A fire that officials said apparently began on the kitchen stove was racing through the three-bedroom apartment in Harlem. Six people were trapped inside. None of them would survive.
“You could hear when they would say, ‘Mom,’” said Jennifer Nunn-Stanley, who lives across the street and heard the shouts coming from inside the burning building.
The Fire Department sent 100 firefighters to the site of the blaze, at 2441 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. at 142nd Street, a 109-year-old building run by the New York City Housing Authority. But the fire commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, said that when firefighters reached the apartment on the fifth floor, “The fire met them at the front door.”
They found the six victims, two adults and four children ages 3 to 11, unconscious in bedrooms at the back of the apartment.
“Every bit of that apartment had fire damage,” Nigro said, adding that the fire appeared to have started in the kitchen, “on the stove.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio said that “all signs point to simply a horrible, terrible accident,” but he added that an investigation to determine the cause would be conducted.
It was the city’s deadliest fire, officials said, since December 2017, when 12 people in a Bronx apartment building died. That fire started when a 3-year-old boy played with the knobs on a kitchen stove.
Firefighters did not hear smoke-detector alarms as they worked their way through the Harlem apartment, Nigro said. Hours later, at a briefing with Nigro and the mayor, the interim chairwoman of the housing authority said the apartment had a smoke and carbon-monoxide alarm. It was installed in June 2017 and had been tested in January, the chairwoman, Kathryn Garcia, said.
Relatives of the woman who died in the fire, Andrea Pollidore, told investigators that she had a history of disconnecting smoke detectors while cooking, according to a city official who was not authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing investigation.
Nigro said the layout of the apartment worked against getting out. The kitchen was the room closest to the front door, and the fire spread from there in the opposite direction, toward two bedrooms where the victims had been sleeping. “They were unable to get to either the door of that apartment or the windows that were on the fire escape,” he said.
Neighbors identified the family in apartment 5G as Pollidore, 45, and her children, Nakyra, 11; Andre, 8; Brook-Lynn, 6; and Elijah, 3. A police spokesman confirmed their names and identified the sixth victim as Matt Abdularaph, 32, a brother of Pollidore.
Raven Reyes, 27, one of Pollidore’s four grown children, said it was a fire that brought her mother to the Harlem building several years ago. She said Pollidore moved there after leaving a Brooklyn brownstone that had burned in 2013, leaving her mother with burns.
Reyes said her mother put herself through nursing school to earn more for her family. Pollidore posted on Facebook in 2017 that she had graduated from Long Island Business Institute.
Friends said Pollidore was a conscientious parent. One neighbor, Deborah Gordon, said Pollidore was often up early to take the children to school. Patricia Flowers, who lives on the Pollidores’ floor, said she often heard the children playing in the hall. There was another familiar sound around apartment 5G: the family’s small, energetic Yorkshire terrier.
Flowers remembered seeing the children pushing their bicycles into the elevator on Tuesday afternoon, heading outside to enjoy the sunny weather after days of rain.
Another neighbor, Cathy Black, 62, remembered an encounter with Nakyra last week — and an invitation.
“She said, ‘I’m graduating this year — I want to see you there,’” Black said. Neighbors said the girl attended Public School 194, three blocks from where they lived.
Records from the Department of Buildings indicated that the building had not been cited for violations for smoke detectors or fire escapes. It has four open violations for failing to conduct safety inspections of the elevator going back to 2016.
Three other people suffered minor injuries from smoke inhalation when the building was being evacuated.
Jesse Scott, who lives across the street, watched as the fifth and sixth floors of the building appeared to explode.
“Suddenly, there was a big fireball,” he said. “It just blasted out. Everything came out. All the windows came out.”
Others described a harrowing run to safety as residents raced down smoke-filled stairways.
Firefighters declared the blaze under control at 3:19 a.m. By sunrise, the damage was apparent: The upper corner of the building was scarred by black streaks.
The building is part of the Frederick E. Samuel Houses, a group of 40 five- to seven-story buildings operated by the housing authority, known as NYCHA. More than 1,400 people live in the complex.
In February 2017, the complex failed an inspection by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.
HUD routinely inspects subsidized housing developments to ensure that conditions are sanitary, safe and in good repair. Inspectors are supposed to check for defective smoke detectors and to deduct points for safety and health hazards, like mold or peeling paint.
Properties are scored on a 100-point scale, with 60 points needed to pass. The Harlem development fell one point short, scoring 59 in 2017, its latest inspection, according to general results posted on HUD’s website.
The HUD inspectors visited a small sample of 26 units in 21 buildings and found a number of health and safety deficiencies, according to a detailed report on the inspection. Inspectors flagged two instances of missing or faulty smoke detectors in a hallway and inside an apartment. They also found vermin, mold, peeling paint, damaged locks, broken bathroom sinks and rotting kitchen cabinets. It was unclear if the apartment where the fire started was one of the units inspected.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.