An 8-year-old boy who dreamed of one day becoming a cop, died early Wednesday in pre-dawn blaze that ripped through his family’s Brooklyn apartment.
The apartment had no smoke alarms, fire officials said.
The boy, William Grice, was the lone fatality in the 5:55 a.m. Mill Basin fire.
The little boy was trapped inside the room where the smoky blaze ignited, said FDNY Deputy Assistant Chief James Leonard.
The boy’s grandmother, Selma Cohen who escaped the blaze with his pre-teen sister, told a neighbor she was could not understand how the fire started in the boy’s room, which did not have a space heater.
Neighbors said the boy lived on the first floor of the two-story attached brick house with his sister and his grandmother. An elderly man and his live-in attendant lived upstairs.
In his kindergarten yearbook, Grice, known to friends and family as Billy, said he had hoped to become a policeman, “because I want to put bad guys in jail.”
“I’m just devastated,” said Alyson Lieberman, 28, who was a teaching assistant in the boy’s kindergarten class at PS 236.
Lieberman, who lives across the street from the two-family home on E. 57th St., said Grice was very playful and she had seen him earlier this week with his sister playing in the snow. “I’m just so heartbroken. He was such a good boy.”
Cohen and her granddaughter were barefoot and covered in soot when they fled the burning home, running through the frigid morning air and snow covered streets screaming for help.
Neighbor Frank Cardello, 49, who took them in described the pair as “frantic.” He called 911 and gave them socks to wear and water to drink. “They were freaking out and in a panic,” he said.