Three Immigrants Die in Brooklyn Blaze
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Three Latin American immigrants living far from their families while eking out a living died today in a blaze that swept the Brooklyn building where they rented rooms, authorities and neighbors said.
Two others were seriously hurt in the early morning fire.
“They all lived alone, and I don’t know if they were legal immigrants,” Ahmed Tebet, who works at a grocery store next door to the fire, said.
One victim jumped from a window to escape the blaze, and the other four were found unconscious in one room, firefighters said.
It took 60 firefighters about 40 minutes to get control of the blaze, which was reported shortly before 7 a.m. on the top floor of a two-story building on 18th Avenue near New Utrecht Avenue in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood.
The five were taken to Coney Island Hospital, Lutheran Medical Center and Staten Island University Hospital. Authorities were trying to determine their identities and the cause of the blaze.
A spokesman for the Staten Island hospital, Christian Preston, said one person died en route there and a second in the emergency room. He said another victim was in critical condition with burns.
Police said the third fatality was a man pronounced dead at Coney Island Hospital. Lutheran Medical Center did not immediately return a call.
Mr. Tebet, who works at the New Way Supermarket grocery store next door to the fire, said the building was occupied by single young men from Guatemala who worked in construction and house painting.
They lived above a 99 Cent Plus Store in an ethnically mixed neighborhood — Italian, Arabic, and Hispanic — of mostly single-family homes.
In recent years, a new wave of Latin American immigrants have moved to the neighborhood, which for decades was mostly populated by working-class Italian-Americans. Many young workers get up before dawn to line 18th Avenue, Bensonhurst’s main artery, and wait to be picked up by contractors’ vans for day jobs, sending their meager earnings to families back home.
Also this morning, a separate fire killed an elderly woman in the Bronx.
Fire officials said that blaze was reported at about 8:15 a.m. and was confined to a single second-floor apartment in the borough’s Fordham section. Blondel Alston, 76, died there, and a 97-year-old woman was hurt; she was in stable condition at a Bronx hospital.
