Fire survivors, back at home that is no more, recall horror

ONE WOMAN stood completely naked clutching the fire escape for dear life, enduring the frigid air over the searing heat inside her building.

Another who was barefoot crawled out a window, then screamed to a neighbor to throw her socks as she waited to be rescued.

One lucky tenant avoided certain death by stepping out to pay his rent a few hours before the blaze erupted.

The survivors of the Bronx fire that killed 12 people returned on New Year’s Eve to the rubble and ruin of the building they once called home.

They came to collect whatever belongings remained but also to recount the miracle of their escapes and to reckon with the loss of their longtime neighbors and friends.

“I’m just grateful I’m here. Grateful I was able to not be in the building because I don’t know what would have happened if I had been in my apartment,” Allen Cannon said.

Cannon, 37, lived on the fourth floor of Belmont building for four years. He was on his way home from work Thursday evening when the fire broke out.

He said he believed he would have died if he had been in his apartment. The fire — the city’s deadliest in more than 25 years — started in a first-floor apartment in Cannon’s line of units.

Cannon said his next-door neighbor from Ghana, Solomon Donkor, 49, and the man’s two children, Hannah Adoma Donkor, 17, and William Donkor, blaze.

When Cannon arrived at the building, he saw swarms of firefighters with ladders on the fourth floor.

“I look out at the side of the building at the fire escape, there would have been no way to escape,” he said.

Cynthia Bryant, 56, was in her second-floor apartment when she saw smoke. She made a splitsecond decision that likely saved her from doom.

“When I saw the smoke, I almost reached for the door, but something kept saying, ‘No, don’t open the door,’ ” she recalled Sunday as she stood outside the gutted building at 2363 Prospect Ave.

She quickly called 911. Then, without stopping to put socks or shoes on, she got her husband and they hurried out a window. 12, perished in the