RELIVING HELL
Return to blaze site brings heartbreak
Rose Leclerc was sitting in her sister’s Bronx living room, enjoying her chance to get away from Virginia for the holidays and spend some time with her family, when she suddenly got the first indication that something was horribly wrong.
“I smelled smoke,” Leclerc recalled Sunday. “I looked in the hallway — it was full of smoke.”
Leclerc, 49, who was with her sister, brother-in-law, their two children and her mother when the blaze began Thursday night at 2363 Prospect Ave., said she acted quickly and put some wet towels under the door to stop the billowing smoke.
“My niece got nervous and opened the door again, and the apartment got dark with smoke,” she said in Spanish through a translator.
“I felt my way to the window in the dark.”
The family immediately realized they had to escape the rapidly growing blaze, which would eventually take the lives of 12 of their neighbors, the highest New York fire toll in 27 years.
Leclerc said she and her family raced through the thickening smoke to the kitchen window, where they climbed out onto the fire escape to descend the three stories from the apartment.
“We were on the fire escape. It was dangerous,” said Leclerc, who said she feared that the fire escape was too rickety and about to collapse. “They pay so much rent in these buildings and they treat them like animals.”
On Sunday, as she carried bags of donated clothing out of St. Martin of Tours’ Church in Belmont, she said that her sister “lost everything.”
Earlier Sunday, Fernando Batiz, 56, visited the five-story building to find a Christmas gift from his sister, Maria, who died clutching her 8-month-old granddaughter.
“She had it all wrapped,” he said. “I miss her.”
However, Batiz and other residents who returned to the burnedout 26-unit building were barred from combing through what remained of their belongings, as the super cited unsafe stairs.
The fire was sparked by a 3year-old who was tinkering with the knobs on the stove in his family’s first-floor apartment while his mother was in the shower, according to officials.
In all, 22 families were left homeless.
“They’re telling me now I can’t go in until Tuesday,” fifth-floor resident Mike Morgan said. “Too dangerous, the stairs. Ridiculous. I am out here every day. You’d think the landlord would call or have a meeting. We’re getting nothing from them.”
Most tenants escaped the fire with just the clothes on their backs, returning Sunday to see if they could find passports, wallets, pocketbooks or other belongings.
“I don’t have a home now. I am sad for all the losses of life. I do not know what I will do,” said Luz Hernandez, who escaped from her fourth-floor apartment with her two children.
First-floor resident Thierno Diallo, 59, who was among the few allowed in, was in tears as he emerged from his waterlogged home, clutching documents.
“I got my papers, but everything is wet . . . But I am alive,” he said.
As tenants tried to piece their lives back together, one woman who escaped blasted the unidentified woman whose son started the blaze for her carelessness.
“She’s new to the building, but you’d think as a mother, she’d watch her kids better,” groused second-floor resident Cynthia Bryant, who fled the inferno in flip-flops.
“Who leaves their apartment door open so the fire can spread, and runs out the lobby door?”
Authorities are not expected to bring charges against the mother.
Meanwhile, Timothy Cardinal Dolan on Sunday lauded the heroism of the Bronx firefighters who responded to the blaze.
“I just want them to know that we love them and we’re proud of them and we’re grateful to them,” Dolan said as he addressed the firefighters of Engine 88-Ladder 38 in a visit to the Belmont firehouse.
“OK, now’s the time to ask for a raise,” he added.