By Colin Mixson, Thomas Tracy
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — Nine people were hurt, including a child, after a fellow resident set fire to a four-story apartment building and tried to trap his neighbors inside in Brooklyn early Tuesday, cops said.
The blaze on Evergreen Ave. near Troutman St. in Bushwick erupted around 2:50 a.m. Witnesses told police that a first-floor resident in his 60s set the fire. He was seen pouring a flammable liquid into the hallway before setting the blaze and running away.
Lilia Soriano was sleeping inside her first-floor apartment where she lives with her mother, father and sister when she heard a knock on the window and the voice of an upstairs neighbor telling her to flee the building.
When she opened the door to the hallway, she and her family were confronted by a wall of black smoke billowing from the apartment across the hall.
“When we exited our apartment, the first thing we saw, it was pitch black,” Soriano said.
She and her family fumbled their way to the building’s entranceway only to find their neighbor from across the hall — who she believed to have started the fire — holding the door shut.
“[Our neighbor] was holding the door,” said Soriano. “My dad yanked the door really hard and it went flying open with [my neighbor] attached. We pushed him aside, like, ‘Move!’”
“After that, he just ran off,” Soriano added. “He knew what he did and ran off. We were left with the aftermath.”
Of the nine building residents who suffered burns and smoke inhalation, four were taken to area hospitals with minor injuries, officials said. Two firefighters also suffered minor injuries and were hospitalized.
Among the injured was a 14-year-old boy with autism who became trapped on a searing-hot fire escape alongside his mother, father and two brothers.
The boy’s mom, 37-year-old Yaret Roque , said she was sleeping when a commotion on the street woke her up. She looked out her window and saw two neighbors brawling outside, with one tenant attempting to sic his dog on the other.
She would later hear from fellow residents that the clash involved the first-floor arsonist being bludgeoned by a vengeful neighbor.
“The neighbors are saying it was the first-floor guys doing things, and I heard he also locked the door so we could not get out of the building,” Yaret Roque said.
As her neighbors scraped outside, her husband spotted smoke seeping into their kitchen and rushed his wife and three boys out the window and onto a fire escape, the couple said.
The Roque clan descended to a second-floor landing where they became trapped as fire bellowing from a window below heated the wrought-iron fire escape to a broil, Yaret Roque’s husband Magdaleno said.
“I was yelling help, help,” said the 49-year-old man. “The fire was so hot, the metal.”
In desperation, the couple’s 17-year-old son snatched the family’s dog, a Maltese named Lily, and rappelled to the ground using some cables hanging near the fire escape, his mother said.
“We were screaming, trying to find a way to go down. My son found some cables there, He said, ‘Let me slide down, let me jump.’” Yaret Roque recounted. “We were desperate.”
Firefighters rescued the remaining family members, but not before Yaret and Magdaleno’s 14-year-old son suffered severe burns, according to his mother.
“One of my sons really got hurt, he’s burned,” Yaret Roque said. “He’s autistic, so it was harder for him to express himself.”
Responding firefighters put the blaze out within an hour. FDNY fire marshals were investigating the arson claims Tuesday morning.
No arrests have been made.
Soriano told the Daily News that her neighbor across the hall moved into the building more than a year ago and that she and other residents have lodged numerous complaints with their landlord regarding his violent behavior, including once threatening a tenant with a hammer.
“We’ve told him multiple times about… the individual who set the first floor apart on fire,” said Soriano. We’ve told him he’s sick, about the times he comes out with a hammer or screwdriver or whatever, and they always give us the runaround.
“Now he’s set the house ablaze and we have nowhere to go.”
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