World News

Families ready to rest New York City fire victims News

[ad_1]

Funeral preparations are underway in the tight Bronx community, where an apartment fire killed 17 people on Sunday.

Calls for prayers were heard from the Bronx Mosque on Wednesday as a mourning community prepares to bury the dead in the coming days and as families demand closure from New York City. the most serious fire decades.

Among those awaiting funeral rites are a two-year-old boy, a mother who died with three children and a family of five, as well as a married couple who were now orphaned by four children.

“This community, these people have gone through so much,” community spokeswoman Sheikh Musa Drammeh said. At least a dozen victims were worshiped at the Masjid-Ur-Rahmah mosque just a few blocks from Sunday’s destruction.

“Now they are mourning, but they really understand that if it were to happen, it would have to happen,” he said. “And they have no right to question why it happened.”

Community leaders were expected to meet on Wednesday evening to plan the funeral arrangements and decide whether any of the dead would return home. a vast majority of deaths per year Fire in a Bronx apartment complex He had relations with the Gambia.

“The most important thing is to help each other. We are all members of the same community, so we are like family, ”said Haji Dukuray, her nephew, Haja, who died in a fire with her husband and their three children — Fatoumata, five; Mariam, 11, and Mustafa, 12.

Mustafa had just celebrated his birthday the night before the fire. “Such beautiful angel eyes,” 68-year-old neighbor Renee Howard said earlier this week about Mustafa.

The forensic office said all the victims were drowned by thick smoke from a third-floor apartment, where officials said a deadly electric heater had ignited the deadly fire.

The fire itself did not spread far and wide, but it created thick black smoke feathers, which flowed down the hall before filling the stairs. People ran down the dark stairs, some from the top floor of the 19-story building. Many escaped, but others fell and died on the way down.

The dead ranged from two-year-old Ousmane Konteh to 50-year-old Fatoumata Drammeh, according to a list of names released by New York City Police, and included eight children.

Family members gather and wait for information about missing persons near Masjid-Ur-Rahmah’s apartment building in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City on January 10, 2022. [Yuki Iwamura/AP Photo]

Musa Kabba, the imam of Masjid-Ur-Rahmah, said the mosque was trying to organize prayers and funerals.

The forensic office has not yet handed over all the dead to their families.

Until then, wait for the family. Islamic tradition usually requires burial within 24 hours, but mourning has intensified with the slow pace at which loved ones were being released into funeral homes.

“We’re all very nervous, actually with you,” Dukuray said. “It’s the most important thing to know right now and I can’t focus on anything until it really happens.”



[ad_2]

Source link

Related Articles

Back to top button