NEW YORK (AP) — A fire barreled through a multifamily row house in New York early Thursday, killing six people and injuring nine others, including some firefighters and police officers, the city's fire department said.
More than 200 first responders descended on the two-story building in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood, where Kevin Woods, the department’s chief of fire operations, said they were met with “fire on every floor.”
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The severely charred wooden home had “fire blowing out every window, meeting us at the front door,” he said at a news conference. Fire marshals were still investigating what caused the blaze.
Firefighters rescued four people, using a rear entrance in the two-unit home to reach people trapped behind window bars, Woods said. A staircase partially collapsed inside the home, he added.
First responders brought the fire under control in about three hours, and eight people who were displaced were taken to hotels. Woods said the fire spread to one adjacent row house, but damage could be seen on buildings to both its left and right.
Row houses share common walls and exteriors and are usually built in blocks. Fire officials said the Sunset Park home was one in a block of 25 wood-frame homes.
“This was a devastating fire,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at the news conference. “It will take a long time for this neighborhood to mourn the neighbors they lost this morning and to recover from this immense grief.”
The nine injured people were expected to survive, including three firefighters and two police officers who had minor injuries. No names have been released.
The home was built in 1915, according to property records.
City records show that the building was sold by a family a few years ago to a company called One Golden Sunshine Corp. Complaints filed with the city’s building department in 2025 said that the home’s basement level was illegally being converted into an apartment and that construction had been going on without a permit for a month.
City inspectors visited several times, including in August, but were unable to gain access.
A lithium-ion battery was found at the scene, but it was unknown whether it was related to the cause of the fire, the department said.
Last week, an e-bike battery fire killed four people in the Bronx. It is among more than 400 fires in the city that have been linked to lithium-ion batteries this year, leading to at least six deaths and more than 70 injuries, according to fire officials.
Fatal home fires are not uncommon, though the death toll in the Brooklyn blaze was unusually high. A townhome fire in Chicago the same day killed four people, including a teenager.
The U.S. Fire Administration says at least 1,555 people have died in home fires this year. Among them were an Amish woman and her six children who were killed in a swift-moving house fire in April in rural Pennsylvania.
Last month, five people, including four children, died in a mobile home fire in Canton, Texas. And in Riverdale, Utah, a man and his four children were killed Oct. 1 in a house fire started by a power strip that overheated, officials said.
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McCormack reported from Concord, New Hampshire. Associated Press reporters Dave Collins in Hartford, Connecticut, Yuki Iwamura in New York and Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City contributed.
