A fire in a South Shore residential building early Saturday morning left one person dead and four others injured, including two young children, according to fire officials.
The blaze broke out at a multi-story residential building shortly after 3 a.m. in the 2400 block of East 78th Street, officials said.
According to police, a 24-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene, while four others were injured in the fire.
- A 27-year-old man was taken to Trinity Hospital with an injury unrelated to the fire.
- A 24-year-old woman was taken to University of Chicago Hospital in good condition.
- A 2-year-old boy was taken to Comer Children's Hospital in good condition.
- A 7-year-old boy was taken to Comer Children's Hospital in critical condition.
According to authorities, 23 people were displaced by the fire.
"“There was a lot of smoke coming from outside in the back and I started smelling smoke and alarms kept going off,” building resident Kelly Day said.
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Day and her husband said they rushed out of their first floor unit with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
“I was scared, I was terrified, worried about other people that was in there because I seen some people hanging out from the third floor window,” she said.
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Cell phone video from overnight captured the intense flames and smoke coming from the top floor of the three-story building, with residents desperately trying to make their way out.
“When I woke up, the alarms were ringing with smoke all over the place and then people screaming about the kid upstairs who was suffocating,” resident Jean Carlos said.
Carlos lived on the building's second floor.
“I just opened the door and walked out the back. Because the front wall—everything burned,” Carlos said.
Jean Carlos told Telemundo Chicago he had just moved into building about five months ago after living in a city shelter.
People living across the street watched in disbelief.
A woman at the scene told NBC Chicago's Courtney Sisk that her child was injured in the fire.
The woman, who said her and her child are migrants from Venezuela, said they woke up to the flames and were not sure how it happened.
A nearby resident recalled what she saw early Saturday morning.
“They had like three people come out. It was like a girl, a man, and a baby and then like a few minutes later, it was a little baby that came out that was real burnt up,” Shaheem Hendricks said. “It made me tear up a little bit—that’s traumatizing.”
“They put out the fire in the first floor stairwell which then collapsed from the fire then they went to the rear made more rescues from the rear and let lines out to the second and third floor,” Chicago Fire Deputy 5th District Chief Scott Shawaluk said.
The cause of the fire is currently unknown and under investigation.
