Inside a Deadly Bronx Fire: Scenes of Chaos, Desperation and Love

The fire lieutenant’s voice over the ambulance radio sounded strange and chilling. “We need help!” he barked — a startling plea from a man with decades of experience.

Christian Marte, a Fire Department paramedic, had never heard the lieutenant speak with such urgency.

It was about 11:15 a.m. on Jan. 9, and Mr. Marte and his partner barreled toward East 181st Street in the Bronx, where a 19-story apartment building in the Fordham Heights neighborhood was burning.

They arrived to find firefighters battling smoke so dark and dense that it seemed as if it could be scooped up by hand. A sickly smell hung in the air, a mix of charred wood, plastic and chemicals.

“Yo, we’re coming to you, we’re coming to the ambulance with a baby!” a voice shouted over the radio.

Mr. Marte, 25, had been with the department for five years. The afternoon would test him in ways he would not forget.

By day’s end, 17 residents — eight of them children — would be dead, with dozens more injured.

A week later, on Sunday, a mass funeral drew hundreds of mourners to a nearby mosque. The service for the 15 victims who hailed from West Africa illustrated the unfathomable hole that the disaster left in a small, intimate community.

For the survivors it has been a week of reliving a moment of impossible choices.

Inside the 120-unit structure, each apartment had a unique view of the chaos, and every tenant was faced with a personal set of circumstances — forced to stake lives on an uncertain decision. Some fled to the stairs, ushering their family down a black hole of smoke. Many sheltered in place, terrified that their own home could become a death trap. A few took to the windows, clinging to the lower ledge before letting go.

The fire had begun on the third floor, in apartment 3N, where a space heater had sparked a roaring blaze around a child’s bed. Soon, smoke was surging out of the home, the apartment’s malfunctioning front door left wide open after the family fled. A turbulent mass of smoke, thick with carbon monoxide, choked the hallways and forced itself into every room, every crack, even seeping in through the electrical outlets and light fixtures.

Up in apartment 12P, Anthony Romero, a tattoo artist who had lived in the building for nearly a decade, was roused from his late Sunday sleep by the fire alarm, but he thought nothing of it.

The shrill, repeating beep was considered the soundtrack of the building, setting off at random times so often that tenants had learned to dismiss it with a roll of the eyes — “like the boy who cried wolf,” Mr. Romero, 40, said.

But when he looked outside, he saw flames in a window below.

“Two minutes later, a big ball of fire comes out of the window — a mini explosion like a boom, and you hear glass being blown away,” he said.

He ran to shove wet towels against the crack beneath his door. But after seeing the acrid black cloud just outside his apartment, he thought that walling it off would be a futile act.

His wife, Jeannie, cried. She was seven months pregnant and could hear firefighters in the hallway saying there was too much smoke for people to leave.

“It’s going to kill everybody,” she said.

Mr. Romero looked at his wife carrying their unborn child, his 19-year-old son, Anthony, his 7-year-old daughter, Jlana, and summoned soothing words. “We’re here together. We’re going to be all right.” He said nothing about the fear ramping up in his mind.

Next door, in 12N, Tatiana Strahn, 28, grabbed a sweater and held it over her mouth, then charged out of her apartment. Her 2-year-old son, Owen, was three floors up at her aunt’s home, and nothing could stop her from going after him. Not so long ago, she had lost two family members in a fire in the Dominican Republic.

Her eyes stinging from the smoke, Ms. Strahn felt for the staircase walls to guide her up through the dark. On the 15th floor, she bumped into a boy about 8 or 9 years old who was on his way down. “What are you doing here?” she shouted. “Where’s your mom? Get into an apartment, get out of the stairs!”

His eyes were big and confused. “She’s coming down,” he said, then turned and scurried back up.

In the hallway, Ms. Strahn called out to her aunt: “Maria!” A door flung open. Her aunt rushed out carrying Owen, his face pressed into her neck. The three headed down the stairs.

Back inside her home, Ms. Strahn began to panic. Smoke was flowing in, and now she had six people to worry about. Aunt Maria who suffered from anxiety. Owen and her 4-year-old daughter, Leilani. The children’s father, Efrain Sifuentes, on his usual weekend visit, who had a broken leg and was on crutches.

Charely, her older sister from Connecticut, was also here, having surprised her for the weekend to tell her she was pregnant. She had brought her 11-year-old daughter, Yoriely. And then there were the two golden retrievers.

Ms. Strahn ordered everyone into the least smoky bedroom while she wedged blankets at the entrance to their duplex and attempted to seal the door’s edges with packing tape. Mr. Sifuentes filled pots with water to drench the area, hobbling back and forth from the sink.

Then Ms. Strahn went to the window, waved a T-shirt and started to shout. “Help I’m 12N, I have babies! Apartment 12N! I have babies!” It was all she could think to say, and she screamed it again and again.

“My entire family was in my household, every person that I loved, and I couldn’t do anything but just sit there,” she said.

A deadly escape route

Down in front of the building, as shattered glass sprinkled from above and cries for help punctuated the air, the battalion chief, Jeffrey Facinelli, was making quick decisions. Crews inside radioed about residents trapped or unconscious or worse.

It would not be the flames that killed and injured so many, but the toxins in the smoke, inhaled by those who tried to escape through the stairs.

Farooq Muhammad, a deputy E.M.S. chief, was tracking people who emerged from the building in critical condition — those in need of the most intensive medical care. The tally was three when he first arrived. It quickly became 16. And there were more to come. He scrambled to coordinate who did what, who went where. He called dispatch for more help, tried to get patients to hospitals swiftly. The stress reminded him of working triage 20 years earlier, in Lower Manhattan, on Sept. 11.

Firefighters appeared at the front of the building, their faces slick with sweat and soot. The compressed air in their tanks was running low, but they made it out with victims in tow.

It was not the first time Mr. Marte had seen death up close, but he noticed that a thin band of discoloration had formed across the boy’s eyes.

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget how his eyes looked,” Mr. Marte said. “I’ve never seen that, and I never want to see it again.”

After transporting the boy to Bronxcare Hospital Center and handing him off to an emergency medical team, Mr. Marte yelled to a doctor, “There’s going to be more!” Then he and Mr. McGraw headed back to the scene, hoping the other patients would not be so young. But soon they were transporting another boy. And then another.

Bronxcare would quickly be at capacity. Among the victims it received were three children with no vital signs. St. Barnabas Hospital and Jacobi Medical Center also found themselves inundated with patients.

At 11:38, additional ambulances were requested. Ten people with life-threatening injuries and four walking wounded were waiting to be transported.

By noon, the fire had been knocked down, but crews continued to report patients with serious injuries. During a brief reprieve, Mr. Marte took a minute to look around at a surreal landscape of desperation. He felt his emotions stir, until a firefighter called out, “We have another one, we need your help.”

Nearby, an unconscious man’s chest was being repeatedly compressed. “Get up man, get up!” a bystander urged in hope as much as frustration.

Some tenants who managed to make it down the pitch-black stairways unscathed stood outside or huddled in cars. They watched the rescue efforts, unable to grasp how devastation came to find them here where families have lived for generations, where neighbors knock on shared walls to check in with one another or offer a plate of food, where everyone’s face is familiar.

Stephan Beauvogui, 67, safely escaped from 4W with his wife and two sons, 9 and 6. The journey for Jose Soto, 40, was longer. He and his girlfriend and her three children walked down from the ninth floor. His ears still rang with the muffled cries of families he passed along his way. “Help us!”

He wondered if the mothers’ screams would ever leave his head.

More residents were escorted out, their trek down the stairway lined with despair. A child’s body slumped against the wall was scooped up by a firefighter. On the eighth floor, a dog lay covered in ash, his eyes still open.

Mr. Romero, the tattoo artist, made it out with his family. He, like most residents, carried no personal possessions, just their two dachshunds. “The only important thing was something that was breathing and had a soul to it,” he said.

His next-door neighbor, Ms. Strahn, also managed to get out. She waited for a glimpse of her children’s father, who had fallen behind as he limped on crutches. Twenty minutes dragged on until he appeared.

Four members of the Touray family, relatives of the man considered to be the unofficial patriarch of the Gambian community in the building and nearby area, made their way outside with the help of firefighters. When the dead were counted, most were found to be of Gambian or West African descent. The Tourays knew all of them.

Outside, the growing crowd of survivors stared at their building’s doors, waiting for others to emerge. Some talked on the phone to those trapped inside. A son looked up to the 18th floor in search of his mother, who was waving a towel to show that she was all right.

Another mother, Fatou Sankanou, searched for her 2-year-old son. “Where is Ousmane?” A patient care technician at Jacobi, Ms. Sankanou often pulled double or overnight shifts to support her four children. The three older siblings were in Gambia visiting their father. But she had left Ousmane in the care of a friend in 19V.

A relative took her to St. Barnabas. There, Ms. Sankanou had to be restrained as she tried to push past staff to find her boy. She would learn later that he had died, the smallest to be taken by the fire.

A chance to breathe

As the smoke continued to clog the halls and firefighters carried out victims, families all over the building hunkered down, left with few options.

Inside 6H, Nikeya Gonzalez and her family had turned their duplex into a bunker for more than an hour. She and her husband, Anthony, had waved in six neighbors from higher floors who had walked down only to find they could go no further.

She also had her two nieces and 9-month-old nephew, Kai, to consider.

Her sister, Quianni, left them in her care as she worked a housekeeping job at a nursing home. She had called Ms. Gonzalez in hysterics about her children, begging them to try to get out.

Ms. Gonzalez, 45, fretted over the lives in her hands. “I gotta get them back to their mother safe,” she said.

But already, smoke was slipping into their masks.

Ms. Gonzalez began to cut up bedsheets from Kai’s crib, dousing them in cold water. Everyone held a wet rag over their mouths.

She funneled the children into the bathroom’s walk-in closet, praying that its lack of windows would save their lungs. Then she lugged oscillating fans up and down the stairs of her duplex, turning them on and off in various locations, in search of the best place to push away the smoke.

“I gotta get these people we invited into our house out safe,” she thought. “You don’t invite them in to die.”

All the while, Ms. Gonzalez coughed, her asthma flaring.

“You have to sit down, you have to breathe,” her husband said.

“I’ll breathe when everybody gets out,” she said.

When the firefighters finally knocked on the door, Ms. Gonzalez snatched a handful of diapers, a baby bottle and a can of formula. Everyone was still in their pajamas, wrapped in winter coats. Someone grabbed the two dogs, a Yorkie and a Pomeranian.

Inside the stairwell, firefighters aimed flashlights at the ground to guide the way along steps soaked with water. Other firefighters pushed past them, holding victims. Aaliyah, 8, had forgotten to change into her shoes and shuffled down in her slippers.

Finally, they could see the lobby, and then, the sky. Outside, a leftover layer of snow glimmered.

Aaliyah spotted her mother, started to run and was scooped up into open arms. “I thought I was going to die,” she said, and all the tears spilled out.

Her mother kissed her and cried. “It’s OK, I got you,” she said. “I got you. I got you. Mommy got you.”

Ms. Gonzalez watched. Her body softened with relief. She wept, then lifted her head up to the sun and drew a breath of air.

Reporting was contributed by Ali Watkins, Anne Barnard, Sharon Otterman, Robin Stein, Eduardo Medina, Azi Paybarah and Lola Fadulu. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.