An adorable four-year-old girl is living with horrible burns — and her seven-year-old sister is dead — because of a Bronx kitchen fire sparked by a shoddily-installed apartment stove, a new lawsuit charges.
“She knows she’s beautiful,” dad Shaun Martinez says of his little girl, Haile Syriah Martinez, who bears painful scars across her face, legs and hand since the March 17 blaze at the 50-unit Grant Towers in Fleetwood.
“I tell her she’s beautiful every day,” the dad, a tech consultant, said of the tot, whose playground peers sometimes point and whisper, “Monster.”
“And then I kiss all of her boo-boos,” the dad said.
Just two weeks before the fatal inferno, the building superintendent installed a new stove in the family’s fourth floor apartment, says family lawyer Howard Hershenhorn, who filed the Bronx Supreme Court lawsuit against landlord 977 Grant Towers.
The super positioned the appliance so close to the wall, it crushed the electrical cord, damaging it to the point where it ignited, Hershenhorn said.
“This whole family almost died,” the lawyer said of Martinez, Haile’s transit cop mom, Ruth Scheker, and the four surviving children.
The FDNY Bureau of Fire Investigation incident report for the fatal inferno confirms that the oven’s power cord was to blame, listing, “Appliance Cord” under cause of fire.
“Examination showed fire originated … in combustible material (electrical appliance cord for oven),” the report reads.
“I opened up the [bedroom] door, and I was hit with a blast — it was pure heat, the fire was just waiting to get oxygen,” Martinez recalled of waking to the 3 a.m. blaze.
Hazel, the sister who would perish, had been sleeping in the same bedroom and came to the door with him — only to be was blown backward by the blast. She died from smoke inhalation and burns covering 80 percent of her body, Hershenhorn said.
“I can only imagine from breathing in half of what they breathed in,” the dad told The Post in a recent interview. “I’m sure they were suffering so much.”
“Oh, my God,” he added, beginning to cry at the memory of the daughter who did not survive. “Even when I had to identify her, the position of her body just showed complete, utter horror.”
Little Haile would spend two months in a burn unit, and is still receiving weekly burn therapies and facing future surgeries. All four of Martinez’s surviving children are getting mental health counseling, the dad and lawyer said.
The family’s lawsuit additionally faults the landlord for not installing the required kitchen smoke alarm, and for “spoilating the evidence” by dismantling the charred kitchen the day after the fire.
“They collected all the appliances. Everything from that kitchen was gone,” Hershenhorn said. “They literally ripped the wiring out of the wall,” he added. “They were trying to cover this up. That’s the only explanation.”
The landlord did not return calls for comment.