The badly burned survivor of an explosive lithium-ion battery fire that tore through a popular Bronx barbershop, killing his hairdresser and a fellow customer, escaped by running through a wall of flames, he recounted Tuesday.
Sasa Acosta, 30, was in a booth in the back of La Roka Barbershop on W. Burnside Ave. near Davidson Ave. in Morris Heights with hairdresser Shantii Quinones, 39, and fellow customer Willy Reyes, 29, when the blaze broke out Aug. 20. Only Acosta ultimately survived.
“I was under the hair dryer,” Acosta said. “She’s about to start doing his hair and then that’s when the loud explosion happens.”
“It sounded like a bomb,” he added. “I immediately jumped out my seat and ran to the door. When I opened the (booth’s) door, that’s when I see the fire right there … I ain’t think about that. Just ran through the fire.”
The victims who didn’t survive thought his actions were rash, he said.
“I remember Shantii’s last words was telling me, ‘No, wait don’t go.’ That was the last words,” Acosta said. “She was scared for me. She didn’t want me to run through the fire.”
Acosta suffered burns on 46% of his body and has so undergone six surgeries, including extensive skin grafting on his back and limbs.
Quinones and Reyes were initially rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Quinones died eight days later. Reyes died more than a month after the blaze, his family confirmed to News12 on Monday.
In an Instagram reel showing startling surveillance footage from inside the barbershop, a man can be seen moving a box when flames explode seemingly from nowhere and quickly engulf the space. Both victims and Acosta were trapped in a closed booth.
“I heard the lady screaming, so I went over there,” a witness told ABC7 New York. “She was on fire. Her hair was on fire and everything like that, so I basically pulled her out the building and got her across the street to the bodega.”
Shantii, who went by her first name only, was a skilled hair braider who had worked at the barbershop eight years. She was burned on over 90 percent of her body, according to her father, who spoke to PIX11 at a memorial in August.
She had been Acosta’s hairstylist for the entire eight years.
“She was more than a hairstylist to me, like somebody you can talk to about anything,”Acosta said. “She’s somebody that you tell her something and it stays right there. She’s not gonna judge you. She’s not gonna tell nobody your business. She was more like my hairstylist-slash-therapist.”
Shantii had hoped to open her own salon, her 21-year-old daughter Aniya told The News Tuesday.
“Everybody loved her,” Aniya said. “She was a counselor to each and every one of her clients. Everybody looked for her when they had issues.”
“It’s really hard because, especially because I’m her only child, I feel like she just put everything that she worked so hard for into me. So that I could continue what she was doing, what she had planned, which was getting her own shop, making her own brand,” Aniya said.
“She was the best mother ever. She just gave me all the fundamentals I need to be a strong woman, just like how she was.”
“I’m going to beauty school so I could get my license, so I could just be just like my mom and continue her legacy,” she added.
Reyes previously worked as a barber at the shop and still came in to get his hair braided by Shantii.
“He was a sweetheart,” Rosie, 42, an employee at a beauty supply store two doors down from the barber shop, said at a memorial for Reyes on Tuesday. “They called him ‘Flaco’ because he was skinny.”
Reyes had two daughters and a 5-month-old son.
“He was very outgoing, funny and very sweet. He used to like to crack a lot of jokes,” Rosie said. “He always said that he wanted to be more for his kids. He always used to talk about his kids.”
The fire broke out about 9:38 p.m. and was brought under control by firefighters about 30 minutes later. It was started by a lithium-ion battery, FDNY officials confirmed.
Three other people suffered minor injuries, according to an FDNY spokesperson.
Lithium-ion batteries commonly used to power e-bikes and other micro-mobility devices are capable of storing huge amounts of energy — and of sparking intense and fast-moving fires.
In 2023 alone, lithium-ion batteries caused 268 fires that resulted in 18 fatalities. Though the number of fires has fluctuated since then, the number of deaths caused by battery fires declined sharply, with six people killed in 2024 and only one death in 2025.
This year, a 48-year-old Queens man killed after a battery charging in the kitchen of his basement apartment in Jamaica ignited on June 26. That victim escaped the fire by crawling out a window of his home on 91st Ave. near 172nd St. in Jamaica, only to later succumb to his injuries at Nassau County Medical Center.
And on Aug. 28, 18-year-old Caleb Matthews was killed when his e-bike’s battery exploded in his family’s apartment in the Albany Houses In Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
The FDNY has attributed the decline in battery-related fires in part to the department’s outreach efforts. New Yorkers are advised to charge and store lithium-ion batteries outside, to immediately stop using batteries that appear to be leaking and to never place a micro-mobility device near an exit, including windows and doors.
With Colin Mixson
