“Fuego!” She Cried

Smoke was filling the apartment. The man inside seemed confused about what to do — until Sgt. Yessennia Agosto appeared at his door and declared: ​“Viste el fuego! Tenemos que salir ahora!”

Which translates in English to: ​“You saw the fire! We have to get out of here now!

Spanish is Agosto’s first language. She has used it often during her 17 years as a New Haven cop. This was the first time she needed to use it to help save lives in a fire.

Agosto ended up using it repeatedly as she and fellow cops raced from floor to floor to help clear six families out of two houses that caught on fire last weekend on Howard Avenue.

The episode showed how cops are sometimes called on to summon skills for which they’re not specifically trained when they come immediately upon the scene of a fire and need to support the firefighters who play the lead role.

The episode also showed how bilingualism gave a cop an extra tool in her kit, especially in a city with a rapidly growing Latino population.

“My parents always said,” Agosto recalled, “‘You’re twice as good because you speak two languages.’”

“Lunch” Hour

The fire first engulfed a three-family house at 425 Howard Ave., Saturday around 4:45 a.m.

It was the time when the overnight patrol shift quiets down and cops tend to break for a meal or catch up on reports. Hill Officer Keron Bryce was inside the convenience store at the Sargent Drive Mobil station, heating up his chicken-broccoli-sweet potato ​“lunch.” He brings the precooked meals from home to eat more healthfully on the shift. He heats up the food in the microwave at the Mobil rather than the police substation in order to check in with the few people who are out working at that hour.

Bryce was chatting with Abdul, the cashier, when the fire call came over the radio. He instantly recognized the address: It was around the same time of night in March 2016 when the same house, across from the police substation, had caught on fire. Bryce was on duty then, too. He had run into the burning building to rescue a fellow officer, Steve McMorris, who was looking to see if anyone was inside. (Read about that here.) It was the only time in his four and a half years on the force that he has run inside a burning building.

Bryce grabbed his food, hopped into his cruiser, and headed for the fire. He turned on his new body camera (pictured) — to which he was just getting accustomed to using as part of the department’s rollout the week before — so he wouldn’t forget later.

Lunch would have to wait.

Agosto was parked in the Rite Aid lot between North and South Frontage roads. As the patrol supervisor for half the city on the overnight shift, she likes to park in that lot — centrally located to different portions of her district — to review reports from her officers. Alerted to the blaze, she put the reports aside and headed over, too.

Along the way she thought about her tasks in assisting the fire department, such as blocking off streets to cars and managing any assembled crowds. Only once, about 15 years ago, did Agosto ever find herself needing to help shepherd anyone out of a burning building. And that was a minor fire, in the daytime, where people were already getting outside on their own. In this case, she knew that 425 Howard was a vacant boarded-up building. No one lived inside.

Triple Threats

The first cop on the scene was Officer McMorris, who happened to be on duty as well and across the street at the substation at the time. Bryce and Agosto arrived right afterward, as firefighters were pulling up. They noticed that not only was 425 Howard lit up and burning fast, but that the flames were spreading to the attics of the two three-family houses on either side.

They needed to get people out of those houses.

Cops are generally discouraged from running into burning buildings. That’s the job of firefighters. Cops don’t have the equipment or the specialized training to be safe in those conditions. However, according to fire Chief John Alston Jr., at the beginning of a fire they can often run in and swiftly remove people and save lives.

Which is what the three cops began to do as the firefighters unloaded their equipment. They had time. A tiny bit of time.

First they ran into 423 Howard. They banged on the door, yelling that the house was on fire, to wake people up. A man opened the door to the first floor. He and a roommate started gathering belongings. They seemed a bit dazed from having just woken up. A dog was there, too. Smoke was seeping into the apartment.

“Get a coat! Get your dog!” Bryce said. He told them to leave everything else in the house and get outside.

While Bryce dealt with the first-floor occupants, Agosto and McMorris raced upstairs. Agosto didn’t need to call out assignments or instructions. She and McMorris fanned out by instinct, each covering a different spot. ​“When you work as a team,” Agosto reflected, often ​“you don’t have to say anything.”

Some people left the house on their own. Agosto and McMorris found stragglers on the second and third floors. They could see flames outside. They felt the heat pouring into the house along with the smoke. Coughing, they urged the stragglers out. (one later said she had noticed the flames next door and fallen back asleep, not realizing the fire was heading her way as well.)

Agosto noticed the tenants were all Latino. ​“Fuego!” she cried out, at each floor. Fire! ​“Hay que salirse!” We have to leave! She said several people responded once they heard the Spanish and fled to safety.

Growing up in Bridgeport, Agosto learned to speak Spanish before she learned English. Her parents, who had moved to Connecticut from Puerto Rico, spoke English well. But they wanted to make sure their daughter could not only speak Spanish, but read and write it fluently.

“They’re proud of their heritage, as am I. The language is part of the heritage,” she said.

Once Agosto joined the New Haven force 17 years ago, she quickly saw how her language skills could help. Other cops regularly called her to the scene of crimes where key people spoke only Spanish, so she could translate. Spending nine years in the detective division, she regularly found that witnesses either couldn’t speak English, or simply felt more comfortable speaking Spanish — and would provide her with crucial details that way. She recalled one time she went to the hospital to interview a woman who’d been raped. The nurses and other cops hadn’t been able to learn much about the crime. The woman opened up in Spanish to Agosto, describing what happened, and providing clues that enabled her to track down the rapist.

With the first house on Howard cleared at last weekend’s fire, the three officers were back outside. A crowd had gathered. People were recording the scene, the roaring flames, with their cellphones.

Bryce shepherded the people out of the 20-degree cold into the police substation. Agosto and McMorris headed to the three-story multi-family on the other side of the vacant burning house. Some people were fleeing that house too.

“We saw two strollers on the front porch,” Agosto recalled. ​“There were kids in there!” They banged on the doors and windows to urge more people to leave.

Firefighters had gone inside. They returned to report that two men remained on the third floor. They didn’t seem to want to come out.

Agosto ran back in along with a firefighter. One door was open on the third floor; they could see flames coming through the window. The firefighter shut that door. Then they banged on another door, where the two stragglers remained.

One ran out. The other man, apparently in his 30s and dressed in a green T‑shirt and sweatpants, Latino like the other affected tenants in the two buildings, appeared in a daze.

“Viste el fuego! Tenemos que salir ahora!”

The tenant understood. He focused. He ran out to safety. As did Agosto.

Knowledge Transfer

At that point, Agosto and her team reverted to cop duty while firefighters from New Haven and surrounding towns spent more than an hour extinguishing the blaze.

At the police substation across the street, Agosto used her Spanish to reassure the burned-out tenants that the Red Cross was on its way to find them places to stay. None of them was injured. Two firefighters were treated at the hospital for minor injuries, including a burn to the cheek. (They were back on the job that night, according to Chief Alston.)

Then Agosto returned outside to make sure the appropriate streets were blocked off. They were, and as the fire was elevated to a four-alarm, the perimeter was extended down Howard Avenue. Her officers also remained on duty to keep people on the street safe as the firefighters did their job.

Bryce settled into his cruiser at one of the traffic points at Spring and Edgar streets to write up the police incident report from the fire — and finally get to that chicken and broccoli.

All three houses were burned too badly for the families to return. Twenty-one people in all, including five kids, have been staying since then in lodgings arranged by the Red Cross. The original house that caught fire, 425 Howard, needed to be torn down. Although it had been boarded up, the fire department suspected that squatters may have found their way inside to escape the cold and ended up causing the fire, Chief Alston said. Squatters had caused the 2016 fire, he said, and his investigators are ​“leaning toward” the same explanation for the cause of the latest blaze.

For that reason, the building was taken down gradually, with smaller equipment, later on Saturday. Firefighters remained on site to see whether any bodies were inside. Thankfully, none was found.

The city’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), has pressed the vacant property’s absentee owner, JP Morgan Chase Bank, to secure the property, according to Deputy Director Frank D’Amore. It fined the bank for anti-blight ordinance violations. Those fines have accumulated to $60,000 since March 2016, he said.

The two adjoining and previously occupied three-family houses, still vacant from the fire, can be repaired assuming insurance comes through, according to city Building Official Jim Turcio. They do not need to be demolished.

Agosto, who is married to fellow New Haven cop Edrick Agosto, with whom she’s raising two young children, has been a supervisor since her promotion to sergeant in April. She loved detective work, she said. She also noticed that ​“the department was getting younger and younger,” with detectives and supervisors retiring.

“All that knowledge was leaving with them. I had the privilege of working under these officers. I [concluded]: It’s time to give a little more and share a little bit of what I learned over 17 years.”

What did she learn in supervising a rescue effort at last weekend’s fire?

Agosto cited two lessons.

Lesson one: ​“If you have faith in your officers, they know what to do. I didn’t have to say, ​‘You go here. You go there.’ I had to have that confidence in my people that they are capable of doing their job — even if it’s not technically in our job description.”

Lesson two: ​“It gets hot and smoky in there, really quick.”

Read other installments in the Independent’s ​“Cop of the Week” series: 

• Shafiq Abdussabur
• Craig Alston & Billy White Jr.
• Joseph Aurora
• James Baker
• Lloyd Barrett
• Pat Bengston & Mike Valente
• Elsa Berrios
• Manmeet Bhagtana (Colon)
• Paul Bicki
• Paul Bicki (2)
• Sheree Biros
• Bitang
• Scott Branfuhr
• Bridget Brosnahan
• Craig Burnett & Orlando Crespo
• Keron Bryce and Steve McMorris
• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia
• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia (2)
• Dennis Burgh
• Anthony Campbell
• Darryl Cargill & Matt Wynne
• Elizabeth Chomka & Becky Fowler
• Rob Clark & Joe Roberts
• Sydney Collier
• Carlos Conceicao
• Carlos Conceicao (2)
• Carlos Conceicao and Josh Kyle
• David Coppola
• Mike Criscuolo
• Natalie Crosby
• Steve Cunningham and Timothy Janus
• Chad Curry
• Roy Davis
• Joe Dease
• Milton DeJesus
• Milton DeJesus (2)
• Rose Dell
• Brian Donnelly
• Anthony Duff
• Robert DuPont
• Robert DuPont and Rose Dell
• Eric Eisenhard & Jasmine Sanders
• Jeremie Elliott and Scott Shumway
• Jeremie Elliott (2)
• Jose Escobar Sr.
• Bertram Ettienne
• Bertram Ettienne (2)
• Martin Feliciano & Lou DeCrescenzo
• Paul Finch
• Jeffrey Fletcher
• Renee Forte
• Marco Francia
• Michael Fumiatti
• Michael Fumiatti (2)
• William Gargone
• William Gargone (2)
• William Gargone & Mike Torre
• Derek Gartner
• Derek Gartner & Ryan Macuirzynski
• Tom Glynn & Matt Williams
• Jon Haddad & Daniela Rodriguez
• Michael Haines
• Michael Haines & Brendan Borer
• Michael Haines & Brendan Borer (2)
• Dan Hartnett
• Ray Hassett
• Robert Hayden
• Patricia Helliger
• Robin Higgins
• Ronnell Higgins
• William Hurley & Eddie Morrone
• Derek Huelsman
• Racheal Inconiglios
• Juan Ingles
• Bleck Joseph and Marco Correa
• Shayna Kendall
• Paul Kenney
• Hilda Kilpatrick
• Herb Johnson
• John Kaczor & Alex Morgillo
• Jillian Knox
• Peter Krause
• Peter Krause (2)
• Amanda Leyda
• Rob Levy
• Anthony Maio
• Dana Martin
• Reggie McGlotten
• Steve McMorris
• Juan Monzon
• Monique Moore and David Santiago
• Matt Myers
• Carlos and Tiffany Ortiz
• Tiffany Ortiz
• Chris Perrone
• Joseph Perrotti
• Ron Perry
• Joe Pettola
• Diego Quintero and Elvin Rivera
• Ryan Przybylski
• Stephanie Redding
• Tony Reyes
• David Rivera
• Luis & David Rivera
• Luis Rivera (2)
• Salvador Rodriguez
• Salvador Rodriguez (2)
• Brett Runlett
• David Runlett
• Betsy Segui & Manmeet Colon
• Allen Smith
• Marcus Tavares
• Martin Tchakirides
• David Totino
• Stephan Torquati
• Gene Trotman Jr.
* Elisa Tuozzoli
• Kelly Turner
• Lars Vallin (& Xander)
• Dave Vega & Rafael Ramirez
• Earl Reed
• Daophet Sangxayarath & Jessee Buccaro
• Herb Sharp
• Jess Stone
• Arpad Tolnay
• John Velleca
• Manuella Vensel
• Holly Wasilewski
• Holly Wasilewski (2)
• Alan Wenk
• Stephanija VanWilgen
• Elizabeth White & Allyn Wright
• Matt Williams
• Michael Wuchek
• Michael Wuchek (2)
• David Zannelli
• Cailtin Zerella
• Caitlin Zerella (2)
• Caitlin Zerella, Derek Huelsman, David Diaz, Derek Werner, Nicholas Katz, and Paul Mandel
• David Zaweski