trAPPEd IN B’KLyN fIrE
Woman, 82, killed, but hero aide saves hubby
A HEROIC home health aide snatched a man from the flames of a raging fire Saturday morning, but she was unable to rescue his 82-yearold wife.
Feyga Geyman was trapped by the blaze about 2:40 a.m. in her second-floor Brooklyn home, authorities said. She and her 85-year-old husband, Sukher, were asleep when the bedroom was suddenly engulfed in flames, said aide Gulruh Rahmonova, 27, who was staying therefor thenight.
Feyga Geyman screamed for help as the deadly inferno closed in.
“I was asleep,” Rahmonova said. “I sleep in the living room. There was a fire in the bedroom. I helped the husband out, but she doesn’t walk — I didn’t know what to do. I tried to go backin, but the fire was too much.”
The aide was on her second day working for the couple. “Help me!” Rahmonova screamed after running from thea partment. “Help me!”
Her cries brought tenant Oleg Dubrovsky running to the burning apartment from his home on the fifth floor.
“I went down to the second floor. A woman was screaming, ‘Help, somebody in the apartment!’ ” Dubrovsky, 24, recalled.
Geyman, the doomed woman, had made it to the couch in the living room by the time Dubrovsky tried to save her, he said.
“She was on the couch screaming, ‘Help me, help me!’ in Russian,” the shaken neighbor said. “I couldn’t get in. The smoke was too deep. I tried to get on my hands and knees (to get to the woman), but the ceiling was starting to collapse. The air was too hot. It was burning my throat. . . . I couldn’t do nothing. She burned before my eyes.”
Dubrovsky said Rahmonova, the panicked aide, made a last-ditch attempt to save Geyman.
“The home attendant was running around with me,” he said. “She was trying to go back in. I pulled her out.”
Authorities believe the fire was sparked by a jumble of extension cords under the bed, a police source said. Fire marshals are investigating.
Other residents rushed from the smoke-choked building at 3111 Brighton Beach Seventh St. through the fire escapes.
Firefighters, after extinguishing the blaze, found Feyga Geyman dead. Sukher Geyman was taken to Staten Island University North Hospital with burns to his hands. He was admitted to the burn unit Saturday afternoon.
Six other residents and one firefighter were treated for minor injuries, Fire Department sources said.
Relatives of the dead woman gathered at the building Saturday in the wake of the tragedy.
“My father is in the hospital. She was in the fire,” Geyman’s devastated daughter, Lyudmila Unik of Brooklyn, said between sobs. “I got a call. (The neigh
bors) said, ‘Fire in the apartment! Fire in the apartment!’ ” “They lived there 19 years.” The surviving husband’s brother, Gregory Geyman, 74, also of Brooklyn, said relatives were protecting the injured man from the horrible truth Saturday.
“He’s going to be OK, but he doesn’t know about his wife,” he said. “We told him that she’s in the hospital. If he finds out she died, I don’t know what will happen to him. We’ll wait another day.”
Sukher and Feyga Geyman emigrated from Odessa, Ukraine, in 1995. In addition to their daughter in New York, they have two sons, who live in San Francisco and Germany.
The victim was virtually bedridden due to diabetes and a bad heart, and she used a wheelchair to get around, her sister-in-law said.
The family is thankful for what Rahmonova, the aide, did to help the couple.
“She was scared,” said Gregory Geyman’s wife, Klavdiya. “She did her best.”