NEW YORK — A raging house fire devastated a Bronx family Sunday morning, killing a 10-month-old girl, her father and the dad’s young brothers, ages 10 and 12.
The blaze ripped through a two-story brick house on Quimby Avenue near Castle Hill Avenue about 6 a.m., waking neighbors with thick smoke and the wails of the victims’ anguished family members as they desperately cried for help.
“The family almost ended in a couple minutes,” said Nagib Aldaylam, the baby’s uncle. “We are all very sad, as you see. It’s not an easy thing”
The two young brothers died at the scene, while their older sibling, age 22, died at Jacobi Medical Center along with his baby daughter.
A 41-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman were critically injured, police said. Three firefighters were hurt battling the blaze, New York City Fire Department officials said.
The family matriarch escaped the house with her only surviving son when they were pulled to safety by their next-door neighbor after pounding on his window from their second-floor balcony. The two homes are separated by a small gap.
The neighbor, Imlaque Chowdhury, 30, described how he got them to safety.
“My wife woke me up. I ran to the other side of the house because I heard noise. When I looked out the window I couldn’t see anything, it was all black everywhere, and then I continued to hear the knocking and then I noticed they were standing there,” he said.
“I heard the screaming of the lady. Once I heard her I came, opened the window and grabbed her and the kid and brought them inside my house.”
“I saw the fire, it was all through the windows, everything,” he added. “Every single window was just insane, intense. I can feel the heat from my house, smell the burning wood.”
The flames quickly jumped to his own house.
“The whole apartment is burnt. Everything is gone. I’m just trying to figure out what to do,” he said of his own home. “I’m just very sad for the family next door.”
Video shared on social media shows a firefighter rushing away from the blaze toward an ambulance holding the little girl. Other firefighters can be seen carrying a victim out of the house and EMS workers performing CPR.
Another pair of videos, taken from a neighbor’s doorbell camera, caught the flames bursting through the windows and the piercing wails of a woman yelling out for several minutes.
“It was just little kids screaming,” said Julio Almodovar, 44, who lives across the street. ”They were crying.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said he spoke with the patriarch of the family, who lost three sons and a granddaughter.
“He lost his children and it’s extremely painful,” Adams said, adding that the family was part of a tight-knit Yemeni community on the block. “So the block and community is going to rally around this family and this city is going to rally around this family.”
At least eight members of the family have lived in the house for the past five years or so, Chowdhury said.
“They’re our neighbors. The children used to play with the other neighbors’ children, playing out in the front. They’re very good kids and really nice people,” he said. “I’m going to miss the kids, seeing them all the time, saying hello.”
Firefighters arrived within four minutes, an FDNY spokesman said, and were greeted by thick smoke and flames on the second floor. The fire had also spread to the ground floor.
“We had heavy fire on the second floor, venting out almost every window,” FDNY Assistant Chief Kevin Brennan said.
Linda Torres, 50, who lives on the block, said she was awakened by the screaming.
”There was an agonizing cry and then you heard banging and saw the smoke. Then the firefighters were trying to get in,” she said. “I stood there, looked, and I saw the smoke coming from the back. All of a sudden it just erupted. The Fire Department came. They couldn’t get into the doorway until they finally broke it down and went in.”
More than 100 firefighters from 25 FDNY units responded to the blaze. The cause of the fire remains under investigation.
Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson, who also visited the scene, came after getting word that people were seriously injured.
“No one expects this on an early Sunday morning, to be awoken by the sound of fire trucks and fire alarms and to hear the screams of people jumping out of windows,” she said. “My heart broke because as a parent you never ever want to be told your child has been lost due to a fire when you tried everything to save their lives.”
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