The Bronx mom whose 3-year-old son ignited a fire that killed a dozen people bolted the burning building without alerting residents to the fast-spreading inferno, her next-door neighbor charged Saturday.
“She did not yell,” recalled an aggravated Shevon Stewart, 44, who lost four family members in the Thursday night blaze. “You (are) the one, and you don’t call for help? …
“Call somebody! If you don’t have a phone, knock on a door. Do something!”
Stewart, who lived in the first-floor apartment next to the mom, said the woman’s only show of concern was a feeble and failed attempt to spread the alarm.
“I hear her dragging her feet,” Stewart recalled of their encounter in a dark hallway.
“I can’t see her but I hear her: ‘Fire,’” Stewart said softly, imitating the woman’s halfhearted warning.
The still-unidentified mother managed to escape unscathed with her 3-year-old son and a 2-year-old child.
Fire officials said the unattended boy set off the killer blaze while fiddling with the gas stove. The child “had a history” of turning the burners on and off, said FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro.
The mother exacerbated the dangerous situation by leaving the apartment door open, with the fire and smoke soon swirling through the five-story building via an adjoining staircase.
“I am so angry,” said Stewart. “I don’t have the words. I don’t know what to say.”
As firefighters responded to the raging five-alarm blaze, Stewart watched the woman walk across the street and sit on the curb as building residents scurried onto fire escapes.
The less fortunate died inside their apartments or were discovered by first responders in the hallways or on the staircase.
Four victims, including a Bronx woman clutching her 7-month-old granddaughter, were found dead inside their bathtub once the blaze was finally extinguished.
Stewart’s anger was tempered by concern over the funeral arrangements for her sister and three nieces — along with the likely death of her brother-in-law.
Holt Francis emerged alive from the deadly mix of smoke and flames, but was surviving Saturday thanks only to life support and despite a dire prognosis.
The comatose man’s niece Carmaleta Halladene walked out of Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx to say he was a fighter and the family wasn’t ready to throw in the towel.
“We’re not pulling him off life support,” said the niece. “We’re not doing that.”
Among the dead in the 100-year-old Belmont apartment building were Francis’ wife Karen Stewart-Francis, 37, and their daughters Kelesha, 7, and Kylie, 2.
A niece, 19-year-old Shawntay Young, was also killed after coming from her basement apartment to visit the Stewart family in their fifth-floor home.
Stewart was far less optimistic about Holt Francis.
“He’s not going to make it,” said Stewart. “I want to cry really bad, but I don’t know — it’s like it’s not coming. Now what do I do? What do I do?”
According to Stewart, doctors need a member of Holt Francis’ immediate family to make a decision about disconnecting him from life support.
“He was married to my sister, so she could do it,” Stewart said of taking Holt off the machines now keeping him alive. “But my sister is no more.”
Relatives, even as they waited to see if the family death toll climbed to five, launched a GoFundMe page to bury the dead in their native Jamaica.
Stewart recounted her attempts to warn relatives in the building about the fire that quickly reduced visibility to zero.
She first tried to call upstairs to her sister’s apartment, and later rushed back into the burning building to bang on Young’s apartment door.
“I can’t see nothing because my eyes start burning me now,” recalled Stewart. “I kicked the door two times. I start kicking it, not knocking. Kicking it.”
Halladene, who lived on the first floor of the building as well, recalled seeing the 3-year-old boy and his mother inside the apartment many times before the fire.
“I would pass by and hear the mother screaming at the kid,” she recalled. “Sometimes he would peek his head outside the door and I would say, ‘Get back in there.’”
The Red Cross was still putting up a dozen families from the building’s 25 apartments at hotels in Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan. The evacuees were also given debit cards to help buy supplies.
The tenants, out of the building since Thursday, were told they can return to retrieve some of their belongings Sunday.
On Saturday, the sister of victim Emmanuel Mensah burst into tears at the memorial outside the building at 2363 Prospect Ave.
The U.S. Army mechanic was back in the Bronx after finishing basic training and died trying to rescue others from the searing flames and choking smoke.
“He always put other people first,” said Vanessa Mensah, 20. “Why? Why couldn’t he save himself?”
Mensah, 28, was found dead in a fourth-floor apartment, one story away from the apartment where he was staying.
The blaze also claimed three members of another immigrant family.
Solomon Donkor, 49; his 17-old-daughter, Hannah Adoma Donkor; and his 12-year-old son, William Donkor, were found dead in apartment 19. The two children came from Ghana two months ago to live with their dad.
“My heart is broken,” Donkor’s friend Frederick Addison said at the memorial.
He described Solomon as a “very good man” who “never gets upset” and was excited to have his kids join him in the Bronx.
“It’s like bringing your family, your kids to this place. I mean everybody is happy for you,” the friend said.
Addison said he was trying to reach Solomon’s siblings in California and his wife and mother, who still live in Ghana.
“You don’t know what to say,” he said. “The whole day I don’t know what to do.”
Police also identified another victim, Gabriel Yaw Sarkookie, 48, on Saturday.
The mourning was certain to continue into the new year, with flyers already announcing a Jan. 2 prayer service at the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Two security guards were shot dead inside a hotel room at a Las Vegas hotel-casino early Saturday morning before the gunman fled and ultimately shot and injured himself.
Las Vegas Police Lt. Dan McGrath said the shooting happened around 6:30 a.m. at Arizona Charlie’s Hotel and Casino on Decatur Boulevard, after a woman called security to report a disturbance.
The guards, employed by the casino, had entered the room on the hotel’s fourth floor and were shot with a handgun by the man, who was the lone occupant in the room, McGrath said.
He said the suspect then fled down the hallway with the gun and exited the rear of the casino, which is adjacent to a residential neighborhood.
McGrath said the man tried to carjack a person in their car, but the individual closed the door on him. Then he tried to break into another car before running up to a house and confronting a woman with four children, McGrath said.
The homicide detective said the woman was able to fend off the man as he kicked the door. McGrath said the suspect then ran to the garage, entered the laundry area and shot himself in the head.
Police later identified the suspect as 29-year-old Christopher Olague. He was taken to University Medical Center, where he was listed in critical condition.
“I don’t expect him to live,” McGrath said.
Arizona Charlie’s is one of three casino properties owned by Golden Entertainment Inc.; it also runs the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas and Arizona Charlie’s Boulder in Paradise, Nev. A spokesman for the company referred questions to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, but said the casino didn’t shut down because the shooting didn’t affect the public.
The hotel was reportedly fully booked for the New Year’s Eve weekend, and Ron Corona, a visitor from San Francisco, said everything appeared normal inside.
It was the scene outside the casino — which advertised 24-hour bingo and specials on Bud Light and Jim Beam on its marquee — that was jarring.
Corona, 31, was walking through the parking lot as a Las Vegas police squad car was parked near an entrance along with a crime scene investigators van. He was reading an account of what happened on his smartphone.
“I figured somebody got murdered in their room,” Corona said. “But inside the casino, you’d never know anything had happened.”
The slaying of security guards at a casino prompted memories of the mass shooting on Oct. 1, when a Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino a security guard was shot by Stephen Paddock. The guard’s injuries were not life-threatening.
From a room in the hotel, Paddock, 64, shot and killed 58 people and wounded hundreds when he opened fire on thousands attending a country music festival across the Las Vegas Strip.
Christopher Darcy, deputy chief of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department investigative services division, said that while the homicide had no connections to terrorism or the mass shooting, the coupling of a casino and shot security guards triggered an initial reaction of dread.
“That was my concern and that’s why the response out here today was commensurate with that [we] thought,” Darcy said. “We want to assure the public that Las Vegas is a safe community and this is in no way related to events on the Strip or terrorism.”
The city has steeled itself for the New Year’s Eve events, which are expected to draw 334,000 people to Las Vegas. The Strip will be closed to vehicle traffic for close to 12 hours amid extra-high security.
Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department authorities requested the U.S. Department of Homeland Security make the New Year’s Eve event a so-called SEAR 1 event. That is the highest level of security and includes measures such as snipers, extra FBI and Homeland Security mobile stations and medical personnel. Other SEAR 1 events include the Super Bowl and political party conventions.
But the mass shooting had an effect on travelers coming to Las Vegas, with the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau noting a decline in people coming to stay and play.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority reported visitation to the city was down 4.2% in October compared with the same month in 2016. Kevin Bagger, executive director of the agency’s research center, said that decline was due mainly to a reduction in the number of nearby tourists driving in to the city, as opposed to flying in from further afield. Another factor, he said, was that people’s usual excitement for a Vegas stay was “muted” due to the tragedy.
The visitor’s authority reported that November numbers were down again — a decline of 3.7% to 3.3 million compared with November 2016. The agency didn’t attribute the second straight decline in visitors to the October shooting, saying there wasn’t enough data to make a correlation.
The authority also expected fewer visitors for New Year’s Eve, but that is being attributed to hotel renovations, which have left fewer rooms available for the night.