Thomas Breen photo
Tenants Hasson Hallet and Dershaya Hargrove describe surviving the fire — and slumlord’s indifference at 150 West (below).
Dershaya Hargrove and Hasson Hallet were asleep in the groundfloor bedroom of a carved up Hill rooming house when a loud noise jolted them awake.
That noise wasn’t the blaring of a fire alarm. It was a neighbor pounding on their bedroom window, shouting “Fire!” and urging them to leave the burning house as upstairs tenants jumped for their lives out of second and third-story windows.
Hargrove and Hallet recalled that terrifying scene on Monday afternoon, less than 36 hours after the two-family house at 150 West St. burst into flames in the early hours of Sunday morning — and about their dealings with a slumlord who they said hung up on them when they called him during the blaze.
Two tenants died during the fire. A third is in the hospital in critical condition. Another 13, including Hargrove and Hallet, were displaced. (Click here to read a previous article about the dramatic fire, the heroic rescue response by local firefighters and paramedics, and interviews with West Street neighbors.)
Burnt out second-story windows at 150 West.
Red Cross has put Hargrove and Hallet up at the Three Judges motel in Amity through Tuesday morning, and another tenant named Rontae Hunter up at the Regal Inn for that same period.
Once that stint in the motel is over, Hargrove said, she has no idea where she and her husband will sleep at night.
“We’re homeless,” she said, standing outside the burnt-out wreck of her former home on Monday. “We’ve only got the shoes on our feet and the shirts on our back.”
Hargrove and Halley said they’ve lived on every floor of the two-and-a-half story house since moving in in 2017. The story they told about conditions there mirrored those told in court documents (described later in this story).
Hargrove.
Hargrove and Halley first lived in the third-story apartment (where Sunday morning’s fire ultimately broke out), where they paid $600 per month. They then moved into a smaller second-floor bedroom, where they paid $500 per month. They then moved into an even smaller first-floor bedroom, where they paid $250 per month.
She and several neighbors at nearby houses said that the third-floor apartment was a well known hangout for crack and heroin users and dealers at the time of the fire.
“We stay away from that drama,” Hargrove said.
She said she wasn’t woken up by a smoke alarm on Sunday morning, but rather by a neighbor who was out on the building’s front porch and banging on her bedroom’s window pane, calling for her and her husband to wake up and get out of the building.
Fire Capt. Sean Reynolds — one of the firefighters who found and carted out the bodies of the tenants on the third floor — also told the Independent that he did not hear any smoke alarms during his time in the building.
Fire Chief John Alston Jr. said at a City Hall press conference Monday afternoon that smoke alarms were present in the building — but “whether or not they were effective” is an open question.
Landlord Hangs Up
“Fire! Fire!” she remembered hearing people calling amidst the chaotic scene, as well as “Jump! Jump!.”
As she and her husband rushed out of bed and out the door, she looked up and saw fire coming through a vent in her bedroom’s ceiling.
When she got outside, she saw upstairs tenants jumping out of second and third-story windows. And she saw the firefighters bring out the two bodies of the men who ultimately died during the fire. They laid the bodies in front of the house, she said, and tried to resuscitate them, but to no avail.
“It was the toughest thing we’ve ever had to go through,” she said.
While out on the street, as the firefighters fought the blaze and neighbors watched with terror and awe, Hargrove said she called the building’s new landlord, John Farrar of the Bronx, who bought the building in March.
She said the landlord almost immediately hung up on her after hearing about the fire.
“He said he didn’t want nothing to do with this building,” she said.
Farrar could not be reached for comment by the publication time of this article.
Sheila Ford, Hasson Hallet’s mother, told the Independent that she had been urging her son to move from the third floor because she feared he would be trapped upstairs in case of an emergency. The house was chopped up into several dwelling units on each floor, with only one exit, she said. “I kept telling him, ‘I’m so scared something will happen, because there’s only one way out.’ It’s a two-family house, and they chopped it up in a bunch of rooms.”
New Landlord “No Better”
Dara Mason.
Dara Mason, who has lived across the street from 150 West for five years, said that paramedics and police are always rushing to respond to overdoses and fights in the third-story apartment.
She said the new landlord hasn’t treated the building or the tenants or the neighbors with any more care than the old landlord, Dorjan Jashari of Yonkers, N.Y.. “He ain’t no better,” she said. “He fights with the tenants in front of the building.”
Luz De Leon.
Luz DeLeon, who has lived next door to 150 West for 15 years, said that, even a day later, the trauma of having seen the house next door on fire and tenants jumping out of upper-story windows hasn’t abated. She was asleep in her groundfloor apartment when she heard people shouting about a fire, and she and her husband rushed out to the porch to see what was going on
“I heard people shouting, ‘Jump! Jump! Jump!” she said.
Howard Boyd.
Howard Boyd, the chair of the Hill North management team, was on the block all morning and afternoon Monday, talking with neighbors about how they’re holding up, encouraging them to come to management team meetings to talk and plan with fellow community members about how to make the Hill a happier, safer, cleaner place to live.
“It’s a shock to the community,” he said about the fire. “It’s not that often that we get this in the Hill.”
He said he would like to start hosting workshops and community conversations through the management team about how to tell if smoke alarms are working and active, about how to know if one’s home has adequate egresses in the case of a fire.
Mayor Toni Harp said the fatal fire will spark a review at City Hall as well.
“Do we need to take another look at how we figure out how some of our buildings are being transformed into these unsafe settings for people? We absolutely do,” Harp said during her latest appearance on WNHH FM’s “Mayor Monday” program. “My staff will be thinking about that and working on it. It was changes made to that building that lost people their lives. We have to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
History Of Allegations & Evictions
A review of state judicial records shows that former owner Jashari filed four separate eviction suits against tenants at 150 West St. between when he purchased the property in 2017 and when he sold it in 2018. Click here, here, here, and here for links to those eviction suits.
He and his Yonkers-based business partner Valbona Jashari filed an additional six eviction suits between 2016 and 2018 against tenants living at their other two Hill properties at 649 Washington Ave. and 78 Third St. Click here, here, here, here, here, and here for links to those eviction suits.
In one of those suits, Jashari sued to evict a first-floor tenant named Tammie Brunson in March 2018 for not paying her $600 monthly rent.
Per Jashari’s complaint, Brunson moved into the first-floor bedroom on Feb 1. She didn’t pay her following month’s rent on March 1. Jashari filed for eviction on March 8.
In an answer filed with the court on April 14, Brunson said she had actually been living at 150 West since the previous December. She explained why she didn’t pay the $600 she owed on March 1. Click here to read her answer in full.
“I stop paying my rent because it wasn’t no heat in the building and [Jashari] would not fix nothing in the building until we had to call LCI. And LCI say if he didn’t fix the building, they say they will shut it down.”
Beyond the five lines allotted for the defendant to provide additional information on the court form, Brunson went on to write another full page of complaints about Jashari’s indifference to both the maintenance of the building and to the drug market that functioned out of the third floor.
She said Jashari came by the building, and actually turned down the heat to such an extent that she almost “froze in the winter” and her brother had to bring her a heater.
Then, in the kitchen cabinets, she said, Jashari “spray some pepper spray in there for the rats and I told him to stop spraying that stuff because I have ashthma and bronchitis and it stay in my throat for 3 days and he does it at night when we cooking.
“Now when I move in [the] room was nice and quiet.” But now, she said, it’s a “trap house” with “drugs coming out the building in the middle of the night and he knew about it and he came around talking to the other roommate, which was working at a gun shop, and that was scary because it bad enough [with] the drug coming for the 3rd floor on down and he knew what was going on and he just [didn’t] care anymore.”
That case ended with both landlord and tenant signing a stipulation, whereby Brunson agreed to vacate her apartment by the end of May 2018 without having to pay anything further in rent.
Jashari couldn’t be reached for comment.
Markeshia Ricks contributed reporting.
Click on the Facebook Live videos to watch the full episode of WNHH FM’s “Mayor Monday” program, and to watch a Monday afternoon press conference about the fire held by the mayor, the fire chief, and the police chief.
WNHH’s “Mayor Monday” is made possible with the support of Gateway Community College and Berchem Moses P.C.
Drugs, code violations, no heat, and STILL they don't move?!?!? Really? Not paying rent was the way to go? It surely undermines your cry for pity.
Real slumlords don't get bothered by the authorities or the neighbors. Wonder why??????