Tenants Return, Retrieve Burnt Belongings

Eleven days after leaping out a window to save his life, Onix Ortiz returned to his former home at 150 West St. — and emerged with only his Xbox One.

He left much of his and his wife’s other belongings behind in the burnt-out, mildewed wreckage of their former third-floor apartment. All his clothes still ​“smelled like death” less than two weeks after a fatal fire at the illegal Hill rooming house killed two former tenants, displaced 14, injured four firefighters, and caused other tenants like Ortiz to jump from upper stories.

Ortiz, 32, recalled that harrowing night on Thursday afternoon while standing in the parking lot of the Cornell Scott Hill Health Center on Columbus Avenue, where he and his wife are receiving therapy to help cope with the trauma of the May 5 blaze.

Ortiz said he and his wife are still living out of a motel room at the New Haven Inn on the west side of town, and that the city’s Livable City Initiative (LCI) has covered the cost of their board through next Monday. After that, he said, he doesn’t know where they’ll be living.

Both Ortiz and another former 150 West St. tenant, Rontae Hunter, said that fire officials allowed displaced tenants back into the boarded up shell of 150 West St. on Wednesday to pick up clothes, appliances, keepsakes, and anything else of theirs that may have survived the fire.

“The house was done,” Ortiz reported Thursday.

While the first floor ​“barely had any damage,” he said, the second floor kitchen, two of the three second-story bedrooms, and all three third-story bedrooms were damaged beyond recognition.

He picked up his gaming console, but left behind a broken television set and all of his and wife’s clothes. ​“It smelled like death in there,” he said.

While walking up the stairs to his former third-floor apartment, he said, he saw a lock of hair from Michael Randall, a third-floor neighbor and friend who died during the fire.

Ortiz described Randall’s actions that night as heroic. He said Randall rushed from room to room to let neighbors know that the building was on fire and that they had to leave immediately. According to Ortiz and three other former 150 West tenants interviewed by the Independent, the building’s smoke detectors didn’t make a sound during the blaze.

Hunter, who is still living out of a motel room at the Regal Inn with his girlfriend, said he was able to salvage a TV and a few shirts and pairs of pants from their former first-floor apartment. But most of his and his wife’s shoes had been destroyed by water from the fire hoses, he said, and the whole room reeked of mildew. He said LCI has also covered their room and board at the motel through the beginning of next week, but that after that, he doesn’t know where they will stay.

“At the end of the day,” he said, ​“we’re basically homeless.”

“We Couldn’t Even Breathe”

Unlike Hunter, who lived on the first floor and was able to escape through the front entrance, Ortiz and his wife survived the fire by jumping from one of the building’s third-floor windows.

Ortiz said that he and his wife had lived at 150 West for the past nine months before the fire. They rented a small bedroom on the third floor of the legal two-family house that appears to have been illegally chopped up by a recent landlord into a rooming house of rentable single bedrooms.

LCI records show that the old landlord, Dorjan Jashari of Yonkers, consistently evaded inspection appointments with department housing code inspectors. The new landlord, John Farrar of the Bronx, was also arrested a few days before the fire due to an alleged physical altercation with a tenant.

Ortiz and his wife paid $550 per month for the bedroom, he said. They shared a bathroom with four other tenants renting out two other bedrooms on the third floor. There was no kitchen on the third floor, he said, so they had to walk down the house’s sole flight of stairs to the second floor whenever they wanted to cook.

The night of the fire, he said, he and his wife were listening to music and dancing in his room when he started to smell smoke. The fire started around 3:20 a.m.

“Baby, do you smell something burning?” he remembered asking his wife. She didn’t. But a few minutes later, Randall and another third-floor tenant came pounding on their bedroom door.

“There’s a fire!” Ortiz remembered them yelling. Ortiz and his wife went into Randall’s room, and saw smoke coming out of a heater and an electrical outlet. Ortiz said his wife ran into the bathroom, grabbed a cup of water, and poured it on the apparent source of smoke.

“We didn’t know that the fire was that bad downstairs on the second floor,” he said. His wife initially made as if to jump out one of the third-story windows, he said, but he convinced her to try the stairs instead.

But they only made it three or four steps down from the third floor when they were ​“engulfed” in a cloud of smoke. ​“We couldn’t even breathe,” he said.

So they ran back upstairs, and went back to Randall’s room’s window. His wife jumped out first, from a third-story window onto the roof of a second-story addition, and then again onto the roof of a first-story porch. Then she climbed down a tree to get to the sidewalk. After she had made it to the ground, Ortiz said, he did the same thing to escape the burning building.

“The smoke was literally hurtling at me at top speed,” he said.

When he got to the sidewalk, he said, he called up to Randall and the remaining tenants on the third-floor. He couldn’t hear or see them behind the smoke.

“We didn’t hear no fire alarms,” he reiterated. And he doesn’t remember there ever being a smoke detector in his bedroom. ​“There was a bracket to hold it, and wires sticking out,” he said about a space for a detector in his room. But there was never a device itself.

He said he attended Randall’s funeral serice at Trinity Church on the Green on Monday. It was an open casket funeral, he said. ​“His son went up to the casket, put his head on his father’s chest, and held him crying.” He said Randall will be cremated at a ceremony on Saturday at Beaverdale Memorial Park Mausoleum in West Rock.

Previous coverage:

• Slumlord Unloads 2 More Hill Properties
• Police Report: 150 West St. Landlord Assaulted Tenant Who Later Died In Fire
• Files Reveal Slumlord-Chasing Challenges
• Tenants Who Escaped Deadly Fire: Smoke Alarm Didn’t Sound. Slumlord Didn’t Care
• 2 Die In Hill Fire; Tenants Leap For Lives; Questions Raised On Smoke Alarms, Exits