GRIEF TURNS TO RAGE
Victims’ family rips fire-starter’s mom: ‘You don’t call for help? Call somebody! Do something!’
SHE SAW SOMETHING, and said nothing.
The Bronx mom whose 3-year-old son ignited a fire that killed a dozen people bolted the burning building without alerting residents to the fast-spreading inferno, her next-door neighbor charged Saturday.
“She did not yell,” recalled an aggravated Shevon Stewart, 44, who lost four family members in the Thursday night blaze. “You (are) the one, and you don’t call for help? ...
“Call somebody! If you don’t have a phone, knock on a door. Do something!”
Stewart, who lived in the firstfloor apartment next to the mom, said the woman’s only show of concern was a feeble and failed attempt to spread the alarm.
“I hear her dragging her feet,” Stewart recalled of their encounter in a dark hallway.
“I can’t see her but I hear her: ‘Fire,’” Stewart said softly, imitating the woman’s halfhearted warning.
The still-unidentified mother managed to escape unscathed with her 3-year-old son and a 2-year-old child.
Fire officials said the unattended boy set off the killer blaze while fiddling with the gas stove. The child “had a history” of turning the burners on and off, said FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro.
The mother exacerbated the dangerous situation by leaving the apartment door open, with the fire and smoke soon swirling through the five-story building via an adjoining staircase.
“I am so angry,” said Stewart. “I don’t have the words. I don’t know what to say.”
As firefighters responded to the raging five-alarm blaze, Stewart watched the woman walk across the street and sit on the curb as building residents scurried onto fire escapes.
The less fortunate died inside their apartments or were discovered by first responders in the hallways or on the staircase.
Four victims, including a Bronx woman clutching her 7-month-old granddaughter, were found dead inside their bathtub once the blaze was finally extinguished.
Stewart’s anger was tempered by concern over the funeral arrangements for her sister and three nieces — along with the likely death of her brother-in-law.
Holt Francis emerged alive from the deadly mix of smoke and flames, but was surviving Saturday thanks only to life support and despite a dire prognosis.
The comatose man’s niece Carmaleta Halladene walked out of Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx to say he was a fighter and the family wasn’t ready to throw in the towel.
“We’re not pulling him off life support,” said the niece. “We’re not doing that.”
Among the dead in the 100-year-old Belmont apartment building were Francis’ wife Karen Stewart-Francis, 37, and their daughters Kelesha, 7, and Kylie, 2.
A niece, 19-year-old Shawntay Young, was also killed after coming from her basement apartment to visit the Stewart family in their fifth-floor home.
Stewart was far less optimistic about Holt Francis.
“He’s not going to make it,” said Stewart. “I want to cry really bad, but I don’t know — it’s like it’s not coming. Now what do I do? What do I do?”
According to Stewart, doctors need a member of Holt Francis’ immediate family to make a decision about disconnecting him from life support.
“He was married to my sister, so she could do it,” Stewart said of taking Holt off the machines now keeping him alive. “But my sister is no more.”
Relatives, even as they waited to see if the family death toll climbed to five, launched a GoFundMe page to bury the dead in their native Jamaica.
Stewart recounted her attempts to warn relatives in the building about the fire that quickly reduced visibility to zero.
She first tried to call upstairs to her sister’s apartment, and later
rushed back into the burning building to bang on Young’s apartment door.
“I can’t see nothing because my eyes start burning me now,” recalled Stewart. “I kicked the door two times. I start kicking it, not knocking. Kicking it.”
Halladene, who lived on the first floor of the building as well, recalled seeing the 3-year-old boy and his mother inside the apartment many times before the fire.
“I would pass by and hear the mother screaming at the kid,” she recalled. “Sometimes he would peek his head outside the door and I would say, ‘Get back in there.’”
The Red Cross was still putting up a dozen families from the building’s 25 apartments at hotels in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. The evacuees were also given debit cards to help buy supplies.
The tenants, out of the building since Thursday, were told they can return to retrieve some of their belongings Sunday.
On Saturday, the sister of victim Emmanuel Mensah burst into tears at the memorial outside the building at 2363 Prospect Ave.
The U.S. Army mechanic was back in the Bronx after finishing basic training and died trying to rescue others from the searing flames and choking smoke.
“He always put other people first,” said Vanessa Mensah, 20. “Why? Why couldn’t he save himself?”
Mensah, 28, (inset) was found dead in a fourthfloor apartment, one story away from the apartment where he was staying.
The blaze also claimed three members of another immigrant family.
Solomon Donkor, 49, his 17-old-daughter Hannah Adoma Donkor and his 12-year-old son William Donkor were found dead in apartment 19. The two kids arrived last month from Ghana to live with their dad.
Their deaths devastated family in their homeland.
“The whole neighborhood is in mourning and disbelief,” said Smith Acquah, Donkor’s nephew.
The dead man’s wife learned of the tragedy on Friday. “She’s devastated,” Acquah said. “Those were the only children she had.”
Family and friends describe Donkor as a kindhearted and generous businessman who sacrificed being with his young children in the early 2000s to
come to the United States and make a better life for them.
“When he left, they were young,” Acquah explained. “He wanted them to come stay with him so they could go to school in the U.S.”
Donkor planned to visit Ghana in January and promised to help his nephew start his own business.
“And now you see what some reckless people did to us,” Acquah said. “Someone took the light away from my life.”
Police also identified another victim, Gabriel Yaw Sarkookie, 48, on Saturday.
The mourning was certain to continue into the new year, with flyers already announcing a Jan. 2 prayer service at the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.