Apartment fire in Bath Beach now being investigated as double homicide
BATH BEACH, Brooklyn (WABC) -- Investigators believe that the two men found dead in an apartment fire in Brooklyn had been killed before flames broke out.
Fire crews arrived at the scene on Bay 29th Street ant Bath Avenue at around 7 p.m. Sunday, to find flames bursting out of the windows of a second-floor apartment.
One woman who lives in the unit right next door, says she heard the sound of a screaming lady, and saw a lot of smoke.
Another neighbor says he has bad hearing and couldn't hear the cries for help, but his girlfriend did. As soon as they opened their front door, the smoke swallowed them up. He says they barely made it out.
"And we ran all the way down and got out," said the neighbor named Jimmy. "And then when we got around here we saw the flames coming out of that apartment. I couldn't believe what I was looking at. It looked like a movie. It was coming out like a jet engine."
Officials say two men were found dead inside of the four-story apartment building.
Police believe the two men were murdered before the fire even started. Authorities say one of the men found had a puncture wound to his neck. The other man had head trauma. Their deaths are now being treated as homicides.
The building superintendent says he raced upstairs and tried to push his way into the apartment but couldn't get past the fierce flames.
"I see on the floor. Two bodies," superintendent Domingo Cuate said. "The door is open. I don't know why. When I pushed it, I couldn't come in because the fire, the fire come."
He says only one tenant lives in the building. Residents in the building though say there are lots of characters coming and going.
"I don't wanna get myself in trouble because somebody might be lookin to kill me, or whoever did it. But a lot of characters come out of the place," Jimmy said. "Nobody kills somebody for nothing. There's got to be something bad going on, right or wrong. The animal that did it, he could've killed everybody in the building."
Meanwhile, two firefighters suffered minor injuries. It took officials about an hour to get the flames under control.
One neighbor, who moved in over the weekend, describes hearing the news about the men who died.
"We decided to take the cats and just leave, head downstairs," Kerven Jasmine said. "Yeah, definitely surprising but you know, but bad things can happen at random times so today just happened to be an unlucky day for us."
The cause of the fire remains under investigation and the identities of the victims have not been released.
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