The day after his 12th birthday, Muhammad Drammeh died along with his mother and two of his sisters.
Muhammad Drammeh’s 12th birthday was on Saturday. He celebrated with his brother and sisters at an indoor trampoline park in Queens.
The day after, Muhammad, his mother and two of his sisters were killed in a fire at a Bronx apartment building that left at least 17 people dead. His 16-year-old brother remains hospitalized, in stable condition.
His father and another sister, Fatima Drammeh, also survived. Neither was home when fire-fueled smoke swept through the building.
On Tuesday, Ms. Drammeh, 23, recalled her final moments with her mother and one of her younger sisters, before she left the apartment for Muhammad’s birthday party. “I just said bye to them, because we were leaving the house,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be my last time seeing them.”
Her father, Ishak Drammeh, 57, had been away on business in Columbus, Ohio, when the fire killed his son, his wife, Fatoumata Drammeh, 50, and two daughters, Fatoumala, 21, and Nyumaaisha, who went by Aisha, 19. He confirmed their deaths.
Mr. Drammeh stood outside the mosque where he worships, Masjid-Ur-Rahmah, on Webster Avenue, on Tuesday and remembered his children. Fatoutmala, he said, was about to graduate from a college in Buffalo, where she was studying international economics.
“She was a very good girl,” he said. “Muhammad was a good boy too. Nyumaaisha was a good girl, she finished her high school; next month she is supposed to start her college.”
As he spoke, Mr. Drammeh was embraced by community members and a police detective. He had barely eaten or slept in three days, he said, and had not yet seen their bodies.
“It’s not easy, your own child,” Mr. Drammeh said. “Now they just go; you never see them again until the day of judgment.”
Like many of the fire victims, the family had West African roots: Mr. Drammeh is from Gambia; the couple married in 1994.
Musa Kabba, the imam of the mosque, where most congregants are Gambian, said that about a dozen of his members may have died in the fire.
The authorities released a partial list of the victims on Tuesday night. In addition to the Drammeh family, it included: Sera Janneh, 27; Seydou Toure, 12; Haouwa Mahamadou, 5; Haji Dukuray, 49; Haja Dukuray, 37; Mustapha Dukuray, 12; Mariam Dukuray, 11; Fatoumata Dukuray, 5; Omar Jambang, 6; and Fatoumata Tunkara, 43. The Police Department gave a different spelling for the Dukuray family name, but relatives spelled the name as Dukuray in interviews with The New York Times.
The day of the fire, more than 60 fire victims were taken to four different hospitals in the Bronx. Seventeen of them died within hours, all from severe smoke inhalation. By Monday, the city said that 15 of the injured remained in critical condition.
City officials said that the fire started in a third-floor duplex, where a space heater that had been on continuously for several days burst into flames late Sunday morning.
The apartment’s self-closing front door failed to close and another door on the 15th floor that was also open created a flue, officials said, sucking smoke upward so thickly through an internal staircases that some of those who tried to flee down its steps collapsed and died. The 19-story tower was constructed in 1972, after city regulations no longer mandated exterior fire escapes and the building was not required to have a sprinkler system.
As smoke crept up to their sixth floor apartment, the Janneh family rushed into the stairwell, hoping to flee to safety. But as they ran down the smoke-choked staircase, one of them, Sera, 27, collapsed, her sister, Mareama Janneh said.
Sera had been a student at Lehman College with an effervescent personality. Her family spent Tuesday arranging her funeral. A sister, Isatou Janneh, 18, remained hospitalized, still battling the effects of smoke inhalation.
Another sister, Mareama Janneh, said that Sera had been active in the Gambian Youth Organization, a Bronx-based nonprofit that focuses on youth leadership, where she helped distribute food to community members and helped organize the Ms. Gambia pageant.
Sera was studying to become a social worker because she believed “we needed more of that in our community, especially in the African community,” Ms. Janneh, 31, said. “She was just a good person to be around.”
On Tuesday, Breanna Elleston, 27, was mourning Sera, whom she described as having been her best friend since the two were students at the High School for Health Professions and Human Services in Manhattan.
“Every milestone that I’ve ever had in my life, she’s always been there for me,” Ms. Elleston said, choking back tears. The two enjoyed visiting museums, she said, and attending concerts by Sera’s favorite musicians, like Tyler the Creator, Playboi Carti and D’Angelo. “Even if it was hard, she would drop everything and be there for me.”
Above all, Sera was her cheerleader: When Ms. Elleston was displaced from her home by a fire last summer, she shared her harrowing experience on social media. Sera praised her for being so open. “You’re a soldier,” Sera wrote in a message Ms. Elleston shared. “The life transitions are so unimaginable but we’re still holding on.”
At around 2:30 p.m. on Tuesday more than two dozen students poured out of the Angelo Patri Middle School, next door to the fire-damaged apartment building, and streamed across the street, trailed by teachers and school staff.
Over their winter coats many wore laminated badges with pictures on both sides of an eighth grade classmate, Seydou Toure, who died in the fire.
The students tacked a white poster board with a smiling photo of Seydou to a wall, above a cardboard box shielding prayer candles from the wind. They quickly filled the poster with colored handwritten messages and drawings of broken hearts.
“They wanted to do this, and for me it’s all about, ‘What they want to do? How they want to express their emotions?’” the principal, Angel Ortega, said. “I give them the space and the freedom to do that because that’s really important, validating their voice.”
Mr. Ortega recalled an interaction with Seydou, on the last day before the December holiday break, when the school was reeling from Covid, with infected teachers out sick and many classes being canceled. “He was a little bit upset because they weren’t going to have gym,” Mr. Ortega said. “But then I said, ‘No, no, I’m going to make it work. I’ll make sure that you guys have gym.’”
“‘You better,’” Mr. Ortega recalled the boy replying. “His friends were like, ‘What are you doing? You don’t say that to Mr. Ortega!’” Seydou quickly apologized, his principal said.
“I loved him dearly,” Mr. Ortega said, looking at the boy beaming from the poster. “He always had that smile.”
Three days after the fire, Fatima Drammeh also clung to memories — of her little brother’s birthday celebration at the Launch Trampoline Park in Queens.
“We were all just jumping around, racing, we were trying to race on the obstacle courses,” she said. “It’s a sweet memory that I have.”
Sean Piccoli and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.
