Boy playing with stove started fatal fire
A preschooler toying with the burners on his mother’s stove accidentally sparked New York City’s deadliest fire in decades, an inferno that quickly overtook an apartment building and blocked the main escape route, the city’s fire commissioner says.
A dozen people died, and four others are fighting for their lives in hospital, after the flames engulfed the century-old building near the Bronx Zoo.
The 31⁄2-year-old-boy, his mother and another child were able to flee their first-floor apartment. But they left the apartment door open, and it acted like a chimney that drew smoke and flames into a stairwell. From there, the fire spread throughout the five-storey building, authorities said.
The city housing department said investigators would look into why the door did not close automatically.
At least 20 people scrambled out via fire escapes on a bitterly cold night, but others could not. ‘‘People had very little time to react,’’ Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said.
Firefighters arrived in just over three minutes and saved some people, Nigro said, but ‘‘this loss is unprecedented’’.
Fernando Batiz said his 56-yearold sister, Maria Batiz, and her 8-month-old granddaughter died, though the baby’s mother survived.
‘‘The smoke, I guess, overcame her. Everything happened so quick,’’ Batiz said.
He described his sister, a home care attendant, as a selfless person who helped him when he was homeless. ‘‘I don’t know what to think. I’m still in shock.’’
One family lost four members: Karen Stewart-Francis, her daughters, aged 2 and 7, and their cousin, 19-year-old Shawntay Young, relatives said. StewartFrancis’s husband was hospitalised, the family said.
‘‘I don’t know what to do, and I don’t know how to feel,’’ StewartFrancis’s mother, Ambrozia Stewart, told The New York Times. ‘‘Four at one time – what do I do?’’
Young lived in the building’s basement but had gone upstairs to visit Stewart-Francis in her fifthfloor apartment, said Young’s boyfriend, Kenyon George.
The two had dated for seven months, and Young had become a mother figure to his 1-year-old son, he said. She called him on Friday, but he was asleep and missed the call.
‘‘If I had picked up the phone, she would have been over here all day,’’ he said. ‘‘It feels so surreal.’’
The 26-unit apartment building was required to have self-closing doors, which swing shut on their own to keep fires from spreading, city Housing Preservation and Development Department spokesman Matthew Creegan said. Investigators would look at whether the door to the apartment where the fire began was defective or if an obstruction prevented it from closing, he said.
No self-closing door violations were issued during an inspection of the building in August, though the city would not have examined every apartment, Creegan said. Such violations are common – the city cited 7752 of them last year.
The management company for the building’s owner, D&E Equities, said it was talking with city officials and was ‘‘shocked and saddened’’ by the deaths and injuries.
Excluding the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the fire was the city’s deadliest since 87 people were killed at a social club in the same Bronx neighbourhood in 1990.
Residents described opening their front doors to see smoke too thick to walk through, and descending icy fire escapes with children in hand. Some escaped barefoot or in their nightclothes.
Twum Bredu still did not know what had become of his brother, Emmanuel Mensah, 28. He was staying with a family that escaped the fire safely, but no one could find Mensah, despite checking four hospitals. Still, his family pounded the pavement, asking about him and hoping for good news.
‘‘That’s my prayer,’’ Bredu said.