NEW YORK — Before the screams started, Dervie Mapp heard loud popping noises outside her Brooklyn apartment. She bolted out of bed to the kitchen window and watched as a neighboring building came crashing down, raining three stories of bricks and twisted metal.
Stunned survivors cried out amid thick dust and piles of rubble that moments earlier had been people’s homes.
“I saw the whole thing come down,” Mapp, a 67-year-old retiree, told The Associated Press on Thursday. “People were running up out of the pit, screaming and hollering. I couldn’t believe it — I froze.”
The deadly collapse that occurred without warning Wednesday afternoon took down a building that housed a store selling medical uniforms on the ground level and four apartments on the floors above.
At least eight people perished, including two children. The dead included two men from Ecuador, José Luis Caguana Cosquillo and Gabriel Ariolfo Siguencia Yupa, according to the Ecuadorian consulate in New York. Officials said 18 others suffered injuries.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday described the victims as “parents and children, young families building their lives in our city and immigrants from Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Trinidad and beyond.”
Among those hurt were four firefighters assisting with rescue efforts, which continued Thursday as crews searched for survivors through heaps of debris that included mattresses, a broken sink and a refrigerator with its door missing and food jumbled inside. Vinyl records, shoes and other personal belongings littered the rubble.
James Williams said he heard loud banging at the construction site all day Wednesday as he worked at a deli across the street. He said he noticed bricks falling from a building next to the site. Then the whole building fell down.
The collapse ripped away a wall shared with an adjacent building, which remained standing with the interiors of its apartments exposed — closets crammed with clothing, a stuffed bear sitting atop a pile of shoes and laundry heaped on a pink bedspread.
Security camera video from the building showed an interior stairway shaking as the wall beside it fell in a loud crash and a cloud of dust. The camera later recorded a firefighter helping a resident descend the same stairs above a yawning abyss of debris.
“Nice and easy,” the firefighter said as the person clutched both his hand and the railing.
Despite the chaos, construction workers who had barely escaped with their lives turned around and began clawing through the wreckage to free survivors, said Mamdani. He said their swift actions saved lives.
The mayor said Thursday that two construction workers were among the dead.
They included Caguana Cosquillo, a 26-year-old immigrant from Ecuador who had a young child and pregnant wife, his brother, Carlos Caguana, told WNBC-TV.
“He was the sole provider for the family,” Caguana said, adding that his brother's wife was devastated.
“She’s completely overwhelmed,” he said, “and can’t even find the words to speak.”
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Rico reported from Atlanta. AP journalists Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa; and Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, contributed.
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