FIRE TRAGEDY
Woman, 60, dies in blaze at Queens home
AN AILING 60-year-old woman was killed by a fire in her Queens home Sunday, neighbors and officials said.
Rita Sklar was inside the twostory house on 217th St. near 67th Ave. in Oakland Gardens when flames broke out about 11:20 a.m., authorities said.
Medics rushed her to North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, L.I., where she died.
“I heard a woman screaming. I looked out and saw the fire,” said Dave Wong, 60, who lives across the street. “She was alone. The husband wasn’t home.
“She’s in really bad health, unable to move,” said Wong, who told the Daily News he thought Sklar was recovering from brain cancer. “When they took her out, they were doing chest compressions.”
On a Facebook page that neighbors said belonged to Sklar’s husband, a video is posted that uses the word “tumors in her head” and “chemotherapy” to describe her condition.
Next-door neighbors tried to warn the residents inside the burning house, shouting, “Fire! Fire!”
“She didn’t make it,” said a distraught relative who arrived at the scene.
“We don’t know what caused the fire. They are still investigating.”
The fire marshal will determine the cause of the blaze.
The blaze comes less than two weeks after a raging inferno in a Bronx apartment building killed 13 people — including four children, one of them just 7 months old.
A 3-year-old boy playing with stove burners started the blaze, which quickly spread through the century-old apartment building at 2363 Prospect Ave. in Belmont.
It was the city’s deadliest fire since an arsonist torched the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx in 1990, killing 87 people.
A day later, a fire in a brownstone on Patchen Ave. near MacDonough St. in Bedford-Stuyvesant killed two longtime friends and neighbors, Ernestine Moore, 79, and Arthur Madison, 76.
Fires claimed 73 lives across the city in 2017 — a 52% jump from the previous year.
In 2016, 48 people died in fires — a record low for the FDNY, and a drop from the 59 fatalities the city saw in 2015.