By Rebecca White, John Annese
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — Three men died in a Queens fire early Sunday that tore through a house full of illegally converted apartments — with panicked survivors leaping out of windows to escape the flames, FDNY officials said.
The two-alarm blaze broke out on Chevy Chase St. near Henley Road in Jamaica Estates about 1:30 a.m., officials said, with the inferno soon bursting through the windows and roof.
FDNY officials described the house as a firetrap, with no apparent smoke detectors, makeshift walls and occupants packed into apartments on the first and second floor as well as the cellar and attic.
One of the survivors described making a desperate escape as his father died leaping out of a second-story window.
“There was a lot of smoke inside. We cannot get out. I broke the window so we can just get out of the window. This is the only way,” said Abdullah Zaher, 25. “There was no flames upstairs. Smoke! My father jumped, my brother jumped, and I jumped in the end.”
Zaher’s hand bled heavily from breaking the window as he spoke to the Daily News hours later. His father didn’t survive.
“He was everything to me, literally everything to me. He was a friend, he was a father, he was a giver. Literally everything. There was food, he would give me the food,” Zaher said. “He’s still working, trying to survive. He was a chauffeur.. Uber driver.”
Firefighters found three men dead at the scene, ages 45, 52 and 67, according to police.
“There’s no evidence to us at this time that there’s a working smoke detector in this house,” FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker told reporters at the scene. “And there’s a lot of evidence of extension cords and other carelessness.”
At least eight residents were hurt but survived, including three injured jumping out of second-floor and attic windows, according to police sources. One of the survivors is in critical condition, according to FDNY officials.
FDNY Chief of Department John Esposito described the scene in the house.
“When our units arrived, they had fire out the windows of the first floor. The fire had extended to the second floor and attic and these were all living spaces,” he said. “There were makeshift walls. The means of egress were substandard, exits blocked, stairways blocked.”
“There was a wall through the middle of the kitchen, which was very abnormal,” he added. “There’s makeshift access to the second floor, which allows the fire to spread much quicker upstairs.”
Four firefighters suffered minor injuries in the blaze, which the FDNY brought under control by about 3 a.m.
The house is listed in city records as a single-family home, but dozens of Buildings Department complaints dating as far back as 2008 show neighbors and residents complaining that it was illegally converted into a rooming house.
The most recent complaint, from February 2023, reads, “The homeowner [has] a mental disabled individual living in the basement. The homeowner built a half wall in the kitchen so someone can live there … there is approximately 12 to 14 people in the house.”
“It’s so frustrating because we’ve been watching this unfold for years. I called 311. My husband called 311. Many of the neighbors called 311,” said Steve Fischer, 67, who lives across the street on the upper-class tree-lined block. “We knew based on what we saw that it was being used as an illegal rooming house.”
“It wasn’t for lack of many people trying to alert the city that there was something illegal going on,” he added.
Buildings Department officials said the owners of the house were hit with a violation in 2010 for illegally converting the basement into an apartment and in 2016 for work without a permit when they constructed two wood-frame structures in the back and side yards.
Since then, the Buildings Department has received several 311 calls complaining about illegal conversion conditions — but inspectors were unable to get into the building for one visit in 2020 and three visits in 2023, agency officials said.
“Calls would prompt people from the city to show up. Supposedly, they would knock. The guy was not an idiot. He wouldn’t answer the door,” Fischer said of the landlord. “It’s so frustrating because it was so avoidable. … I hope he is charged criminally.”
The cause of the blaze is under investigation.
Tony Rock, 40, who paid about $1,000 a month to live in a first-floor room, dived out of a window to escape the fire.
“I heard screaming, the guy upstairs above me … begging to get out of the room. He’s in there dying,” Rock said. “I saw him jump out the window.”
Sk Ferdeus, 37, the sister of one of the survivors, said her brother jumped out of a second-floor window, leaving his red jacket dangling from the frame.
“He’s in Jamaica Hospital,” she said. “Both of his hands burned and also his hair burned and his spine. Spine fracture.”
Adham Ammar, 29, lived in the house for the past seven years despite the warning signs.
“[The landlord] was not maintaining the place very well,” he said. “I saw many red flags in the safety of the place, but it was hard to find something else for the same price.”
Ammar paid around $700 rent for half of a subdivided second-floor room, he said.
“When you try to find a single room, that’s below average nowadays,” Ammar said of the price. “I had my mattress, my desk, a small closet. It was not bad.”
The man living in the other half of the room died in the blaze, he said.
“[He] was quiet, always minded his own business. He was a hardworking man,” Ammar said of the man, whom he knew as Ibrahim. Ammar said Ibrahim moved to Queens about three years ago from East Africa. “He used to wake up early, 5 a.m., go to work,” Ammar said. “He was a well-mannered person. I feel bad.”
Ammar was hanging out with friends before returning home around 5 a.m. to the burnt-out house and saw one of the victims who died in a “black bag covered [with] a white cloth.”
He said his floor had a fire detector that didn’t work.
“This is the cost of affordability,” he said. “You see people getting caught in a fire like that.”
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