A Queens man ran into his burning home to save his elderly mother in a fast-moving blaze Monday, but neither made it out alive.
The two-alarm blaze broke out around 6 p.m. in the home on 164th St. near 109th Ave. in South Jamaica, police said.
A neighbor watched as the 63-year-old man escaped the flames, then turned back around when he realized his 86-year-old mother was still inside.
“He came out and he started saying, ‘My mother! My mother!” said Juan Carlo Velazquez, 68. “Some guys were holding him but he ran back inside.”
As smoke poured out of the house, neither the man, identified by relatives as Richard Jackson, nor his mother, Doris Jackson, made it back out.
Firefighters arrived on the scene within two and a half minutes, the FDNY said.
“From the side of the basement it was all fire and smoke and I could hear their alarm going off,” said neighbor Chantal Gbado. “The firefighters arrived and the fire already spread throughout the whole house.”
The mother and son were discovered in a second-floor bedroom. Inside the home was medical equipment, indicating the woman was unable to escape the flames herself, FDNY officials said on the scene.
“It was overwhelming,” Gbado, 45, said of the blaze. “They were good people. It’s horrifying.”
About a dozen mournful relatives arrived at the burned home Monday evening.
“She lived here since 1970 and she raised her three sons and two daughters here and I don’t know how many grandchildren,” said Doris Jackson’s grandson, who did not want to be named. “We have a large family and she was very loved.”
Doris Jackson worked for a telephone company until she retired in 1997 and her son, who took care of her, was former military, according to the grandson.
“There’s no way he would leave,” he said of Richard Jackson. “He always took care of her.”
About 100 firefighters from 25 units worked to knock down the flames, which appeared to have started in the basement, Deputy Chief George Healy said at a news conference at the scene Monday night.
“This is unreal,” Jackson’s grandson said. “It’s like a movie.”
The fire marshal will determine the cause of the fire, which was the latest in a rash of fatal fires across the city.
On Wednesday, a 5-year-old boy died in a blaze on Barnes Ave. near E. 226th St. in Wakefield, cops said.
His mother and great-grandmother were also injured in the fire but survived.
The boy’s death came two days after Rory DeCristoforo, 7, was killed in a house fire on the corner of Brookside Ave. and Alpine Court in Staten Island.
The girl was found in a bedroom of the home and was rushed to Richmond University Medical Center, where she died.
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