There was no smoke alarm in the Brooklyn apartment where a kitchen fire broke out and killed a mother and her two children early Friday morning, officials said.
Police and firefighters responded to reports of a blaze at 587 Gates Ave. in Bed-Stuy around 5 a.m., according to the NYPD.
As the FDNY fought to control the fire, a woman and two young girls were removed from the apartment by EMS and transported to NYC Health & Hospitals Woodhull, where they were pronounced dead, officials said. The victims were later identified as 48-year-old Danielle Havens, 11-year-old Journee Miles and 9-year-old Keslee Miles.
“This is an incredible tragedy for this neighborhood, for this family," FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh told reporters at the scene.
Kavanaugh and fire officials said they arrived within three minutes of the alarm and encountered heavy fire and smoke, indicating the fire had been raging for some time. In a tweet, the FDNY said that the fire was caused due to "cooking carelessness" and that a smoke alarm was not present. The fire was contained to the third floor of the building and lower floors sustained some water damage.
Mayor Eric Adams was at the scene and said the fire happened about a block from his own home.
"It's just a terrible situation," he said. "Our heart goes out the family."
Downstairs neighbor Andrea Brown said she had been asleep.
"All I remember was being told there was a fire, so I ran outside,” she said. “It was just smoke.”
Brown said her apartment is uninhabitable and that she is currently waiting to see if she’ll get placed in temporary housing. The Red Cross was working with displaced residents on Friday.
A chalk-drawn hopscotch game where neighbors said the two children who died had recently played.
Another neighbor, Darlene Brown-Bezear, said the girls would play hopscotch on the sidewalk when the weather was nice. At the scene on Friday morning, their last hopscotch chalk drawings were littered with glass from the broken windows above.
Brown-Bezear, who lost one of her three cats in the blaze, said the two girls would occasionally come over to her apartment to watch TV shows on the Disney Channel. Brown-Bezear introduced them to songs from Mary Poppins, and they’d all sing together.
“They were a treasure,” she said. “It’s gonna be empty.”
She described the mother as a loving parent who spent much of her free time with her children. The family had been living in the apartment for less than a year, she said.
The last time Brown-Bezear saw her neighbor was before dawn on Friday, when the woman was on the sidewalk and EMS were attempting to revive her.
“They were pounding on her chest,” Brown-Bezear recalled. “Just seeing her down there, she looked dead.”
“She loved those kids, she was beautiful,” Brown-Bezear said. “She didn’t need to die.”
The only survivor from the apartment was the family’s small black dog. Brown-Bezear said firefighters brought him down hours after the blaze, and that he was taken in by relatives of the victims.
This story has been updated with the victims' names and the cause of the fire.
