Fire Wrecks Another Xu Rental Property

Another apartment building owned by Bethany-based landlord Jianchao Xu burst into flames Friday morning — displacing a half-dozen tenants, including Anthony Bruton, who rushed to safety after an overwhelming smell of smoke wafted up into his second-floor apartment.

That fire took place at the three-family house at 126 Sheffield Ave. in Newhallville. It marks at least the fifth fire in the past two years that has taken place at various local rental properties owned by Xu, a landlord with a long and contentious history with the city’s housing code enforcement agency.

Most recently, that’s included a standoff with inspectors on Avon Street last October, and an $18,000 fine approved by a Livable City Initiative (LCI) hearing officer over missed inspections at an Elm Street property and potential rooming house that became the site of a fatal fire.

Assistant Fire Chief Danny Coughlin told the Independent that the fire at 126 Sheffield started at 10:48 a.m. City firefighters had it under control within 45 minutes.

He said six adults were displaced by the fire. No one was hurt, including firefighters.

While the cause of the fire is still under investigation, it appears to have started in the basement. 

“They did a great job” in challenging conditions, he said about the firefighters at the scene. ​“There was a lot of cut up walls, a lot of additional walls” installed in the basement. Those walls, apparently installed to separate the basement into different storage areas, were ​“hiding the fire. Had they not broken through the walls, it would have spread” even more quickly to other parts of the building.

The @NewHavenFire social media account on X first posted a video of the blaze at 10:57 a.m. Subsequent videos posted to that same X account, including the one at the top of this story, show the building’s first floor engulfed in bright orange flames, and then plumes of thick grey and black smoke flying out from the building, enshrouding the block.

Several dozen firefighters were still at the scene at around noon; so were Livable City Initiative (LCI) Executive Director Liam Brennan, Red Cross personnel, Alder Kim Edwards — who lives right next door to the house that caught on fire — and neighbors and 126 Sheffield residents still shaken by a fire that appears to have wrecked at least the building’s basement and first floor.

The property is owned by a company controlled by Xu, whose local rental properties have repeatedly caught fire in recent years, including a fatal blaze at 516 Elm St. last October that left 32-year-old New Havener Kenneth Mims dead. (Other recent fires at Xu properties include at 38 Bishop St. in January 2023, at 370 Mansfield St. in October 2023, and at 58 Avon St. in November 2023.)

Xu’s property manager, David Kone, was present on Sheffield Avenue in the wake of Friday’s fire, providing city officials with information about the property and checking in on tenants and connecting them with Red Cross. He declined to comment for this article, instead pointing his phone camera at this reporter while recording a video of the scene. (City assessment records show that Xu and his various companies have owned 126 Sheffield since 2016.)

One of the tenants displaced by Friday’s blaze was Anthony Bruton, who said he rents a single bedroom on the property’s second floor, and shares that apartment with two other rent-by-the-room floormates. He said he’s lived in that Sheffield Avenue property for more than a year.

Bruton said he was in his bedroom, watching music videos on YouTube, when he started smelling smoke. ​“The smell was so strong,” he said. He remembered thinking to himself, ​“Was someone burning leaves? What’s that smell that’s so strong?”

He said he checked upstairs, found nothing, went downstairs, and encountered thick plumes of smoke coming from the direction of the basement. The smoke was black, he said. He hurriedly told his roommates what was going on, and rushed outside.

At around 11:30 a.m., standing on the sidewalk and looking at the fire-wrecked apartment building, he said he was ​“cold as hell” and waiting for a chance to get back inside and retrieve what belongings he could before being relocated to a new temporary place to stay by Red Cross.

How’s it been living at 126 Sheffield? ​“It’s a place,” he said. ​“Better than no place.”

Kimberly Edwards, who represents Newhallville/Prospect Hill’s Ward 19 on the Board of Alders, lives next door to the property that caught fire Friday. She said she was at home this morning, getting ready to take her mom to a doctor’s appointment, when she heard a smoke alarm going off in the building next door.

She went outside to see what was up, and saw three tenants — neighbors she knew from 126 Sheffield — standing on the front porch, with thick black smoke billowing behind them. ​“It was so scary,” Edwards remembered. She said one of the tenants has a prosthetic leg; she said she helped him get down the front porch’s flight of stairs safely.

She looked up at the house’s first-floor wreckage and spoke about how scary it must have been for the people inside, let alone for neighbors like herself. ​“You’re literally watching your whole life go up in flames,” she said about what her neighbors went through Friday.

LCI Director Brennan said that his agency’s deputy, Mark Stroud, had been out at the site of the fire scene Friday morning, helping tenants and working with Red Cross. After Red Cross puts up the displaced tenants for a few days, LCI will take over in setting them up with temporary accommodations, he said.

Brennan said that LCI had been scheduled to inspect the third-floor apartment at 126 Sheffield on Friday; it was a federal Section 8 rental-subsidy inspection, he said. A family was getting ready to move in, assuming that the apartment passed the inspection. Amidst all the other fallout of Friday’s fire, he said, that family with Section 8 now support doesn’t have an apartment ready for them to move into.

Standing nearby on the sidewalk, George Lopez looked up at the property, which he had been working on as recently as Wednesday. He said the landlord hired him to renovate the third-floor apartment. He said he had put in new flooring and painted the place. He also said the third-floor apartment was going to be rented out as a full apartment, while the first- and second-floor residences offered rentals by the room.

Two neighbors just to the north of 126 Sheffield, Keisha and Paola, who asked to be identified by only their first names, were still out on their front porch at around noon, looking over at the fire-damaged house next door.

They said the fire appeared to erupt from the building’s basement. Keisha, a crossing guard who works for Gateway Community College, said she smelled burning, went out onto her apartment’s second-floor balcony, looked down, and ​“saw the flames shoot up” from the basement next door.

She said she rushed through her apartment, grabbing what was most important to her before leaving her building in case her house too caught fire.

In times of crisis, she reflected, you realize what’s most important in your home as you’re packing up to flee. That’s why ​“my dog’s in my bag,” she said, gesturing towards her pup, named Stinky, curled up in her purse, quietly looking out over the firefighters packing up their hoses and equipment and preparing to leave Sheffield Avenue after a hectic morning.