NEW YORK (AP) -- Fire investigators believe a 6-year-old boy started a blaze that killed a veteran fire lieutenant and sent smoke coursing through a high-rise apartment building, forcing frightened residents to hide in their homes rather than risk fleeing through blackened hallways.
1010 WINS AUDIO: Terry Sheridan Reports
The fire sparked Thursday evening when the boy took some packaging from a recent gift he received and placed it atop a lit stove, which the family had been using to warm their Brooklyn apartment, fire officials said Friday.
Fearful of getting caught, the boy took the flaming package and tried to hid it under a bed in his 14th-floor home.
When the fire worsened, the family fled and left the front door open, causing smoke to spread throughout the 25-story building in the Ebbets Field Houses complex, authorities said.
Lt. John H. Martinson, 40, was found unconscious in the 14th-floor home, fire officials said. The 400-apartment building, which is on the site of the former Ebbets Field, was named for the ballpark that was once home to the Brooklyn Dodgers.
``He gave everything he had,'' Mayor Michael Bloomberg said late Thursday at Kings County Hospital Center. ``His death really breaks the hearts of all of us.''
``Telling the wife that her husband's not going to come home again is not an easy thing; it's very sad,'' said Bloomberg.
The couple has a 22-month-old son, and the wife is pregnant, Bloomberg said. ``These children will grow up never knowing their father.''
Martinson was among more than 100 firefighters called to the building, where smoke was so thick that resident Basil Patrick turned back after opening his door. ``It's black out there,'' Patrick, 56, said by telephone Thursday evening from his 24th floor home.
Simon Black said flames shot from the burning apartment's windows while smoke surged into the hallway.
``I don't know how they got in there,'' Black, 37, said of firefighters. ``They're supermen.''
Martinson was a police officer for four years before joining the Fire Department in 1993. His late father had been a member of the department, and ``he always wanted to be a firefighter like his father,'' said Thomas DeLisio, a longtime neighbor of the family's on Staten Island.
Martinson, his wife, Jessica, and their son, John Patrick, recently moved into what had been his grandfather's house, DeLisio said.
``It's a heartache,'' the neighbor said.
Fire authorities said the boy won't likely face charges since it appears to be an accident. But they warned people not to warm their homes with stoves and always close their doors in an event of a fire.
Martinson was the first city firefighter to die in the line of duty since Aug. 18, when Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino were trapped in a blaze in the condemned former Deutsche Bank building at ground zero. On June 21, Daniel Pujdak fell to his death from a ladder near the top of a four-story Brooklyn building where he was tackling a fire.
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