A distraught father recalled being caught between hope and despair: hope for his 6-year old twins critically injured in a raging fire at his Bronx home, and despair for the 1-year-old boy who didn’t make it out alive.
”I have all their names tattooed on my arm,” Kwesi Harris said after a Monday afternoon fire ripped through his second floor apartment. “But not Liam because he was just born. I’m still going to put his name on my arm though.”
Since the beginning of the year, fires have torn apart families and sowed despair across New York.
The number of people who have died in fires so far this year has increased 50% over the same period last year. Through the first four-and-half months of 2026, 42 people, from young toddlers just learning to walk to elderly grandparents enjoying their retirement, have been killed in fires across the city. That’s an increase from the 28 people who died in fires during the same months last year.
This year’s dead include a fashion editor and her mother who perished in a blaze in Inwood, a Brooklyn man and his elderly mother who died when their shared Crown Heights apartment went up in flames and two victims killed in a fire that broke out above a Bronx bodega.
Though most of the fires had different causes — a flicked cigarette in Manhattan, and a twisted arson in the Bronx — they each had two common threads, grief and pain.
The sorrow in Manhattan reverberated throughout the fashion industry after Yolaine Diaz, 48, a former editor for People en Español, died with her mom, Ana Mirtha Lantigua, 73, while trying to escape a blaze that broke out in the six-story building on Dyckman St. near Broadway in Inwood on May 4.
“We are incredibly sad to hear about the loss of Yolaine,” People magazine editors said in a statement to The News. Diaz left her position as fashion and beauty editor in 2023.
“She continued to contribute regularly to fashion, beauty and entertainment,” the editors said.
“Her life was an example of seizing every moment, living life to the fullest in the most positive way,” fashion and beauty expert Kika Rocha, who worked with the victim at People en Español, told the News. “She was always kind, always willing to give advice. Her legacy is that life should be enjoyed and cherished.
That fire also claimed the life of Lance Garcia, 25, who perished saving his mother, who remains hospitalized in critical condition, unaware that her son made the ultimate sacrifice.
“I just want him to be remembered as a hero,” said Garcia’s best friend, Kris Florentino. “His personality was very quiet but he always kept an eye out for people.”
A building tenant, Victor Arias, 29, was later arrested and charged with criminally negligent homicide for allegedly sparking the May 4 blaze by flicking his lit cigarette into a pile of cardboard boxes at the bottom of the building’s staircase.
Also reeling from a fire death are friends and relatives of Oreste Deleon, 70, a Bronx landlord who died along with two tenants on May 6 when an arsonist torched his Mott Haven building.
A suspect was arrested and charged with murder and manslaughter in an incident sources say was potentially sparked by a drug debt.
The building had been in Deleon’s family for generations, Deleon’s niece, Salina Rivera said.
“The building is gone. The deli is gone. And our family is left grieving the sudden loss of our family member. Losing him in such a tragic and violent way has left our family heartbroken and overwhelmed,” Rivera wrote on GoFundMe.
“This was not just a property — it was my grandmother’s childhood home, her late mother’s home, and a place filled with decades of memories, and history. It also housed the deli she rented out, which used to be my great grandmother’s and was recently renovated.”
The GoFundMe pages, like the one Rivera launched, revealed much about this year’s fire tragedies.
And while many of the headlines have focused victims who were killed, the fires also exacted a heavy toll on residents who survived, like Sasha Denham and Evan Frank.
Dunham and Frank managed to flee the Inwood fire by climbing down the building’s fire escape, but the ordeal for them continues.
“The damage to our building is severe and we have not been allowed back inside,” Dunham wrote in a GoFundMe fundraising post. “We know that all of our furniture has been lost to smoke and water damage, along with the materials for our livelihoods in NY’s theater scene. We are now displaced outside of NYC and raising funds to start over and get back into the city. We will need new housing; along with new furniture, clothing, and essentials.”
Displacement is a common theme among the fires’ living victims. A deadly fire that ripped through a five-story building in the Bronx’ Belmont section resulted in a vacate order for all 27 apartments.
“We’re basically homeless now, we’ve lost everything,” tenant Luciano Silva told News12. “We’re just trying to pick up the pieces to see where we can go, where we can live now.”
Silva was among those who gathered in the basement of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church to collect necessities like soap, toothpaste and clothes.
“All of this is donations,,” Father Carlos Germosen, the church’s parochial vicar, told the news station. “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.
Fire officials said they had no simple explanation for the dramatic increase in fire-related deaths.
The loss of life has sparked a public service campaign to enforce laws mandating self-closing doors in apartment buildings, and reminders to tenants to close doors to keep fires from spreading.
“We had fire going into nine apartments. That’s what made it such a difficult fire,” said retiring FDNY Lt. Michael Conboy, who worked the Inwood blaze. “If we do everything right, people are still going to die sometimes. But if you do everything right, people are going to live, too.”
