Son and mom die after he runs back into burning home trying to save her
An elderly mother and her son were both killed after he ran back into their burning home in an attempt to rescue her.
A two-alarm fire raged at a home in Queens, New York, on Monday night and a 61-year-old man who stood outside said he had to go back in to save his elderly mom, said passerby Gersham McGowan.
‘He never came out,’ McGowan told the New York Post. ‘His mom never came out either and later on I saw they took two bodies from the house.’
McGowan called 911 and more than 100 firefighters responded to the home on 164th Street between 108th and 109th avenues. The blaze that started in the basement moved up two floors and took more than an hour to extinguish.
‘We very quickly located two occupants on the second floor, they were quickly removed,’ said New York City Fire Department Chief George Healy told WABC. ‘Unfortunately, both those individuals expired on the scene.’
Rescue crews recovered medical equipment that suggested that the mom could not escape by herself. Her son is believed to have been living in the basement.
‘That man was brave to go back inside and help his mom,’ McGowan said. ‘But he never made it. That’s sad.’
A next-door neighbor, Chantal Gbado, told the TV station that she heard fire alarms three times and ‘started running for the phone’.
At least one of the deaths could have been avoided, Healy said.
‘The recommendation is always once you get safely out of the house, never return,’ the fire captain said.
The cause of the fire was not immediately determined.
It is not the only recent fatality involving an individual going back into a burning residence.
In mid-December, a mother-of-two ran back into her family’s burning apartment in Houston, Texas, trying to save their cat, her husband Andrew Salinas said.
‘When I was out here screaming for her, I didn’t hear anything. If I would’ve heard my wife, I would’ve ran in there,’ he said. ‘There would have been nothing that could have stopped me from going in to save my wife.’
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