2 Children Killed In Fire At Orange, NJ Home
ORANGE, N.J. (CBSNewYork) -- A house fire has claimed the lives of two young children in Orange, New Jersey.
There's not much left of the three-story home at 191 Central Pl. where the blaze broke out around 8:45 p.m. Friday.
Neighbors told CBS2's Ilana Gold the children -- 1-year-old Zion Tony and his 6-year-old sister Jayda McEachin -- were stuck on the third floor when the home became engulfed in flames.
"They didn't have a chance at life, and that's the sad part," said one neighbor.
Seven others, including the children's distraught mother, managed to escape the fire safely, WCBS 880's Sophia Hall reported.
Witnesses say the children's mother had just left for the bus station to visit relatives.
"They called her at the bus station and she came back, she freaked out," one witness told CBS2's Steve Langford.
The mother of the children had to be rushed to the hospital with burn injuries, Gold reported.
Neighbors also rushed to help as the dramatic scene unfolded.
2 Children Killed In Fire At Orange, NJ Home
A neighbor, Darryl Mayfield, told CBS2 how he came to the rescue of one little boy.
"We see smoke coming from the front. We ran down, we looked up — there was two kids up there, and they was waving. So we were like, 'Yo, jump!' Now man, they didn't jump," Mayfield said. "But the little sister, she threw her brother out. The girl threw the brother out and we caught him."
Neighbor Christian Willis told Stern by the time he got outside, the entire house was on fire and two kids were on the house yelling.
"They were screaming their mother, trying to say 'help! help!' And we were trying to get down there to them, but the fire was just burning out of control. It was too fast," he said.
Family Devastated After 2 Children Trapped In Orange House Fire Perish
The frigid temperatures made it particularly tough for firefighters to battle the fire as the water from hoses froze almost on impact, 1010 WINS Roger Stern reported.
"Our firefighters are out here. We've called neighboring towns as well. It's particularly tough when you have frozen pipes, and the water freezes basically on impact, and so it's good that we have a rotation of firefighters going in and out of the unit," Mayor Dwayne Warren said Friday night.
"We had no less than five people in the house and I believe three were treated at St. Barnabas Hospital for burn wounds and wounds associated with jumping out of the windows," Warren said Saturday.
A neighboring home was also damaged in the fire. Neighbors from that home were still waiting outside Saturday morning hoping to get back in to retrieve some possessions, Stern reported.
The cause of the blaze remains under investigation.
