Two Men Killed in N.Y. House Fire

Sharon Mack woke up early Friday morning to a woman pounding on her door.

The woman carried a young child and had just escaped her burning home across the street. A severely burned 9-year-old girl soon followed.

“She was burned from her head to her feet,” Mack said.

The mother yelled that her husband and another child were still in the big house at the corner of Humber and Litchfield avenues. The father had carried the severely burned 9-year-old out of the house, and then went back inside to look for more of his family. He never made it out.

He and another man living in the multifamily home died. Buffalo officials have not released the names of the victims but said the men who died were ages 49 and 24.

The 9-year-old girl, who suffered burns over 90 percent of her body, was taken to Women and Children’s Hospital and will be transferred today to the Shiners Hospital burn care unit in Cincinnati.

Mack said she could see burns to the girl’s hair and entire body. Her clothes had been burned off.

The girl was screaming in pain, Mack said. “It was just like a nightmare,” Mack said.

The father living in the downstairs apartment carried his nine-year-old daughter from the burning house.

He then “went back in searching for the rest of his family. He did not make it back out,” Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield said.

A Buffalo police officer was the first responder at the scene and spoke to the father before the man went back inside, Whitfield said.

Two children in the home - a four-year-old and two-year-old - apparently were carried out by their mother.

The four-year-old suffered smoke inhalation but the two-year-old was “in pretty good shape,” Whitfield said. All three children were taken to Women and Children’s Hospital.

One of the children will be released later this morning, a spokesman for the hospital said.

The second fatality was a man in the upstairs apartment, who was found in a bedroom, Whitfield said. A second person living in that apartment, identified by neighbors as the nephew of the dead man, was able to flee the fire.

Whitfield said firefighters had no information on the cause of the fire, which was reported shortly after 4 a.m. The house sustained severe damage and fire marshals were going to try to get into the building to determine a cause once the fire was extinguished.

“We will give it our due diligence,” Whitfield said, as to determining whether the home had working smoke detectors.

The family downstairs had just moved in about a week ago, a neighbor said, while the two in the upstairs apartment had moved in about two months ago.

Gary Matthews, who lives across street, said he’s never seen a building go up in flames that quickly. Matthews said his wife alerted him to fire and he saw smoke coming out of an attic window.

“By the time I put my robe on, the whole house was in flames,” he said.

The Red Cross is assisting four adults and four children.

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