The Beacon High School student torched in a botched chemistry class experiment testified in excruciating detail Tuesday about the moment he caught fire — and found himself “hopelessly burning alive.”
“She poured the methanol into a container, and then without any warning, there was a big whoosh sound — a giant fireball had erupted from the jug,’’ recalled a now-21-year-old Alonzo Yanes of his chemistry teacher and the fateful Jan. 2, 2014, lab experiment at the prestigious Manhattan public school.
“I saw flashes of blue and orange. I heard my classmates go, ‘Whoa!’ and scream,” said Yanes — appearing publicly for the first time since the horror.
“I reflexively put my arms out … to kind of shield myself from the flames that were shooting out towards me,” Yanes told jurors who will decide his $27 million civil case against the Department of Education teacher Anne Poole. He held up his hands to demonstrate.
In their suit, Yanes and his parents allege basic safety standards were ignored as Poole tried to conduct the so-called “Rainbow Experiment,’’ where mineral salts are set afire with the help of a solvent, in this case volatile methanol, to produce different colors.
“I remember feeling this intense burning sensation. … It kept going and going, and I quickly realized I was on fire,’’ said Yanes, who came to court wearing a baseball cap and zipped-up blue Eddie Bauer windbreaker.
“I yelled out, ‘Hot! Hot!,’ and I dropped to the floor, and I started to ‘stop, drop and roll,’ because that is what you are supposed to do,’’ said the young man, who bears severe scarring on his head, face, torso and limbs.
“I was flapping around on the ground, but nothing was helping me. I was still on fire. I remember feeling the fire eat away at my skin and eat away at my flesh, and it was charring me the way a piece of meat chars in a frying pan.
“I heard someone yell out, ‘Oh, my God!’ I heard my own body on fire, a sizzling sound by my ear, the cartilage melting away,’’ Yanes said.
“I held my breath for as long as I could. But nothing was working. I was hopelessly burning alive, and I couldn’t put myself out, and the pain was so unbearable.”
The victim said his teacher was saying, “ ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,’ I told her it’s OK, but she insisted no, it was not.
“I overheard her saying, ‘I’m stupid, I’m so stupid.’ ”
Poole, who has been in court daily since the trial began last week, appeared somber and nervous as she sat quietly, with her hands clasped together, during her former student’s testimony.
Yanes testified that when he got to the hospital, the doctors let him see his father before they put him under sedation.
“My dad was in a state of shock — he didn’t really know what he was looking at,’’ the then-teen said. “I said, ‘Dad, I know it looks bad, but I’m going to be OK.’ I was trying to be strong for my dad. I didn’t want him to worry.”
When he first looked in the mirror again after coming out of an induced coma, Yanes said, “The face that was looking back to me, it wasn’t my face. It was like out of a horror movie. My arms were in this giant brace, and I was in this fixed position.
“It looked deformed,’’ he said of his body. “That wasn’t my skin. I looked like Frankenstein or something.”
Suffering third-degree burns over 30% of his body, Yanes needed a slew of skin grafts. For his arms, the skin was taken from his legs.
“I had to sacrifice one part of me for another part of me,” Yanes said. “They put me in a brace and locked me into place kind of like a crucifix position.’’
Meanwhile, “The cartilage in my ears had been completely burned off, and most of it was dying tissue,’’ he said. “I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I felt like I was becoming less normal. … I felt like a freak.”
Earlier in the day, Yanes’ mother broke down on the stand describing how she tried to prepare her 7-year-old daughter, Alana, for seeing her big brother again.
“‘Alonzo does not look the same anymore. He will probably look very scary to you. He will probably look like a monster, like Frankenstein,’” the weeping mom recalled warning her daughter. “‘He has been patched up a lot. He has staples in him. So he is going to look very different.’
“Alonzo came into the room, and I could see Alana stiffen up, and Alonzo lunged to go hug her, and she kind of stayed away at a distance from him until he started talking with her,” the mom said.
“You could see visibly Alana’s body kind of relax as she responded to her brother’s voice.”
The mom also recalled seeing her son for the first time in the hospital.
“Someone was coming out of the emergency room area, and the door was open, and I got to take a glimpse of what I thought was Alonzo, and I remember seeing this huge body, and it doesn’t look human — it looked like an alien form that was moving and flailing around,” she said.
Yvonne told jurors that she tried to dissuade her son from looking in a mirror.
“I tried to prolong that for as long as I could,” she said, “because I don’t want him to see what I was seeing.
“The face, the way that he looked … I didn’t think he could handle it.’’
The mom burst into tears as she recalled Alonzo’s friends coming to visit for the first time about two months later.
“Some accepted him, and some were clearly taken aback by how he looked and his burned appearance,” Yvonne said. “But they all tried to be very kind. There was no embracing because he is still sensitive to touch.”
Additional reporting by Lia Eustachewich