January Waldo awoke to a woman pounding on her front door in Crafton Heights shortly after 1 a.m. yesterday.

It was her neighbor Aisha White, holding her 6-year-old daughter, Paje. Across Litchfield Street, flames engulfed Ms. White's house, where her other two children remained inside.

"Fire, fire," Ms. White screamed. "My babies are still in the house!"

The bodies of Ms. White's two sons, William, 10, and Jordan, 4, were later found by firefighters in a second-floor bedroom.

They were pronounced dead at the scene. The Allegheny County Medical Examiner ruled that they died of heat-related injuries and smoke inhalation.

Ms. White, 28, was in serious condition yesterday at UPMC Mercy, while Paje was uninjured.

Firefighters reported flames consuming the first floor when they arrived at the scene, and the fire already had spread to the second floor of the three-story, white vinyl-sided home.

A car parked beside the burning house also caught fire, and the flames spread to an adjacent house. Investigators had not determined a cause of the blaze yesterday.

Ms. Waldo said the White family had lived in the house for about a year.

Jordan, who was enrolled in a Head Start program at Chartiers Early Childhood Center, liked to come over and play with the Waldos' dog, a loud-mouthed Corgi.

"He was a little cutie pie," Ms. Waldo said of Jordan. "He would really want to pet it, but he was scared. He'd sneak up to it, then sneak back."

William was in the fifth grade at Imani Christian Academy in the East Hills, where all 220 students convened yesterday morning to mourn and pray together. Paje is in first grade at the school.

Milton Raiford, the headmaster at Imani, described William as an outgoing, bright student who especially loved math and science.

"He was a leader in his classroom," Mr. Raiford said.

"He was a calm student. He sat in the front of the class and shared everything. He was spiritually strong. He was strong academically. He was a caring kid, very socially responsible. ...

"He could have been a fine educator one day, because he was a sharp boy -- always well groomed, always on point."

The family is no stranger to tragedy.

The boys' father, William White III, was shot and killed in March 2007 outside a Sheraden bar, a murder that remains unsolved.