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Fatal Fire in Brooklyn
Fatal Fire in Brooklyn
CreditMary Altaffer/Associated Press
Seven children from an Orthodox Jewish family died early Saturday when a fire ripped through their home in Brooklyn, trapping the children — ages 5 to 16 — in their second-floor bedrooms as their mother and a teenage sister clambered outside through windows.
The fire, the deadliest in New York City in eight years, was sparked by a malfunctioning hot plate, the authorities said. Such devices are often used by observant Jewish families because they are forbidden from lighting a flame on the Sabbath. They can light one or turn on an electric device before the Sabbath begins Friday night and keep it going through the day.
The blaze started on a first-floor kitchen counter at the home of the Sassoon family in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, a neighborhood populated by many large Orthodox families, and then raced up the stairs to the second floor, investigators said, where nine family members were in bed.
Witnesses described hearing screams from the mother and her children piercing the cold night.
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The open stairwell through which the fire rose was transformed into a column of flames, Fire Commissioner Daniel A. Nigro said, confining the children to their bedrooms in the back of the house as thick smoke filled the home.
The children’s mother, 45, jumped out a front window, Mr. Nigro said, and a 14-year-old daughter leapt from a side window, barely escaping the fast-deteriorating home, which was shrouded in smoke. Both sustained burns and smoke inhalation, and were in critical condition at local hospitals on Saturday.
Firefighters arrived three and a half minutes after the blaze was reported, the fire department said.
“Firefighters forced their way in, extinguished fire on the first floor, which had started in the kitchen,†Mr. Nigro said, “then pushed upstairs and found the children in their bedrooms.â€
Firefighters grabbed the children through windows, passing them to colleagues who were waiting on ladders and on a porch behind the house.
“They took them out every which way,†said James Long, a fire department spokesman.
The firefighters then rushed the children to waiting ambulances, which took them to hospitals, but they could not be revived. Three girls, ages 6, 11 and 16, died, as did four boys, ages 5, 8, 10 and 12, the police said. The two survivors were closer to the front of the home when the flames ignited.
“It’s a tragedy for this family, it’s a tragedy for this community, it’s a tragedy for our city,†Mr. Nigro said, calling it “the largest tragedy by fire†in nearly a decade.
The seven children of the Sassoon family who were killed were identified as Eliane, 16; Rivkah, 11; David, 12; Yeshua, 10; Moshe, 8; Sara, 6; Yaakob, 5.
In March 2007, nine children and a woman were killed by a fire in the Bronx, all of them from two families of immigrants from Mali. That blaze started in a cord attached to a space heater, then raced up a staircase in a 100-year-old wooden building.
On Saturday, fire investigators found a smoke detector in the basement of the Brooklyn home at 3371 Bedford Avenue, between Avenues L and M, but had not found any on the first or second floors, Mr. Nigro said. They were still searching the debris.
“There was no evidence of smoke detectors on either the first or the second floor that may have alerted this family to the fire,†Mr. Nigro said.
Mr. Long, the fire department spokesman, said that at a minimum, homes are typically required to have a smoke detector on every floor as well as outside areas where people sleep.
The fire, the frantic escape and the unsuccessful search for survivors cast anguish over a Brooklyn block still flecked with the previous day’s snow. A large, square, charred hole gaped from the front of the light-colored, red-roofed house.
On Saturday morning, many neighborhood residents had not yet heard the news because they had turned off their phones, televisions and computers the night before in observance of the Sabbath. The names of the victims had not yet been released Saturday morning because of difficulty reaching the children’s father, who was not at home when the fire broke out.
A neighbor who gave only her first name, Bonnie, said the mother, a beautiful and popular girl in high school, had married in 1998 and moved to Israel, and that her husband worked in banking. She had moved back to Brooklyn to the house where she grew up about two years ago to be closer to her large extended family in Midwood, Bonnie, 40, said. The mother’s parents live in New Jersey, she said.
"They’re a very close-knit family," Bonnie said. "It’s a tragedy."
Another friend of the mother, who declined to give her name, described her as “wonderful.â€
Reached by phone, a man who identified himself as a relative of the family but refused to give his name said between heavy sighs that “it’s not a good time.â€
It was more than a coincidence that the fire struck on the Jewish Sabbath, a day of rest.
Orthodox Jews do not cook on the Sabbath because doing so requires the lighting of a flame, which is forbidden at that time. But they will often light an oven on Friday before sunset, and keep it going through the next day, to heat a stew known as cholent or will keep a stovetop flame on covered by tin sheet called a “blech†in Yiddish and warming, say, a teakettle. Sometimes food is kept extra warm by covering a pot with a cloth.
On Saturday, the Fire Department handed out fliers titled “Fire Safety for Jewish Observances†with a list of tips to avoid fires while cooking. However, some of them, such as “Stay in the kitchen — Don’t leave cooking food unattended,†were not compatible with the regular practice of leaving a heat source on overnight.
An earlier version of this article included an incorrect age range for the victims of the fire, based on information from the police. The children were ages 5 to 16, not 5 to 15. An earlier version of this article also misstated the number of people killed in a 2007 fire in the Bronx. Nine children and one adult died as a result of that fire, not eight children and one adult.
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