PHILADELPHIA — Three children and one man, believed to be their father, were killed early Sunday morning in a raging house fire in North Philadelphia, authorities said.
Heavy fire was visible from both floors of a two-story row house on the 3200 block of Hartville Street in the city’s Kensington section when firefighters arrived shortly after 2 a.m., according to the Philadelphia Fire Department.
“Despite an aggressive interior attack by firefighters, four people did not survive; three of them were children,” the Fire Department said in a statement issued Sunday morning. Their identities were not released and the cause of the fire was under investigation by the Fire Marshal’s Office.
A woman believed to be the children’s mother jumped from an upstairs window, wrapped in a blanket, said Jose Salas, who lives two houses away.
At a news conference Sunday afternoon, Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel said the woman was hospitalized in stable condition and expected to be released.
According to public records, the property has been owned by Edwin and Gloria Ruiz since 2004.
Next-door neighbor Levi Walker was awakened by the smell of smoke around 2 a.m. He said he made sure it wasn’t his own home on fire before going outside to see the first-floor air conditioner ablaze and falling out of the window of 3239 Hartville. Then he saw a woman fall on the ground and then run to a nearby truck, screaming something in Spanish he did not understand.
Flames engulfed the first floor first, he said, before shooting upstairs. After alerting neighbors and calling 911, Walker, who is new to the neighborhood, said his first thought was to try to help but he realized the fire was already too out of control.
“I didn’t think it would be that much fire that fast,” Walker said.
The first fire truck arrived “exactly two minutes” after the 911 call came in, Thiel said, but not all apparatus could get down the narrow street with cars parked along one side.
“We’re able to put hands on one of the juveniles inside; unfortunately it was too late,” he said.
The investigation so far yielded one troubling absence, Thiel said. “We have not found any evidence so far of working smoke detectors in this home.”
Salas said a mother, a father and three elementary school-aged children lived at 3239 Hartville. Thiel said the family was renting the home.
“He’s a good guy,” Salas said of the man killed in the fire, who he said was a mechanic and a hard worker who had fixed up the house. “He don’t bother nobody.”
He said the last time he saw the children they were riding their bicycles. A woman at the scene who did not give her name said one of the children was a fifth grader at John B. Stetson Charter School. Neighbors said another child attended Lewis Elkin Elementary School.
A GoFundMe page has been established by the Elkin Elementary School community “to help the mom of Elkin students that perished in a fire on 4/24/22.” As of about 2:30 p.m. Sunday, $1,605 of the $5,000 goal had been raised.
“They are our babies,” an emotional Charlotte Maddox, principal at Elkin, said at the news briefing Sunday afternoon, joined by teachers from the school.
The fire was placed under control at 2:28 a.m. By late Sunday morning, every window and the front door on the gray, painted-brick home were gone. Black char marks ran from the first-floor window up the front of the house to the second floor. Windowsills were blackened. A bench and some drawers laid on the sidewalk; damaged shoes and clothes peeked out from a pile of ash and debris.
The causes of the children’s deaths will be determined by the Medical Examiner’s Office, authorities said.
More than 60 members responded to the fire, including firefighters, medics, chiefs and support personnel.
