A 1-year-old boy died when fire tore through an apartment in the Bronx on Monday afternoon, and twin 6-year-olds — a boy and a girl — were critically injured, the police said.
Firefighters arriving at the scene of the fire at Bainbridge Avenue and East 194th Street in the Fordham neighborhood found flames pouring out of an apartment on the second floor of a five-story building, said Malcolm Moore, an assistant fire chief.
Neighbors at the scene said that the mother of the children had managed to sprint out of the building with one child in her arms but had shouted that three children remained inside.
“I saw so many people crying, the mother of the children crying,” said Rosa Hilario, 46. “At one point the mother of the children was crying, trying to get back into the building, but they wouldn’t let her.”
Ms. Hilario said that she had been walking from a store when she saw the fire “running up the building.”
“The heat was shattering the windows,” she said. “The firefighters came and broke the rest of the windows, and the fire was burning on the outside. They took two kids out of there and had them on oxygen.”
Chief Moore said the firefighters had struggled to enter the building through the front door because of the “volume of fire” in the staircase and had to remove two of the children through a window.
The boy was pronounced dead at St. Barnabas Hospital, where the 6-year-olds were also being treated, the police said. Three other people were also injured, one of them seriously, and three firefighters sustained minor injuries, officials said. The fire, reported shortly after 3:30 p.m., was declared under control an hour later. Its cause is still being investigated.
There have been several fatal fires recently in the Bronx, including one last Wednesday that killed three people and one on April 21 that killed two. A fire at an apartment building in Upper Manhattan last Monday killed three people and injured 14 others.
Chief Moore said that just as at some of those other recent fires, people fleeing the fire on Monday had left apartment doors open, allowing the fire to spread through the hallway.
“If there was one message that I could deliver across the spectrum to everyone here, and out there watching, it is, ‘Close the door,’” he said. “It’s tough to wrap your mind around having to do that, but the minute you close that door, you give everyone else in the building an opportunity to flee, and you give yourself your time to flee, by not allowing the fire to chase people.”
