What to Know
- A morning kitchen fire inside a Brooklyn apartment fire claimed the lives of a 48-year-old mother and her two young daughters, city officials and family said Friday
- The fire appeared to start in the kitchen, the FDNY said hours after the fire; eventually fire marshals ruled the fire accidental and was started "due to cooking carelessness"
- Investigators had been looking into whether the mother saw the flames, then left the apartment to get help before returning to try and save her daughters
Fire investigators have ruled the quick-moving inferno responsible for taking the lives of a Brooklyn mother and her two young daughters an accidental, blaming the 5 a.m. blaze on "cooking carelessness."
Danielle Havens, 48, and her daughters were found in their third-floor apartment on Gates Avenue in Bed-Stuy, none of them were breathing. FDNY officials said the victims had burns and had likely inhaled a lot of smoke.
The apartment kitchen, where the fire had started, was gutted and blackened, as evident in dramatic photos shared by the mayor's office. Fire marshals would late determine the cause of the all-hands fire.
Questions were quickly raised as to the status of any smoke alarm inside the building, to which officials said a hard-wired system had been discovered but it wasn't immediately clear if it was operational or worked once the fire sparked. In a Friday evening tweet, the department said "a smoke alarm was not present."
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FDNY officials said the fire was already "very advanced" when crews reached the scene just three minutes after the first aid call.
"Unfortunately due to the serious nature of their injuries, the patients did not survive. This is an incredible tragedy for this neighborhood, for this family. We'll be here all morning working with the red cross, working with OEM and the city to support this family," FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanaugh said.
Shock reverberated in the neighborhood as relatives learned of the news. Robert Carlson drove to the apartment to try and help his son, the husband and father of the two girls who died.
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"My granddaughters and daughter-in-law were in the fire, they passed away," Carlson told News 4.
He grabbed ahold of his son, catching him before he collapsed into tears near a gate outside the apartment building. Family members consoled one another, remembering the girls, 9-year-old Keslee and 11-year-old Journee.
"The little one she ran track she was great and they danced," the mother's cousin said.
Fire investigators were working to determine whether the mother saw the flames, then left the apartment to get help but returned to try and save her daughters.
"A mother's loved is just extremely intense as you see what happened here. It is just it was really unfortunate," Mayor Eric Adams said while visiting the scene Friday morning.
