The investigation in a deadly fire in Longueuil continues Saturday.

Three bodies were pulled from the ashes of a building destroyed by fire on Friday. Autopsies will be performed on the bodies as investigators continue to comb through the ashes to determine what happened.

The first body was found shortly before 1 p.m., with the second retrieved around 2:40 p.m. and a third roughly an hour later.

The fire began shortly before 2 a.m. in a 24-unit apartment building on Terrasse Turgeon.

"When the firemen got here the fire was already spread," said fire Chief Jean-Guy Ranger.

"People couldn't get out through the stairwell so they had to do evacuation from the balcony on the back. We rescued about 20 persons."

Ranger said firefighters concentrated on saving lives first, and only once they pulled people from the balconies started working on the fire.

Vanessa Comptois said she threw her two-year-old son into the arm's of someone on the ground.

She does not know if the person who caught the child was a firefighter or another tenant.

"I was so scared. I was scared if the person would have the reflex to catch my child. And then me, my youngest and my husband made it to the ground because my husband climbed down the balconies to help catch the youngest. And then we realized we had left our oldest on the balcony all alone. All of a sudden we realized we were all on the ground except my oldest, and I started to panic," said Comptois.

Firefighters were able to get to that boy and bring him to safety.  

One woman told CTV Montreal that the flames spread so quickly she was trapped on her balcony with her three children, ages 3, 5, and 7. 

Firefighters rescued them all.

Three children and five adults were taken to hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation.

The fire appears to have started on the the third floor of the building, but the flames quickly spread after part of the building collapsed and severed a gas line.

"The gas, it's a leak that's on fire right now, so it spread the fire through the building," said Ranger.

It took more than four hours to control the fire, and at 8 a.m. firefighters were still extinguishing embers and hotspots. 

The building was heavily damaged and it is very unlikely that anything will be salvaged. 

Around 6:30 a.m. officials doing a head count of all residents realized that three occupants were missing.

Two of the victims were a couple in their sixties, both with limited mobility, and both requiring oxygen tanks.

Their son is distraught, and told CTV Montreal his parents had a hard time getting out of the building at the best of times.

The other is a man who was known to be a heavy sleeper.

He was asleep in the apartment he shared with his roommate, who escaped.

His girlfriend told CTV she has called his phone repeatedly but there was no answer.