Bronx Fire, City’s Deadliest in Decades, Kills at Least 12 and Injures More

“I had one on my front and one on my back,” she said, sobbing. “I couldn’t carry the rest of them.”

Luz Hernandez, another resident, said she first realized something was wrong when the smell of burned rubber filled her apartment on the fourth floor, followed by smoke so thick that it made the room pitch-black. She summoned her husband and two sons, 11 and 16, to the window, and they descended the front fire escape as smoke rose near them.

Later, Ms. Hernandez said in Spanish, she saw the charred bodies of two women who lived together and their two young daughters being carried away on stretchers.

The smoke seeped through the closed windows of a building next door where Ana Santiago, 25, was cooking in a fifth-floor apartment.

Ms. Santiago said she called 911 and ran downstairs with her 4-year-old son, knocking on neighbors’ doors as she went. When she reached the street, she saw a man lying on the ground, she said, pointing to a patch of sidewalk where glass shards lay like snow. She said she could not tell if he was alive or dead.

Three young girls, Ms. Santiago said, had descended from a fire escape barefoot, wearing no coats. They stood outside, crying, before a neighbor in a first-floor apartment hurried them indoors.

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The building — a five-story walk-up on Prospect Avenue near East 187th Street, close to Fordham University and the Bronx Zoo — was built in 1916, according to property records. It has more than 20 units.

The 12 confirmed fatalities made the fire the deadliest since an inferno at the Happy Land social club killed 87 people in 1990. It surpassed the toll from a decade ago, in March 2007, when 10 people — nine of them children — were killed after an overheated cord to a space heater caused a fire that tore through a four-story house in the Bronx.

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