He spent 8 days in a coma after being rescued from a deadly Old Montreal fire

The last thing Patrick Meguid remembers from Oct. 4 is retreating back into his hostel room after attempting to escape through an exit blackened with smoke.

The sharp ring of a fire alarm had woken him up shortly after 2 a.m. 

"I told myself, 'I'm going to have to move quickly,' and that's the last thing I can recall before I passed out," Meguid said in a recent interview.

He was one of two people rescued by Montreal firefighters when a fire broke out at the three-storey, 100-year-old building on Notre-Dame Street in Old Montreal where Meguid was renting a room. Twenty-one other people inside the building were able to make their way out on their own.

But a French mother and her daughter did not make it. Léonor Geraudie, 43, and seven-year-old Vérane Reynaud-Geraudie, whom Meguid had just met, died in the fire that night. 

The building is owned by Émile-Haim Benamor, who also owned the building on Place D'Youville in Old Montreal where seven people died in a fire in March 2023. Benamor was sharply criticized for the windowless rooms used for short-term rentals in that building.

Both fires were deliberately set, say police, who have made arrests in both cases. 

The motives remain unclear. After the second deadly fire, gunshots were reported outside Benamor's office and his car was set on fire outside his home.

A restaurant and a hostel were operating in the building on Notre-Dame Street and have other people listed as their owners.

Some comments on booking websites describe the hostel, Le 402, as cramped and rundown. Multiple reviewers also reported bedrooms without windows, or windows that wouldn't open. 

The day after the fire, Martin Guilbault, a division chief with the Montreal fire department, said despite talk about the lack of windows in bedrooms, "it was not an issue" for hotels.

"In terms of fire safety, a window is not considered a means of escape," he told reporters. 

Meguid believes those guidelines should change. He says he was lucky enough to have ended up with the biggest suite in the building, which had a window, and that that's how firefighters were able to rescue him. 

By the time they arrived, he'd inhaled so much smoke that soot coated his lungs and bronchial tubes.