Police on Monday released the names of the five people killed when a fire roared through a two-story house in Queens on Sunday afternoon.
The dead included two teenagers and two young children.
The five killed were Destiny Dones, 20, Melody Edwards, 17, Jada Foxworth, 16, Rashawn Matthews, 10, and 2-year-old boy Chayce Lipford.
The two-story house on 208th Street near 112th Avenue in Queens Village went up in flames around 2:10 p.m., officials said.
A passing motorist called the FDNY after witnessing flames rising up from the first floor, fire officials said. The driver also saw a man tumble out of a second-floor window onto the front lawn.
That man, 46, was in stable condition and apparently is the only known survivor of the fire.
Firefighters got to the scene in about four minutes, but aging, wooden-frame house was already engulfed in flame, said Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro, who estimated the structure to be nearly a century old.
Firefighters accomplished the “superhuman task to reach that attic and bring people out,” the commissioner said. Two firefighters suffered what appeared to be minor injuries, he said.
BREAKING U/D; 5 killed in a 4-alarm #Queens fire including a 2-y/o male, 9-y/o male,14-y/o female, 20y/o female & 45 y/o male @AllisonPapson pic.twitter.com/Qf6psSZA4k
— New York City Alerts (@NYCityAlerts) April 23, 2017
The FDNY continued to battle the flames two hours after the initial 911 call. The fire badly damaged an adjacent home but nobody was inside at the time.
“This is a devastation of a family,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at the scene of the fire.
“There’s a lot we need to know about what happened here,” he added.
The mayor called the fire the worst since seven children from an ultra-orthodox Jewish family died in a Brooklyn fire in March 2015.
“Our job is to get down to the bottom of it to make sure no family ever suffers like this again” he said.
De Blasio noted that the tragic fire occurred while the FDNY was still reeling from the death of Firefighter William Tolley, who fell five stories to his death on Thursday while responding to a residential building fire in Queens.
