Sharon Hinds, a home health attendant, was walking home from a party along a street in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn early on Saturday when she heard screams and smelled smoke coming from a two-story house.
An older woman in an upper window of the house was leaning out to a porch roof, Hinds said, trying to pull herself out of the burning building.
Suddenly, smoke engulfed the woman, who fell back inside, Hinds said. Only her hands, clutching the windowsill from inside before she lost her grip and fire flared through the window, were visible.
“I watched her die,” a visibly shaken Hinds said as she recounted the scene.
The early-morning fire tore quickly through the home, giving residents little chance to escape, even as neighbors and passersby tried to rescue them.
Lord Kinard, 76, and Octavia Kinard, 71, were killed, a spokeswoman for the New York Police Department said. Their ages were originally given as 86 and 81.
More than 100 firefighters responded to the blaze, which started at about 5:30am at 404 E 49th St and was extinguished about an hour later.
A faulty power strip in the dining room on the home’s first floor caused the fire, New York Fire Department officials said.
There were no working smoke detectors in the house, officials added.
As the flames grew, neighbors and then firefighters raced to save those trapped inside.
One man climbed a tree trying to reach several people on the second floor, but he fell and broke his leg, police officials said.
Plumber Freddy Semple, 34, said he was asleep in his room in the back of the house next door when his neighbors’ screams woke him.
He ran outside barefoot, he said, and found a woman on the roof of the house.
He said he found a ladder, carried it to the burning building and used it to climb toward the roof and pleaded with the woman to come down.
She refused, he said, but then a passerby climbed up the ladder and convinced her to climb down.
Keisha James, who lives across the street, said that after rescue workers arrived, she watched firefighters carry a man into the middle of the street and try to resuscitate him.
Eventually, they appeared to give up, she added.
At the same time, James said, a boy who appeared to be a teenager jumped from the second floor.
She said she ran across the street to open a gate in front of the house for the boy, whose hands were badly burned.
The police said the 19-year-old was hospitalized with burns and was expected to survive. Two firefighters were also taken to the hospital with minor injuries.
On Saturday morning, the home, across the street from a beauty parlor and a party supply store, was charred and gutted.
Semple sat on the steps of his house drinking a beer to try to calm his nerves. A group of people called out to him, calling him a hero, but he yelled back: “No.”
He said his lungs hurt from the smoke he had inhaled and he was grieving over the two neighbors who died.
“I feel like I was the one who was supposed to save their life,” he said.
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