maternal Hospital. Combustible gas had hissed out into the neighborhood.

Residents had already called firefighters to alert them to the leak minutes before the gas ignited, and the hospital had already begun evacuating. But the exposition hit them in the middle of it.

More than 100 people were still in the building.

Officer Suarez arrived to find the hospital for newborns and their mothers leveled to crumbled concrete and twisted steel. People stained in blood were screaming for help.

He and the other officers went straight into the wreckage looking for injured survivors. He turned over pieces of the collapsed roof to see if victims were under them.

"I saw a sheet that was moving very slightly," he said. "Picking it up, I saw that the baby was face down with its head and knees in the rubble."

The baby did not appear to be terribly injured, Suarez told FOROtv.

"He had small wounds. He had scrapes. What I did was just wrap him up and pick him up and leave running."

Holding the baby in his left arm, Suarez signaled with his right hand to colleagues, directing them to go inside to help more injured people.

At that moment, someone snapped a photo of him, as he scurried over jumbled pieces of debris.

A public safety official sent it out via Twitter with the message:

"'I would like to know what happened with the baby. Our work is to save lives,'" says Mauro after rescuing a baby from the explosion."