New York City's mayor says 12 people have been killed in a Bronx apartment building fire including a child around one year old. (Dec. 28) AP
NEW YORK — A four-alarm fire in the Bronx late Thursday killed at least 12 people and injured several more, authorities said.
The dead included a child of around a year old, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a briefing outside the building. Four more residents were seriously injured and fighting for their lives, he said.
“We may lose others as well,” de Blasio said.
The baby was found in her mother's arms in a bathtub, the New York Post reported. Both were dead, the paper said.
Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro called the fire “historic in its magnitude.”
“Our hearts go out to every person who lost a loved one here and everyone who is fighting for their lives,” he said.
The cause of the fire remained under investigation, Nigro said.
More than 170 New York City firefighters responded to the scene of the fire.
Firefighters rescued at least 15 people, a fire department spokesman told The (New York) Daily News.
Crews worked in sub-freezing temperatures to extinguish the blaze in the 101-year-old, five-story walkup, which is located a block from the Bronx Zoo.
Thierno Diallo, 59, a security guard originally from Guinea who lives in a ground floor apartment, said he was asleep when he heard banging on his door. It took a moment to realize what was happening.
“Only when I heard people screaming, ‘There’s a fire in the building!’” he said. “I heard somebody, ‘Oh! Fire! Fire! Fire!’”
He ran out in his bathrobe, a jacket and sandals.
Neighborhood resident Robert Gonzalez, who has a friend who lives in the building, said she got out on a fire escape as another resident fled with five children.
“When I got here, she was crying,” Gonzalez said.
Windows on some upper floors were smashed and blackened.
“The smoke was crazy, people screaming, ‘Get out!,” a witness, Jamal Flicker, told the New York Post. “I heard a woman yelling, ‘We’re trapped, help!”
Emmanuel Mensah, 28, who was home for the holidays from serving in the Army, is among the missing, the Post reported.
“When they rescued (others) . . . they couldn’t find him,” his father Kwabena Mensah told the newspaper.
The 12 confirmed fatalities made the fire the deadliest in the city since an inferno at the Happy Land social club killed 87 people in 1990, The New York Times reported.
Contributing: The Associated Press and USA TODAY's Jane Onyango-Omara; follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo
Join the Nation's Conversation
To find out more about Facebook commenting please read the Conversation Guidelines and FAQs