3 Men Die in Fire in Overcrowded House in Queens

The house in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood had no working smoke detectors and was crammed with tenants, fire officials said.

In a house on an affluent street in Queens, a tenant woke up early on Easter Sunday choking on black smoke.

A fire had broken out on the first floor, where he lived in a cramped single room. “There were people screaming, jumping out the windows,” the tenant, Tony Rock, 40, said hours later. He described the scene in one word: “Hell.”

Three men died in the fire, which started just after 1:30 a.m. on Chevy Chase Street in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood, a three-minute drive from the mansion where President Trump grew up.

Firefighters arrived at the scene in less than four minutes, but the blaze ascended to the attic very quickly, fire officials said at a news conference on Sunday. The victims, men who were 45, 52 and 67 years old, died at the home, the police said. Eight other people were taken to area hospitals and were stable, the police said.

The exact cause of the fire is still under investigation. But officials said that the house was overcrowded with people, with makeshift partition walls creating small rooms.

Possessions also blocked the stairways, and there were too many extension cords, the fire commissioner, Robert S. Tucker, said at the news conference. There were no working smoke detectors, he added.

There have been at least 55 complaints about the property filed with the city’s Buildings Department since 2003, according to public records. Most of them were regarding illegal conversions, and all of the cases were listed as resolved or closed.

Between 2009 and 2010, the department received 12 complaints about overcrowding, including that the home had been converted into a hotel and that people were living in illegal apartments in the basement and attic. The department received other complaints nearly every year through 2020 about illegal conversions to accommodate more occupants, the records show.

The most recent complaint, filed in 2023, was about an illegal basement apartment and a makeshift wall that had been placed in the kitchen to house another tenant. An inspector visited the house twice that year to investigate but was unable to gain access, so the case was closed, according to the records. The Buildings Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the complaints.

The modest brick and clapboard house stood out among large, well-kept Craftsman and Tudor homes, neighbors said on Sunday. Steve Fischer, who has lived across the street for 32 years, said it had long been overfilled with tenants.

“It was a disaster waiting to happen,” Mr. Fischer, 67, said.

On Sunday, Mr. Rock, who has lived in the house for five years, paying $1,000 a month for his room, dived out of his first-floor window to escape. He estimated that at least a dozen men lived in the house. Inside its acrid-smelling, wrecked interior, a sofa bed and two cots could be seen in one small first-floor room.

Another tenant, Adham Ammar, had lived in the house for seven years. He said he had found his room listed on Craigslist, and paid $700 to rent it.

Mr. Ammar, who had been out with friends in Manhattan on Saturday night, returned around 5 a.m. to find his belongings covered in soot and ash.

“It’s devastating,” he said as he filled IKEA bags with soiled clothes and a stack of paperwork. He hoped his immigration papers were among the salvaged documents.

Mr. Ammar, 29, who is from Egypt, said many of the residents were born outside the United States. He said the house was overcrowded but that he had stayed because it was affordable and close to Queens College, which he attended. “This is the cost of trying to find something affordable and convenient,” he said.

Mr. Ammar and a neighbor, Jaspal Sidhu, identified the landlord as Misbaah Mahmood, who shares an address in Elmhurst, Queens, with the woman listed as the owner of the property on Chevy Chase Street, according to public records.

Mr. Sidhu said Mr. Mahmood knocked on his door last year. Mr. Mahmood said he was running for New York State Assembly and asked for his vote.

“I told him, ‘Come on, man, you can’t even clean up your house,’” Mr. Sidhu said, recalling the conversation. “‘How are you going to clean up the city?’”

Mr. Mahmood could not immediately be reached for comment on Sunday. Mr. Ammar said Mr. Mahmood lived in the rear main floor of the house and suffered smoke inhalation from the fire.

Mr. Sidhu, 56, saw the house engulfed by smoke and flames. He later brought shoes, clothes, water, tea and bread to several tenants who escaped, he said.

“Just trying to help,” he said. “It was hard to believe.”

Liam Stack contributed reporting.