Residents Flee Late Night Fire In Four-Story Brownstone

In an apartment on the top floor of 127 Lafayette Ave. in Fort Greene, Gabriel Reilich grabbed his laptop. On the first floor, Meredith Turner grabbed her cat, Tatiana. 

Both fled a late night fire that started in a third-floor apartment in their building just after 9 p.m. Thursday with the things nearest and dearest to them.

Nine fire companies responded to the scene on Lafayette between Cumberland and S. Oxford streets. A search of an apartment at the back of the four-story brownstone where the fire began failed to the turn up the unit's resident, descibed by neighbors as a woman in her 50s.

According to a fire official, the apartment where the fire began was "filled with a lot of stuff." The fire was extinguished by 10 p.m. No injuries were reported, according to the FDNY. 

The cause of the blaze is still under investigation. 

Reilich said he was home when the fire began. 

"I smelled smoke. Then the fire alarm went off," he said. "I could see the flames underneath her door."

Reilich then called 911 and evacuated along with a half-dozen other residents, who congregated outside the building waiting for word that they could reenter.

According to fire officials at the scene, the damage was confined to the third-floor unit. 

Standing outside of the building, Turner said she was glad that everyone, including her cat, was safe.

"She was really freaked out, so I had the firemen promise that she would be O.K. before I left," she said of Tatiana, who refused to be carried out of the building—prefering to hide underneath Turner's bed instead. "I'm an animal lover."