20 years ago, a girl survived a deadly Yonkers fire. Her story has gone untold until now.
There is a hole on Nodine Hill.
This gritty neighborhood in southwest Yonkers, New York, doesn’t invite strolling; you can pass right by without noticing what’s no longer there. But if you know what to look for, in the hundred-block of Oak Street, you'll see the signs.
There. The break in the string of houses on the right.
Two empty lots, one wide, one narrow, lined in gravel.
See the black chain-link fence separating the lots? It follows the path where a family ran for their lives.
See the wide gap in the crisscrossing power lines overhead? They melted away that night. No reason to replace them.
That stretch of sidewalk across the street? That’s where neighbors stood by the dozens, watching homes reduced to smoke and ash.
Something happened here 20 years ago this month, deadly and awful, but cradling the tiniest glimmer of hope.
A fire raged, a family all but disappeared, a girl was carried through flame and smoke to safety. They called her survival a miracle.
But all that came afterward hasn’t been told until now.
The story of what was here and what was lost — on a night of bitter cold and staggering bravery — is all but forgotten. For two decades, it has endured only in the memories of those who rushed to help, and in the broken heart of a girl who lived.
March 14, 2003: Horror in the flames
CAPT. ED MILEY HEARS THE CALL GO OUT — a structure fire on Nodine Hill — and the 21-year veteran of Yonkers (New York) Fire Department knows two things immediately.
His Engine 303 will be among the first to arrive. And there is no worse place to fight a fire in Yonkers than where he’s heading.
On Nodine Hill, the streets are named for trees — Oak, Maple, Poplar, Ash — and the buildings are just as vulnerable to fire. The wooden pre-war homes are clad in tar siding that firefighters call “gasoline siding.” The buildings are so close you can reach out the window of one and nearly touch the next.
And now Nodine Hill is burning.
It is not yet 2 a.m., on March 14, 2003. Miley has already fought a fire in a small apartment on Riverdale Avenue, down by the third police precinct. He’ll use every last minute of his 24-hour shift.
Engine 303 parks at the corner of Poplar and Oak. As soon as Miley opens the door, he feels the sharp wind from the north, where the fire is. Wind and flame and bone-dry buildings. A nightmare in the making.
Everywhere the captain looks, something is on fire.
We might not put this out, he thinks. We might get killed here.
Miley hooks a hose to a hydrant on Poplar and makes his way north, down the hill to attach another line to Engine 306. He passes the three buildings — No. 100, No. 98, No. 96 — that have turned the east side of Oak Street into a wall of flame stretching 100 feet wide, 50 feet high and at least 60 feet in from the street.
As he stretches the hose, he hears yelling.
There are people in there.
That’s when he sees them: three shapes emerging through that wall of flame in the sliver of space between No. 96 and No. 98.
The shapes are people, and they are burning.
The Velez family comes to Nodine Hill
NODINE HILL IS TIGHTLY PACKED and poor and its residents mostly speak Spanish.
Of the 15,000 or so people who call this third-of-a-square-mile neighborhood home, more than 63% are Hispanic, 18% are Black, 10% are white and about 5% are Asian. More than a third of Nodine Hill’s residents live in poverty, and they live close together, with nearly four times the population density of the rest of Yonkers.
There are gangs on Nodine Hill, but there are also hard-working people trying their best to scratch out a living, looking over their shoulders and keeping their families close.
In many respects, the Velez family fits right in.
Pedro Velez moved to Yonkers from his native Puerto Rico in 1968. The aspiring boxer stepped away from the ring to devote time to cooking and planting flowers.
He met and married his wife, Julia Elena, and they started a family. But soon, they began to grow apart. They were estranged for more than a dozen years when Julia got sick and lost the apartment where she had been raising their children, Peter, Jasmin and Brian. Around 2000, the family moved into Pedro’s basement apartment at 96 Oak St.
When Peter Velez married Enid Vanessa Lugo, who went by Vanessa, she moved in, with her son, Zayvon. In July 2002, Vanessa gave birth, to a daughter, Vaniya. The baby’s health was poor from the start.
The doctors called it “failure to thrive,” but in a matter of months, Vaniya’s story of survival would raise spirits on Nodine Hill amid devastating loss.
Everyone moved on, confident in one thought. At least they saved the baby. But that story, it turned out, had more cloud than silver lining.
The night that changes everything
NO ONE IN THE VELEZ FAMILY IS EXACTLY THRIVING IN MARCH 2003, but they are making it, together. Two couples, two teens, a toddler and an infant sharing a basement apartment. Vanessa’s folks live around the corner on Poplar Street and help out with Zayvon.
Pedro, 53, likes to cook and one of his specialties is an annual labor of love: Christmas pasteles. It's Puerto Rico’s take on the tamale, made with plantains, meat and vegetables steamed in a banana leaf. The tradition carries its own delicious lesson: Things worth making take time. “He was everyone’s favorite uncle,” his niece Evelyn Campaña will say. Julia Elena, 45, loves the church and insists that, if her children marry, it should be in front of a priest.
Peter (actually, Pedro Jr.) is 22. He works at the Big Brothers Big Sisters clothing warehouse but can't get home fast enough to see his wife and daughter. (“They were his world,” his sister Jasmin says.) Vanessa, 21, loves music, dancing and her children. She hopes to get her GED and one day become a lawyer. Brian, 16, nicknamed “Fat Joe” after the Puerto Rican rapper he resembles, is known as a peacemaker among his crew, called “Family Defeats All.”
On the night that changes everything, the family that is holding together by staying together is apart. Zayvon, 3, is sleeping at his grandparents’ apartment. Jasmin, 19, is staying at a friend’s. Everyone else is home.
But on Nodine Hill, your home is only as safe as the place next door.
A fire in a pot
VACANT BUILDINGS ARE A CONSTANT PROBLEM. Squatters find their way in, stripping buildings of anything of value and buying drugs with the proceeds. Vanessa’s father, Benjamin Lopez, calls the empty buildings “silent assassins” and wonders, on the day he buries his daughter, if the unoccupied house across the street will be the next to kill.
According to court documents, on the frigid night of March 13, 2003, two squatters, Jesus Silva and Carlos Muniz Rodriguez, break into the vacant house at 98 Oak St., next door to where the Velezes are sleeping. They have women with them. Someone has some crack. Silva and a friend nicknamed Cholo try to get warm in the trash-strewn front room on the first floor. A fire is lit in a stock pot. Muniz Rodriguez, Cholo, and one of the women go upstairs to smoke crack.
Downstairs, at about 1:30 a.m., the fire leaps from the pot and spreads quickly. The squatters warn no one as they flee.
A desperate escape
FIREFIGHTERS CALL IT A DOOR-BANGER, when someone runs up to the station to report a fire. That’s how the Oak Street fire comes to the attention of Station 6, Engine 306, a block to the north.
The alarm has already sounded when Station 6 Capt. Neal McCaffrey bolts down the hill. He sees fire pouring from No. 98 and spreading to the top floors of No. 96 and No. 100. He orders his crew to take up a position to start the fight.
Each floor of these narrow, three-story wooden buildings has bay windows and wooden porches and balconies in the front and back. Concrete steps lead up from the sidewalk, with access to the basement under the front porch and out the back, where a courtyard provides a tiny plot of earth, pinned in by other buildings.
The Velez family — Pedro, Julia Elena, Peter, Vanessa and Brian — huddle behind their building as the fire rages. Someone holds the baby. Looking at the back of their burning building, they have three escape options. None of them is good.
Going through the house, now being consumed in flames from ground to roof, is out of the question.
There is a small break between the brick buildings to their right, behind 72 and 74 Maple St., but to get there, they’ll have to run past the corner of their building, which is an inferno. And there’s no telling what they’ll find on the other side.
To their left is a slightly wider gap between the buildings. It is no more than 3 feet across and runs the length of the building, about 60 feet. At the end is Oak Street and safety.
The Velez family wraps little Vaniya in a blanket, Peter cradles her in his arms, and they brace themselves before racing through hell on earth.
‘We’re in trouble’
FIGHTING THE OAK STREET FIRE means battling hills, wind, water and wires.
Some will call it a 10-alarm fire, others a general alarm. It doesn’t matter what you call it. Everyone is coming from everywhere, some 175 firefighters swarming Nodine Hill.
Assistant Chief Larry Smith is incident commander, coordinating the massive response and telling arriving companies where to go and what to do. One misplaced engine on these clogged streets could spell disaster. And the fire is only getting hotter. (When he returns to his battalion car hours later, Smith will find the plastic and the rubber inside the car has all melted, behind closed windows.)
There are hills everywhere. This stretch of Oak Street is downhill from Poplar to Maple, uphill from Maple to Ash. Maple and Poplar Streets both go uphill to the east. All those hills create a backstop for the northerly wind to push against, a recipe for rapid fire spread.
Smith can’t be everywhere. When Deputy Chief George Kielb arrives, he is dispatched to Poplar Street, to assess the fire’s southern spread and report back.
Later, Kielb and Engine 6’s McCaffrey find a vantage point from the kitchen window at 108 Oak St., several houses south of the fire. It gives them a view into the fire, until they notice that the frame of the window they are looking through is also on fire.
“Both of us have been around for a while, to say the least,” says Kielb, who would later be named Yonkers fire commissioner. “But both of us looked at it and laughed and said: ‘We’re in trouble.’ Everybody else was trying to contain this big blaze, and they’re spread out all over. And he and one of his guys got a hose line to go back up there, one guy on a hose line with the captain. We already knew it wasn't enough, but you've got to try to do something."
Everyone is trying to do something and reporting back to Smith.
The wind and the hills are one thing. The wires are another.
The ladder trucks must thread their ladders through a network of crisscrossing overhead power lines, lines that Smith knows from experience will likely melt in extreme heat. Con Edison is called in to cut power, but not before live wires begin falling on the trucks below.
Nodine Hill also has a water problem, with small water mains incapable of quickly delivering the millions of gallons needed to put out the fire.
That’s why Assistant Chief Kyran Dunn’s phone rings, even though he is asleep and off-duty.
“Kyran, you have to come in. The hill is burning.” It’s all the communications officer needs to say.
As he turns out of his street in northwest Yonkers, Dunn can see the glow in the sky 2 miles to the south.
When Dunn reports to Oak Street, Smith gives him a three-word order.
“Get me water.”
Smith and Dunn were firefighters at Station 6 together. Their fathers were posted to Station 6. Smith left the station as a lieutenant, Dunn as a captain. They are now assistant chiefs. There’s no one Dunn respects more than Smith. There’s no one Smith trusts more with this task than Dunn. He knows where the water is. Like all Station 6 captains before him, Dunn has planned for the worst case. This is the worst case.
Dunn knows the biggest water mains are on Van Cortlandt Park Avenue, high above and behind the fire. He also knows there’s a staircase at the top of Maple Street that connects Nodine Hill to that area. He positions two engines and before long, hose lines stretch the 900 feet to the fire. They have all the water they'll need.
What cannot be rebuilt
SMITH KNOWS NODINE HILL. He grew up knowing that a neighborhood with buildings this close needs a firehouse as close as possible.
“I can go up and down Elm Street, Oak Street, Ash Street, Poplar, Maple, you name it, and say: ‘Yeah, I remember a fire there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there, there,’” he says.
Much of Nodine Hill was built before modern building and fire codes. Many buildings completely lost to fire cannot be restored to their original footprint. No more two-foot alleys between structures.
There are setbacks, rules that could render reconstruction economically unviable. If a lot is 40 feet wide and there must be 10 feet of space between properties, a 20-foot-wide home could be a poor investment.
That explains the vacant lots.
In a way, Smith says, it’s a miracle there’s anything standing at all.
“It's a testament of the firefighters. Six engine, three engine, four engine — that downtown area — has always been extremely aggressive, extremely efficient at putting fires out. There shouldn't be any part of Nodine Hill left.”
Unimaginable horror, unimaginable bravery
EVERYONE IS SCREAMING. By the time Peter, Vanessa and Brian reach Oak Street with Vaniya, their clothes are burning off them. They are engulfed in flames.
As soon as Vanessa reaches the street, she falls into Miley’s waiting arms. The captain uses an extinguisher to try to douse the fire and helps her to lay down on a tarp on the street behind Ladder 74. Police and medical teams take it from there.
Peter and Brian go to the left, toward Poplar and the crew of Ladder 71. The firefighters jump off their truck. Someone takes the baby from Peter and others take the brothers to the ground to put out the flames.
Lt. Larry Dunn burns his hands patting them down, but will keep fighting the fire, telling no one but his brother, Assistant Chief Dunn, the extent of his second-degree burns. Firefighter Nicholas Sarro uses his own body to snuff out the flames on one of the brothers.
There are photojournalists at the scene, documenting the horror unfolding before them. Some images capture the moments after the three reached Oak Street with their bundle. The photographs will be placed in the newspaper’s archive but will never be published.
Soon, ambulances take Vanessa, Peter, Brian and Vaniya to hospitals. The baby will have burns on her hands and a skull fracture. The others will have burns over most of their bodies.
Larry Smith says it’s one of the bravest things he’s ever seen.
“Put yourself in that position,” he says. “The parents couldn't even make it out. They're running for their lives. And whoever it was thought of wrapping that baby up. To me, that was remarkable, that they were willing to sacrifice time for that baby. Amazing.”
Pedro and Julia Elena never reach Oak Street. After sunrise, their bodies are found in the gap between 72 and 74 Maple. They went to the right, but were pinned behind a fence, unable to break through. They died in each other's arms.
Rev. Thomas McDonald, the fire department chaplain, blesses the bodies before they are taken from the site.
Smith has seen too many fires to believe the three who dashed through flame will survive long. But the baby. The baby becomes the story. She’s the girl who lived.
What another fire tells us
FIREFIGHTERS CALL IT “CATCHING A FIRE,” but they don't mean it in the way one might think. They don’t mean they caught it in time and stopped it in its tracks. “Catching a fire” means responding. And firefighters don’t forget the fires they caught.
For generations, Yonkers firefighters spoke of the worst fire in city history, which killed nine children and three adults attending a music class at a Jewish community center on Dec. 20, 1965.
Then there was the 1989 fire in a rooming house on Warburton Avenue, where seven people died, including those trapped by a front door that required a key to exit.
There have been apartment-building fires where hundreds needed to be evacuated.
But for its sheer scope — 14 buildings damaged, six destroyed, 200 homeless, two people killed, with three more to die of their injuries in the weeks to follow — the Oak Street fire on March 14, 2003, stands apart.
“It was literally a living hell when we arrived,” Smith says.
But it was only the start of one of the busiest fire weekends in Yonkers history. Two days later, a blaze breaks out at the 106-unit, brick Wakefield Towers co-op apartments across town, along the Bronx River Parkway, leaving 300 more people homeless.
Between the two fires, more than 500 people who went to sleep on Thursday night in Yonkers had lost their homes by Sunday night.
The two fires couldn’t be more different.
On Oak Street, the fire was at 2 a.m., in wind and freezing temperatures on hilly terrain with wooden structures and wires everywhere, with two dead initially. At Wakefield Towers, the fire is in a single, albeit sprawling brick building in the middle of a sunny afternoon. Some firefighters suffer smoke-inhalation injuries, but there is no loss of life.
Wakefield Towers was gutted by fire but rebuilt, at a cost of $12.5 million. It reopened in October 2005, less than three years later.
The hole on Nodine Hill remains.
A cascade of mourning
A WEEK AFTER THE FIRE, FAMILY AND FRIENDS GATHER at St. Peter’s Catholic Church on Riverdale Avenue for a funeral Mass for Pedro and Julia Elena. They follow to Oakland Cemetery, where their caskets are lowered into the ground under a floral arrangement of the Puerto Rican flag.
Family and friends retrace the same route when Vanessa dies March 26. And again when Peter dies April 16. Finally, for Brian, who dies May 8.
Jasmin Velez had seen her family disappear from her life to be reunited in death, in a hilltop area of Oakland Cemetery called Sunset Knoll.
Peter and Vanessa are pictured on their headstone, in a photo of them in the back seat of a car. Vanessa looks confidently at the camera, leaning back into her husband, her left arm reaching back to cradle his neck. Peter’s eyes are narrowed, looking off-camera to their right, the focus of his gaze uncertain.
Brian’s image peers from his headstone, too, in a photo that is formal for a 16-year-old. He wears a tab collar with a corsage, his tie slightly askew. “Beloved brother and uncle.”
There was a wrongful death suit and a settlement. The men who started the fire went to jail for six years. They have been released.
Little Vaniya Velez
DESPITE BURNED HANDS AND A SKULL FRACTURE, little Vaniya Velez lived on, in the care of her Aunt Jasmin.
But her father’s impossible dash through smoke and flame didn’t guarantee Vaniya a life without hardship.
She was diagnosed with periventricular leukomalacia, a type of brain damage that slows mental and physical development and can heighten the risk of cerebral palsy. Doctors testified it was not related to the fire.
Children with this disorder can have hearing loss and vision problems, learning disabilities. Their leg muscles are tight; they are prone to seizures. There’s no cure, but physical therapy can make life more livable.
For a dozen years, Vaniya knew her unfair share of doctors and medicine and tests.
Eleven years after the fire, a coda to the Oak Street fire story arrived in the form of three unremarkable lines in The Journal News:
Yonkers – Velez, Vaniya, 12, died on 11/23/2014, arrangements by Sinatra Funeral Home.
It wasn’t the fire. It wasn’t all the other disorders. It was cancer.
Her online tribute wall has only three mourners.
Hector Rosado wrote: “You will never be forgotten, always in my heart, you will forever sleep in peace. Love, Tio Hec.” He included a blurry photo of Vaniya sitting in his lap, her hand on his shoulder, bangs framing her face.
Zayvon wrote: “My name is Zayvon Harper. Vaniya was my little sister who I loved from the bottom of my heart.”
And Jasmin wrote, “Vaniya we love you, sleep in peace,” alongside a photo of Vaniya in the lobby of a dentist’s office, sporting a Nike “Just Do It” T-shirt, neon pink sneakers with purple laces and blue pants. She looks straight at the camera, her left hand curling out at the wrist.
Repeated efforts to reach Rosado and Zayvon were unsuccessful. But Jasmin did respond — in her own way, on her own terms.
The girl who lived
JASMIN VELEZ IS 39 NOW AND STILL LIVES IN YONKERS, though not on Nodine Hill. She isn’t interested in talking about the night that changed everything or the years that followed. There’s still too much pain.
It hurts to talk about her family and the brief life that awaited the girl whose father once cradled her tiny, blanketed body in his arms and ran as fast as he could.
In a single text message in response to repeated interview requests, Jasmin proved herself to be a woman of faith, like her mother before her.
She wrote: “My life will never be the same. Life is hard for me. Every day is a struggle mentally. I’m thankful for God. Without Him in my life I wouldn’t know where I’ll be.”
Twenty years ago, Yonkers knew Vaniya as the girl who lived.
As it turns out, the girl who lived is Jasmin, the woman with a broken heart.
Memories and memorials
VANIYA HAS REJOINED HER FAMILY, in Oakland Cemetery’s Sunset Knoll.
She is buried next to her grandparents, beneath a carved stone angel holding a heart. On the heart is a photo of the girl with the dark eyes and the brunette bob, above the words “In God’s care.”
On a recent trip, a Halloween pumpkin toy sat beside a small metal Christmas tree. Leaves had collected beneath a tall candy-cane decoration, behind summery pinwheels. A circular concrete garden stone reads: “Look for angels in your life. They are everywhere.”
At the last of the fire funerals, Brian’s friends spoke of taking up a collection. There should be a memorial mural of the Velez family painted somewhere on Oak Street, they said. It never materialized.
Less than a year later, on the first anniversary of the fire, a woman who lived across the street from the fire site said she was still waking in the middle of the night to drive off squatters from her property. She hoped the empty lot across Oak Street could be turned into a park or a playground.
Here in this empty spot on Nodine Hill, only the things that are missing speak to the things that were lost.
But beneath the stone angel at Vaniya’s grave, holiday keepsakes from every season show the girl — and her story — have not been forgotten.
Reach Peter D. Kramer at pkramer@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Yonkers NY fire: The tragic story of a baby saved in 2003
