A 34-year-old mother and her 7-year-old son died yesterday in a raging early morning blaze that left their Queens home a charred shell.
Deomettie Subreieh, a single mother, had moved into the semi-attached, two-story wood-frame house on 112th Street in Richmond Hill with her son, Rajiv Harryram, just four months ago, said their landlord, who did not want to be identified.
Residents of two other apartments in the building managed to get out safely, said FDNY spokesman James Maguire.
The cause of the fire – which was so intense it jumped a driveway and spread to the house next door – is under investigation.
It took 106 firefighters two hours to put out the flames. Four firefighters were treated at Jamaica Hospital for minor wounds.
A resident of the block said she heard a loud crackle of flames just after 2 a.m.
“It sounded like firecrackers,” she said.
Another neighbor, who ran out of her home when she heard the commotion, said her first thought was for the people inside.
“Oh, my God. I was hoping, thinking that everybody could get out safe,” she said.
Subreieh, a schoolteacher in Guyana, came to the United States about 10 years ago to join her husband and to make a better life for herself, said Phulo Ranjit, her former sister-in-law.
Though the marriage ended in divorce, she, her former husband and Ranjit all remained in touch, even after she met another man and had a son.
“We’re all still friends. We knew her since she was a little girl back home,” Ranjit said.
“She had her own life, and she was happy living it with her son.”
Subreieh, who worked in a drugstore in Queens, was a devoted young mother who was always a “happy, jovial person,” Ranjit said.