Queens home didn’t have smoke detectors in fatal fire

The Queens home where three young children and two others perished in a fire on Sunday did not have any smoke detectors, officials said Monday.

“It’s a very sad day in our city when five lives were taken from us — five promising young lives,” Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said at a press conference, noting the home’s lack of the devices.

“We know that the firefighters on the scene did all that they could and more to save those children,” he added.

The Queens Village house on 208th Street quickly went up in flames Sunday afternoon, killing 2-year-old Chayce Lipford, 10-year-old Rashawn Matthews, 16-year-old Jada Foxworth, 17-year-old Melody Edwards and 20-year-old Destiny Dones, according to officials.

Four of the victims were related: Rashawn was Chayce’s uncle, and Jada and Destiny were sisters. Melody was a close family friend, a relative said.

The two-story home, built in 1920, burned fast, Nigro noted.

“They’re wood-frame, they will burn rapidly,” he said of the homes in the neighborhood.

There was an initial report that the blaze may have started when a car parked in an alley between two homes caught fire, but Nigro said that does not seem to have been the case.

The fire commissioner added that, “as far as we know,” the home was up to code, aside from the lack of smoke alarms.
Mayor de Blasio on Monday called the blaze “extraordinary — in the worst sense of the word.”

It was “an extraordinarily horrible fire both in terms of its intensity and the five lives that were lost,” Hizzoner said.

The youngest victim’s cousin, Ozzie Stubbs, 29, said he was told that Dajuana Green — Rashawn’s mother and Chayce’s grandmother — was buying smoke detectors when the fire erupted. Green owned the home.

“She was literally buying smoke detectors for the house at Home Depot when she got the call,” he said.

Area resident Benjamin Gordon, 45, recalled how he ran toward the fire to try to aid those trapped inside, eventually helping to break the fall of Maurice Matthews, who jumped from a second-floor porch roof while screaming, “The kids! The kids!”

“I seen the man on the second-floor [landing] . . . The fire was a few feet away. I was telling him, ‘You have to jump! Get off the roof!’ ” Gordon said.

With Leonica Valentine