NYC Blaze Kills 8 Children, 1 Adult

Screams poured from the burning building along with smoke and flames: "Help me! Help me! Please! Please!" Bystanders looked up to see a woman toss her children out the window one at a time to those below.

The scene unfolded early Thursday during New York's deadliest fire in nearly two decades — a blaze that killed eight children and one adult, all African immigrants who shared a row house near Yankee Stadium.

The woman who tossed her children jumped from the building. Her fate and that of her children were not immediately known.

Investigators believe the fire started overnight with a faulty space heater or overloaded power strip, ignited a mattress in the basement and quickly raced up the stairs of the four-story structure. Most of the 22 residents — 17 of them children — were stranded on the upper floors as the blaze raged out of control.

Neighbor Edward Soto ran toward the fire, then stared in disbelief as an infant was tossed from the building.

"They were screaming and yelling, 'Please save my baby.' We ran, I jumped the gate and she started tossing babies out the window," Soto told CBS station WCBS-TV.

One woman threw at least three children from a third floor window to people below. Two were caught, and one hit a discarded bathtub on the sidewalk and died. The woman then jumped and witnesses say she broke her legs.

Firefighters worked for two hours in freezing predawn temperatures to bring the flames under control. The home had two smoke alarms, but neither had batteries.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission calls it a common problem, reports CBS News correspondent Randall Pinkston.

"While there are 90 million smoke alarms in homes across America, 16 million of them don't work, that's 20 percent," said the CPSC's Julie Vallese.

Police said there was no evidence of a crime.

The dead were found throughout the house, mostly on the upper floors, with babies still in their cribs. The victims included five children from one family, along with a wife and three other children from a second family.

Word of the fire spread grief across two continents, from the Bronx to villages in Mali, a West African country about twice the size of Texas and one of the poorest nations in the world.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," said a devastated Mamadou Soumara, a livery cab driver whose wife, son and 7-month-old twins died in the blaze. "I love her. I love my wife."

Soumara was driving through Harlem when he received a frantic cell phone call from his wife, Fatoumata. "She said, 'We have a fire,"' Soumara recalled. "She was screaming."

Soumara rushed home in his cab, only to stand on the street and watch helplessly as their home turned into a fiery tomb.

Mousa Magassa, an official of the New York chapter of the High Council for Malians Living Abroad, was headed back to the city from a business trip to Mali after receiving the grim news that nearly half of his 11 children were dead, said council representative Bourema Niambele.

Neighbors described a close-knit family, with the children often seen playing in the yard or in the street with water guns and scooters.

The death toll might have been higher if not for the efforts of Soto and another neighbor, David Todd.

Todd, 40, who lived in an adjoining apartment building, said one child was already on the ground in the yard when he arrived with Soto outside the burning home. "Please God, help my children!" the woman inside screamed while tossing her children out, and then jumping from the window.

Another neighbor, Elaine Martin, said flames were shooting from the building when she arrived, and a shoeless woman in a nightgown stood crying in the street.

"My kids is in there, my kids is in there," the woman wailed to Martin.

Neighbor Charles O'Neal, 21, watched as firefighters passed along babies still clad in their pajamas. Later, O'Neal saw two of the children dead, splayed across white plastic on the ground near their home.

There were reports of 19 injuries, including four firefighters and an emergency medical worker. A 7-year-old girl remained in critical condition while a pair of 6-year-olds were upgraded from critical to good condition.

Part of the problem, according to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was that residents apparently tried to extinguish the fire themselves.

"Once they were notified, the Fire Department was on the scene in a little more than three minutes," the mayor said. "Sadly, that was not enough time."

The home was not equipped with a fire escape, and was not required to have one under city building codes. There were no complaints or violations on record against the building, constructed in 1901.

Neighbors said at least one of the families ran an import-export business, and a public records search lists African American Import Export at the address.

The fire was New York City's deadliest blaze since the 1990 Happy Land social club blaze in the Bronx that killed 87 people. It was the city's deadliest residential fire since a 1983 blaze in Chinatown that also killed nine.

The dead, according to family members, included Fatoumata Soumare and her three children. Also killed were three children from the Magassa family ranging in age from 5 to 11 years old. The names of the other Magassa children were not immediately known. Multiple spellings of the family's surname were provided after the fire, but property records and phone listings have it as Magassa.