As a fatal fire tore through a Bronx apartment building, panicked residents — including one who had caught fire — were forced to jump from a second-floor fire escape as they screamed for help.
Workers at a bodega on the first floor of the E. 187th St. building near Belmont Ave. brought out a small step ladder for fleeing residents to lower themselves onto instead of having to jump from the fire escape as the 1:30 p.m. fire raged Tuesday.
“I heard people screaming, ‘Fire! Fire!’” Odai Albahri told the Daily News. “I brought two ladders from the store and brought two people down from the fire escape. One guy was on fire, his whole body. He was crying and screaming.”
“He was burned all over,” added Abdulrahman Albahri, 32, who works at 187 Discount Store and Variety. “We… caught him as he came down.”
Two people were killed in the fire and 11 people, including five firefighters, were hospitalized following the blaze, FDNY officials said.
Survivors recalled “a strong burning smell” before the conflagration destroyed their homes.
“When we went to check the front door of the first-floor apartment, a gust of flames hit us,” second floor resident Luciano Silva told the Daily News Wednesday. “We closed it back up and smoke started coming through the cracks. We heard glass exploding, so we investigated. That’s when we realized the whole stairwell, from the first floor up, was engulfed in flames.”
“We called the fire department as soon as that happened,” Silva, 33, added. “Then we grabbed our dogs and ran back inside. We went to the fire escape. Everyone was going to the fire escape, just getting down and watching our home get engulfed in flames.”
Surveillance video from a neighboring store shows the bodega workers helping people down from the second-floor fire escape.
The retractable ladder connected to the fire escape, which would have taken residents down to the ground, wouldn’t lower.
At one point in the video, a bodega worker is seen going up the step ladder and shaking the bottom of the fire escape in an attempt to shake the retractable ladder loose as other good Samaritan on the sidewalk try to convince people to jump or lower themselves down.
The retractable ladder was ultimately freed and brought down as more residents started escaping the building, Silva said.
“I just watched my whole life go up in smoke,” Silva recalled. “Now we’re trying to pick up the pieces and see where we can rebuild.”
Another resident, 19-year-old Jared Palacios, ran out of the building holding the family dog, Rocky.
“When he made it outside, his hair and clothing were on fire. He has said he felt like his whole body was burning,” Palacios’ cousin Joana Pacheco said in a GoFundMe post looking for donations to help her family recover from the fire. “People nearby rushed to help him, trying to remove the burning clothing, and a barber from Invictus Barber Shop brought scissors to cut off his clothes and cut away his burning hair to help stop the flames.”
During the chaos, Rocky became separated and is currently missing. “We are still hoping and actively searching for him,” Palacios said in her post, one of several for tenants of the burned-out building.
When firefighters arrived, they set up their own ladders to grab more people trapped on fire escapes.
“They did a phenomenal job,” FDNY Chief of Operations Kevin Woods told reporters during a briefing after the five-alarm fire was extinguished. “They rescued people in the front and rear of that building. (FDNY) 56 truck rescued a civilian trapped at a window with no access to a fire escape, and rescued that victim via a portable ladder. Same in the front of the building (where they) rescued many people off the fire escape.”
More than 84 FDNY units — including 270 firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics — were called in to handle the job, FDNY Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore said, calling Tuesday a “tragic day.”
“This particular assignment unfortunately ended with multiple patients, including two fatalities,” the commissioner said.
Arcelia Ariza, who lives on the top floor of the building, was at work when his brother called and told him about the fire.
“My children were inside the building,” he said, recalling the panic that gripped him when he heard about the blaze. “One of my children’s godfathers also called and told me the fire had gotten out of hand and that my kids might not be able to get out.”
“Everyone was very, very worried,” Ariza, 59, added. “When I saw videos people were posting online, I felt terrible.”
Luckily, everyone made it out — save for one family pet.
“I had a cat that I couldn’t save,” Ariza said. “I was only able to rescue a kitten.”
The two victims who died have not yet been identified. FDNY fire marshals are still trying to determine what sparked the blaze, which erupted on the first floor.
There is a store on the first floor with two apartments behind the store, Woods said. There are six apartments on each upper floor.
An FDNY source said the fire quickly spread up the staircase to the upper floors because tenants from the fire apartment left their door open as they escaped.
“This fire rapidly raced up the stairs, involving all floors of this building,” Woods said. “When we hit the top floor, the roof has collapsed in a large portion of that building, a lot of the stairwell has collapsed as well. So we had to pull our firefighters out of the building, go to exterior operations.”
The FDNY said that the century-old building was made mostly of wood, which caught fire quickly. There were also large spaces or “voids” in the building that the flames could get into, Chief Woods said.
Several residents claim they didn’t hear any fire alarms. Nor did any sprinklers go off. The FDNY could not immediately confirm if the building had working alarms.
Displaced residents gathered in the basement of Our Lady of Mount Carmel church up the block Wednesday to collect necessities like soap, toothpaste, and clothes.
“All of this is donations,,” Father Carlos Jermosen said. “This happened really quickly to put all this stuff together and it’s really awesome to see the community come together to support those who are suffering.”
“We have lawyers and social workers from Catholic Charities to try to connect those who have lost everything to housing, to whatever resources that they need to get back on their feet and to recover documents,” he added. “We have representatives from the Consulate of Mexico and from other foreign countries that are here to help recover documents as well.”
On the day of the fire, the Red Cross set up a reception center at the Bronx Academy for Software Engineering on nearby Crotona Ave. for displaced families.
By Tuesday night, the Red Cross had registered 23 households, including 24 children and 52 adults, for emergency assistance such as temporary housing and other support.
