A community in the Bronx gathered on Sunday to say goodbye to loved ones who died a week ago in a raging fire in a building that claimed the lives of 17 people, including eight children.
The mass funeral capped a week of prayers and mourning within a close-knit West African community, most with connections to the small country of Gambia.
Amidst the mourning, there was also frustration and anger as families, friends and neighbors of the victims tried to make sense of the tragedy.
“This is a sad situation. But everything comes from God. Tragedies always happen, we just thank Allah that we can all come together,” said Haji Dukuray, the uncle of Haja Dukuray, who died with three of her children and her husband.
The dead were between 2 and 50 years old. Entire families were killed, including a family of five. Others left orphaned children.
There were 15 coffins in all that lined the front of the prayer room. They vary in size, some no larger than small coffee tables, containing the bodies of the younger souls who have died.
“One week they were with us…now they are gone,” said Musa Kabba, the imam of the Masjid-Ur-Rahmah mosque, where many of the deceased prayed.
Funeral services for two boys were held earlier in the week at a mosque in Harlem.
After Sunday services in New York City, 11 caskets were to be transported to a New Jersey cemetery for burial. Four of the victims were expected to be repatriated to Gambia, as requested by their families, said a Gambian government official who attended the service.
All week, family members had been eager to bury their loved ones to rest in honor of Islamic tradition, which calls for burial as soon as possible after death. But complications over identifying the victims delayed their delivery to funeral homes.
All of the dead collapsed to their deaths after being overcome by smoke while attempting to descend the ladder, which acted as a conduit for the heavy smoke.
The funeral was held at the Islamic Cultural Center, 3 kilometers (2 miles) from the 19-story apartment building where New York City’s deadliest fire in three decades raged.
Parts of the service were provided in Soninke, a language spoken in The Gambia and other parts of West Africa.
Hundreds packed the mosque and many hundreds more filled tents outside or huddled in the cold to pay their respects. The services were broadcast on giant screens outside and in other rooms of the mosque.
Due to the magnitude of the tragedy, funeral organizers insisted on a public funeral to draw attention to the plight of immigrant families in New York City.
“There are protests. There is injustice. There is negligence,” said Sheikh Musa Drammeh, who was among those leading the response to the tragedy.
Authorities blamed a faulty space heater in a third-floor apartment for the fire, which sent plumes of suffocating smoke rising rapidly through the 19-story building’s stairwell.
Some residents said space heaters were sometimes needed to supplement the building’s heat and that repairs were not always timely.
“We want the world to know that they died because they lived in the Bronx,” Drammeh said. “If they lived in midtown Manhattan, they wouldn’t have died. Why? Because they wouldn’t need to use space heaters. This is a public protest. So there has to be accountability on the part of elected officials to change the conditions that cause death every day.”
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Lt. Governor Brian Benjamin, as well as two officials representing the Government of The Gambia, attended the funeral services.
“When tragedies happen, we come together,” Schumer said.
“I am here to express the pain that all New Yorkers experience,” Adams added later.
New York Attorney General Letitia James vowed to investigate, saying “there were conditions in that building that should have been corrected.”
The investigation into the fire is ongoing.
Much of the focus is on the catastrophic spread of apartment smoke. The fire itself was contained to an adjoining unit and hallway, but investigators said the apartment door and a stairwell door many floors above had been left open, creating a chimney that allowed smoke to quickly spread throughout. The whole building.
New York City fire codes generally require apartment doors to be spring loaded and slam shut automatically.
In the wake of the deaths, a coalition of officials, including federal, state and city lawmakers, announced a legislative agenda that they hoped would tighten fire codes and building standards to prevent similar tragedies from happening.
The proposals range from requiring heaters to automatically shut off to requiring federally funded apartment projects to install self-closing doors on units and stairwells that would have to be inspected monthly.
As families bid their loved ones farewell, others remain in hospitals, some in serious condition from smoke inhalation.
The fundraisers have raised almost $400,000 so far. The Mayor’s Fund, Bank of America and other groups said 118 families displaced by the fire would receive $2,250 each in aid.
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