A 25-year-old man trapped in the massive fire that tore through his Inwood apartment building died after leading others to safety — including his own mother, who is now intubated and unconscious in a hospital bed unaware of her son’s fate.
Lance Garcia led his mother, sister and grandfather out of their fourth-floor apartment on Dyckman St. near Broadway to a fire escape two floors below before turning around and going back upstairs to help more people, according to Garcia’s best friend, Kris Florentino.
“I just want him to be remembered as a hero,” Florentino said. “His personality was very quiet but he always kept an eye out for people.”
A tenant of the building was later arrested for criminally negligent homicide for allegedly sparking the May 4 blaze by flicking his lit cigarette into a pile of cardboard boxes at the bottom of the building’s staircase. A former fashion editor and her mother were also killed trying to escape the blaze.
Garcia’s mother and grandfather were rushed to the hospital and haven’t been conscious long enough since to be told of Garcia’s fate.
Lance Garcia is pictured with his sister (bottom-left) and mother. (GoFundMe)
“They don’t know,” said Florentino, 25, speaking to the Daily News from Seattle, where he moved for work recently. “His mom is still unconscious to this day. And his grandpa, I think, is just waking up. His mom is also my godmother. We’re all very close.”
“They’re both still in critical condition and she’s sedated and unconscious,” added Florentino.
“For a Dominican mom, if anything happens to your son, that’s the worst thing that could happen. In our culture, a mother not only loves their kids but they love their son very deeply. (He was) the man in the house too, that took care of a lot of things and supported the family.”
Garcia’s sister is the only family member who knows what happened to him — and now has the sad burden of telling the rest of the family.
Three people were killed in the apartment building fire on Dyckman St. near Broadway in Inwood, Manhattan, early May 4. (Theodore Parisienne / New York Daily News)
The windows in Garcia’s family’s apartment don’t lead out to a fire escape. He knew he had to get his family to the second floor where a fire escape was accessible. The building had racked up over 100 open violations.
Victor Arias was arrested Monday and charged with three counts of criminally negligent homicide. He was released without bail after being arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court the next day but ordered to surrender his passport and follow a strict curfew.
Arias, 29, was captured on video flicking his cigarette into the pile of boxes and then walking up the stairs at 12:27 a.m., according to court documents. Within five minutes, smoke began billowing above the boxes and within another 10 minutes the entire lobby was engulfed in flames, prosecutors say.
POOL
Victor Arias during his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday. (POOL)
The fire quickly spread through the first-floor hallway and up the building’s single staircase, FDNY officials said.
Arias fled the building without warning anyone, according to a police source.
Yolaine Diaz, a 48-year-old former fashion editor for People en Español, and her 73-year-old mother Ana Mirtha Lantigua collapsed in the smoke-filled stairwell near Garcia.
Diaz’s stepfather darted out onto the fire escape, survived and was seen by neighbors outside the building desperately searching for his wife and stepdaughter, heartbroken neighbors recalled.
Fourteen tenants were hospitalized after the fire, five with critical injuries. FDNY officials said.
Yolaine Diaz with her mother, Ana Mirtha. They were killed in a fire in their apartment building on Dyckman St. near Broadway in Inwood, Manhattan on May 4. (Instagram / chicwantedny)
Florentino and Garcia grew up in Inwood together and continued to talk daily after Florentino moved to Seattle for work. The two were even chatting on Discord the night of the fire.
“We were just cracking a lot of guy jokes,” Florentino said. But then Garcia went quiet.
A short while later, Florentino saw social media chatter about a fire on Dyckman St. He reached back out Garcia on Discord but got no response.
“Then my other friends were trying to reach out to him and he also didn’t respond,” Florentino said. “He just stopped talking — because he had to attend to the fire and save his family.”
“I was just literally going insane,” he added. “He’s somebody who I was closer with than my own blood relatives. I just wanted to make sure that he was okay and if he wasn’t okay at least finding out where he’s at.”
Lance Garcia (pictured) was one of three people killed in a fire in an apartment building on Dyckman St. near Broadway in Inwood early May 4. (GoFundMe)
An FDNY fire marshal discovered the three victims dead in the stairwell near the roof landing “burned throughout the entirety of their bodies,” about an hour after the fire broke out, according to the criminal complaint against Arias.
Garcia worked in patient care at Lenox Hill Hospital and hoped to become a radiologist. His sister, who lost everything in the fire and can’t move back, has launched a GoFundMe to help the family recover.
Florentino believes Arias should “rot and die in prison” for his actions.
“To be scummy and just throw a cigarette butt in your building that you live in is crazy,” Florentino said. “I’m completely disgusted.”
Victor Arias leaves Manhattan Criminal Court Tuesday. (Barry Williams/ New York Daily News)
The landlord of 207 Dyckman St., Jack Bick, who heads JanJan Realty, is on the Public Advocate’s list of the city’s 100 worst landlords of 2025.
That six-story building has had 117 open violations, which include defective self-closing doors on the fourth and sixth floors and nonfunctioning smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors, city records show.
Bick and JanJan Realty have been sued by the city’s Housing Preservation and Development for not fixing violations in some of the buildings he is responsible for.