Use of candles during a voodoo ceremony in a Brooklyn apartment caused the fatal fire at 346 East 29th St. in Brooklyn on Feb. 20, FDNY Fire Marshals have determined, while an open door and delays in calling 911 helped quickly escalate the fire to a fifth alarm.
“Time and time again we respond to tragedies that could have been so easily prevented,” Fire Commissioner Salvatore J. Cassano said. “This fire had so many of those elements – candles left on the floor near combustible material, one of the occupants trying to douse the flames before calling 911 and an open door, which allowed fire to spread into the hallway. Hopefully others will learn from this tragedy.”
Fire Marshals said the fire began around 6:40 p.m., when a Brooklyn woman visited a fourth-floor apartment in the building, where she paid one of the male occupants $300 to perform a voodoo ceremony aimed at bringing her good luck. Candles arranged on the floor around a bed where the ceremony took place ignited bed linens and clothes on the floor. Instead of calling 911, the man began retrieving water from a bathroom sink in a futile effort to put it out, but the flames only grew. As smoke began to gather in the apartment, one of the other occupants opened a window and propped open the door to the public hall in an attempt to dissipate the smoke. Wind gusts of up to 40 mph instead shot the flames back inside, creating a blowtorch effect as winds whipped in through the open window and pushed fire out into the hallway. The occupants fled the apartment, leaving the door open.
Fire engulfed the fourth, fifth and sixth floors, causing part of the roof and fourth floor to collapse. An elderly female occupant of the sixth floor was killed in the fire and 20 firefighters and three civilians were injured. Nearly 200 firefighters from 44 companies took nearly seven hours to bring the fire under control. The investigation is ongoing.
(YWN Desk – NYC)
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7 Responses
Avoida Zora kills …
what a looser he should be put in jail for causing so much damage and a death
She paid $300 for good luck and instead became homeless along with her neighbors, caused the death of a neighbor and injuries to firefighters. This should serve as proof that voodoo doesn’t work.
Ppl nebech have had terrible fires on shabbos and yom tov. Not sure why you say vodoo played a role. We should never hear such tzoros! It all has a cheshbon!
#3,
A family in my neighborhood lost their home from Chanukah candles when they set the house ablaze. Everything was lost but B”H nobody was injured. Does this mean that Judaism “doesn’t work”?
charliehall: #3 is 100% correct. This beyond any doubt proved vodoo does not work . . . It showed unquestionably that vodoo, or any other attempt by humans to control the world directly through their fabricated methods, does not, in the end, do anything. Judaism does work. Mitzvos, Torah learning, and our prayers are the G-d given formula for maintaining stability in the world and for ultimately expressing the will of HaShem. We don’t attempt to control our own or the world’s destiny through these deeds and thoughts. What we do do is reveal the will of HaShem and provide the world with its most basic elements of creation, and thus make the world a more perfect place to live.
#5
Dear Charlie, how do you know that it was bad luck for your chanukah-lights neighbors house to burn down? May be now they’ll be able to receive that insurance money, and move to a new place with no super-liberals as neighbors? Just speculating here..