Earlier this month, 17 people, most of them of Gambian descent, died from inhaling smoke in their home, a 19-story apartment building in the West Bronx. The tragedy evoked the city’s long history of failing to provide safe housing for migrants.
At the end of the first week in January, a symbolic time of new beginnings and future plans, seventeen people died from inhaling smoke in their home, a nineteen-story apartment building in the West Bronx. Eight of them were children; one was two years old. A space heater in a third-floor apartment started the fire. When the residents of the apartment fled, their front door stayed open, despite having an automatic closing mechanism, which city regulations require.
“This is really traumatizing,” Momodou Sawaneh, the founder of the Gambian Youth Organization, which is coördinating a relief effort for the victims and their families, told me. “This is bad. We knew people who lived in that building, and they are part of us. If they were here, they would be volunteering, they would be working with us, teen-agers, kids.” When city leaders, including, the new Mayor, heard the news, they expressed a collective grief.
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