‘Mother’s worst nightmare’

Jackie Ospina-Lopez had only run to the store for some groceries but when she walked back onto her street in Sunnyside, she saw what friends called “a mother’s worst nightmare.”
Flames were shooting from the apartment building, where she lived with her mother, Carmen Ospina, and her kids, and Carmen was on the street, clutching three children - six-year-old Isaiah, and one-year-old twins, Alec and Ana. Her three-year-old son, Carlos Joel (C.J.) was nowhere in site.
“It’s very hard for everyone to deal with this tragedy,” said Ospina-Lopez’s first cousin and neighbor, Iris Acevedo.
Acevedo said that she spoke to her cousin on Friday, August 10, the day after the fatal fire.
“I spoke to her this morning,” Acevedo said. “She understood what had happened, but she was very calm.”
Acevedo urged the mother of six to stay strong for her other children, even though she lost “her angel.” Ospina-Lopez’s two older children were at camp at the time of the fire, and likely will not find out about the accident for a week.
“I told her, ‘Thank God you saved three of them,’ ” Acevedo said, while hanging a memorial for her little cousin outside of the burned out building on 49th Street. “She just kept saying, ‘I lost my son. I lost my Blondie.’”
Fire officials believe that the blaze began when C.J.’s brother Isaiah accidentally lit a bed sheet hanging from the toddler’s bunk bed while playing with their mother’s lighter. Carmen, who was caring for the four kids, said in published reports that she rushed into the room after hearing an explosion, and the fire had already spread. She could only grab three of the children and rushed out of the building.
Long-time neighbor Todd Agnello said that he saw Carmen coming out of the building with the kids in her arms, yelling frantically in Spanish. When he looked up at the apartment, he said flames shooting from the building. Meanwhile onlookers and firefighters tried to climb up to the third-floor apartment, but were not able to reach C.J. in time.
According to Justin Tovar, a 10-year-old family friend, Carmen, her hair singed, was on the street, yelling, “What happened to the baby?” She had tried twice to go back into the fire, but could not get past the wall of flames.
Ospina-Lopez, after running back to the street from the grocery store, was just as distraught. When neighbors told her that that C.J. was still inside the burning building, she fainted.
“She was devastated,” said Agnello, who tried to give the frantic mother water to revive her.
“We were just praying for [firefighters] to find him,” Acevedo said.
Agnello said that if Ospina-Lopez or her husband had been at the scene of the fire early on, they also would have tried to rush into the burning building.
“That’s what made it really sad because you couldn’t go in,” Acevedo said, explaining that neighbors and friends watched helplessly from the street. In addition, fire fighters did not find the toddler until 10 p.m., three hours after the fire began.
“I feel really bad for the grandmother. She tried but she couldn’t get back in,” Agnello said. “That’s going to haunt her for the rest of her life.”