Beach Avenue blaze (NY Post: G.N. Miller)
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A boy, his grandpa and another elderly relative perished yesterday in a nightmarish Bronx apartment fire that raged for nearly four hours.
Searing orange flames shot out of windows of the Beach Avenue building, sending desperate residents leaping for their lives from windows as high as three stories up.
Inside a gutted third-floor apartment, firefighters found the badly burned bodies of Jahvonte Smith, 12, his grandfather John Debro, 73, and another family member, Annetta Isaac, 71.
The three-alarm blaze broke out in the a three-story private row house near Lafayette Avenue, at around 5:45 a.m., and engulfed the second and third floors said an FDNY spokesman.
Thirty-three units and 140 firefighters responded to the fire, which spread to the house next door, FDNY officials said.
“We found the building fully engulfed, three floors of fire,” said William Oehm, a Fire Department battalion chief. “There were reports of people trapped. We could not get to them. We tried our best and unfortunately, three of those people perished.”
Cops who were the first to arrive on the scene found a 48-year-old woman in front of the house who had sustained a broken ankle after jumping from a second-floor window.
She and two other residents, a girl, 15, and a woman, 73, were taken to Jacobi Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, fire officials said.
The fire was declared under control at 9:30 a.m..
Authorities initially labeled the fire as suspicious. But later, officials said an odor of gas was reported in the area before the fire, and investigators were probing a possible gas leak.
Responding units were delayed because the first 911 caller gave the address of a house several blocks away.
Moments later, a second caller gave the correct address, but firefighters had to respond to both addresses and treat them as separate calls.
Seven minutes passed between the first call and firefighters’ arrival on the actual scene.
Although the average response time is four minutes, officials said the delay was not significant because the structure was already fully engulfed.
But one witness was annoyed over the delay.
“It started off small,” said Haley Terrell, a local resident. “They could have stopped it.”
Other neighbors spoke fondly of the boy who died in the fire.
“We would go to the park together,” said Jahvonte’s friend Nelson Feliz, 14. “He was a little brother to me. We went to the movies and we would go out to eat . . . He always told me he wanted to be in the NBA.”
Neighbors said the boy was living with his grandparents while his mother served a stint in jail.
A Red Cross spokeswoman, Lana Mullen, said the group is working with survivors to arrange for housing, food and clothing.