A Queens community is in shock after a fire ripped through a home early Sunday, killing a 95-year-old woman and injuring two other family members.<\/p>\n
Crews boarded up the windows of the home on quiet 202nd Street in St. Albans, where the family had made memories for decades.<\/p>\n
“I have no words right now”<\/p>\n
Neighbors said they heard sirens just before 8 a.m. Arriving FDNY crews quickly got the fire under control.<\/p>\n
“We come outside and look into houses, engulfed in flames. Not smoke — flames, orange flames,” one said.<\/p>\n
Janai Grant said her grandmother, Joyce Bunkum, died in the fire, and that the blaze also left her 68-year-old mother, Paula, and 6-year-daughter, Aylani, critically injured.<\/p>\n
“I’m numb. It’s … it’s … I have no words right now,” Grant said.<\/p>\n
Grant later reflected on the loss of her grandmother, saying, “She lived a very long life. Now she’s with God in heaven. She’s a God-fearing woman.”<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t her time to go”<\/p>\n
Grant said Bunkum was like the family glue, holding everything together.<\/p>\n
“I remember her always having that glass of wine with ice and spinning it around with her fingers and being the life of the party and dancing,” Grant said. “It’s very unfortunate. It wasn’t her time to go.”<\/p>\n
Grant said her mother and daughter are both in critical condition but are stable.<\/p>\n
“Hopefully, God got me. I’ll be okay. We’ll get through this. My daughter will pull through. Hopefully, my mother will pull through,” Grant said.<\/p>\n
The fire marshal will determine the cause of the fire.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Queens community is in shock after a fire ripped through a home early Sunday, killing a 95-year-old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49911,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[194,1978,9,11,10,122,1236],"class_list":{"0":"post-49910","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-fdny","9":"tag-house-fire","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-headlines","12":"tag-new-york-news","13":"tag-queens","14":"tag-st-albans"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}