2nd body found at site of deadly Bronx apartment building fire, FDNY says

A second body was found Friday at the scene of Wednesday's deadly Bronx apartment building fire, officials say.

The FDNY confirms two people have been pronounced dead. Officials have not released their identities, but a relative told CBS News New York the victims were her aunt and uncle.

Tashaila Parks said she had been asking the FDNY to try to find her 65-year-old aunt, Mary Ann Martin, for two days, but they told her the building was unsafe. Parks then went to the nonprofit Emergency Rights, where she asked Awilda Cordero for help.

Later, at the scene, Cordero told firefighters Martin lived in Apartment 3A, which collapsed into the second-floor apartment below. She says that's where a body was found.

Parks still has to go to the medical examiner's office to identify the remains, but she said she's confident the victim is her aunt. She says residents told the family they saw Martin go to the fire escape and wave for help during the fire.

"She may have either gotten to the fire escape, may not have been able to leave from the fire escape and tried to make her way to the front door," Parks said, "or she may have been to the front, trying to get to the fire escape, but they found her in between those two areas."

Parks says her aunt's husband, 70-year-old Lester Martin, was also killed. She says his body was retrieved from the building Wednesday night.

"They just lost their son, like, and that was already hard for all of that because that was sudden," Parks said. "Now we have to tell their grandkids, and their grandkids are small."

She says the family had a big reunion last weekend, and she knows her aunt was home the day of the fire because Wednesday was the one day of the week Mary Ann Martin did not spend volunteering with local nonprofits.

"I'm just glad we got some kind of answer now," Parks said.

The FDNY says of the 14 people who were injured in the fire, two remain hospitalized.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation, and a police source says due to the structural integrity, fire marshals have not been able to enter the apartment where the fire started to examine the gas piping in the walls and determine if there was a lithium-ion battery on scene.

The source adds investigators are not ruling out that the cause was a gas explosion or a combination of gas and a lithium-ion battery.

The managing agent for the building told CBS News New York by phone that there were never any gas issues in the building.