A Queens man recalled Monday how he ran toward Sunday’s tragic raging house fire to try to aid those trapped inside, eventually helping to break the fall of one person who jumped from a porch roof while screaming, “The kids! The kids!”
Benjamin Gordon, 45, said he was on his way home from church when he spotted flames shooting from a two-story Queens Village house on 208th Street at around 2:30 p.m.
Gordon helped catch a 46-year-old man who escaped the blaze by jumping from a second-floor window, he said.
“I seen the flames coming out of the roof. I seen the man on the second floor [landing]. He was pacing back and forth. The fire was a few feet away. I was telling him, ‘You have to jump! Get off the roof!’ because the fire was almost on his back,” Gordon said.
“He was yelling, ‘The kids! The kids! The kids!’ We caught him. The landing was hard, but we braced his fall,” Gordon said.
Gordon added that he then took a pole and broke a window on the side of the house, “and the smoke and fire hit us strong.”
“Another gentleman stumbled out of the house from a side door and started yelling, ‘The kids! The kids!’ ” too, Gordon said. “He was delirious.”
Gordon said the 46-year-old man who jumped “was so out of it, he was foaming from the mouth, he couldn’t even talk. We had to coax him to jump.”
The blaze killed 2-year-old Chayce Lipford, 10-year-old Rashawn Matthews, 16-year-old Jada Foxworth, 20-year-old Destiny Dones, and 17-year-old Melody Edwards, officials said.
Four of the victims were related and one, Melody Edwards, was a close family friend, a relative said.
“I saw one of the bodies lying on the floor,” Gordon said. “There were bright orange flames.”
Fire officials said no smoke detectors were found inside the wood-framed home, built in 1920, and the cause of the fire was not immediately known.
Queens Borough President Melinda Katz stopped by the tragic scene Monday, saying, “We haven’t seen such devastation in a fire in Queens in, I can’t even remember in how long. The loss of children, the adults, five people, really has been a devastating thing.”
Meanwhile, friends and neighbors of the victims reeled from their untimely deaths.
A friend of Jada’s who was on the cheerleading team with the teen girl at the Young Women’s Leadership School of Queens, stopped by the scene and broke down in tears.
“It’s so hard. I didn’t expect this. It’s devastating. She was a good person. Our friendship was everything to me. The school is devastated, the whole cheer team,” said Natasha Khan, 15.
Neighbor Charles Perkins, 76, said that the victims were members of the Tabernacle Community CME Church.
“The young kids sang in the choir. Their grandfather played the drums,” Perkins said. “They were churchgoing kids from a Christian family.”
Lauren Love, who identified herself as Rashawn’s sister and Chayce’s aunt, said that Jada and Destiny are sisters, Rashawn is Chayce’s uncle, and Melody “is a close friend of the family.”
