{"id":797093,"date":"2026-05-15T01:41:25","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T01:41:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/797093\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T01:41:25","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T01:41:25","slug":"he-died-saving-his-mother-from-a-raging-nyc-fire-she-doesnt-know-that-hes-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/797093\/","title":{"rendered":"He died saving his mother from a raging NYC fire. She doesn’t know that he’s gone."},"content":{"rendered":"

A 25-year-old man trapped in the massive fire that tore through his Inwood apartment building<\/a> died after leading others to safety \u2014 including his own mother, who is now intubated and unconscious in a hospital bed unaware of her son\u2019s fate.<\/p>\n

Lance Garcia led his mother, sister and grandfather out of their fourth-floor apartment on Dyckman St. near Broadway<\/a> to a fire escape two floors below before turning around and going back upstairs to help more people, according to Garcia\u2019s best friend, Kris Florentino.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just want him to be remembered as a hero,\u201d Florentino said. \u201cHis personality was very quiet but he always kept an eye out for people.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s staircase. A former fashion editor and her mother were also killed trying to escape the blaze.<\/p>\n

Garcia\u2019s mother and grandfather were rushed to the hospital and haven\u2019t been conscious long enough since to be told of Garcia\u2019s fate.<\/p>\n

\"LanceLance Garcia is pictured with his sister (bottom-left) and mother. (GoFundMe)<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t know,\u201d said Florentino, 25, speaking to the Daily News from Seattle, where he moved for work recently. \u201cHis mom is still unconscious to this day. And his grandpa, I think, is just waking up. His mom is also my godmother. We\u2019re all very close.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re both still in critical condition and she\u2019s sedated and unconscious,\u201d added Florentino.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor a Dominican mom, if anything happens to your son, that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Garcia\u2019s sister is the only family member who knows what happened to him \u2014 and now has the sad burden of telling the rest of the family.<\/p>\n

\"ThreeThree 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)<\/p>\n

The windows in Garcia\u2019s family\u2019s apartment don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0 billowing above the boxes and within another 10 minutes the entire lobby was engulfed in flames, prosecutors say.<\/p>\n

\"Victor<\/p>\n

POOL<\/p>\n

Victor Arias during his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court on Tuesday. (POOL)<\/p>\n

The fire quickly spread through the first-floor hallway and up the building\u2019s single staircase, FDNY officials said.<\/p>\n

Arias fled the building without warning anyone, according to a police source.<\/p>\n

Yolaine Diaz, a 48-year-old former fashion editor for People en Espa\u00f1ol<\/a>, and her 73-year-old mother Ana Mirtha Lantigua collapsed in the smoke-filled stairwell near Garcia.<\/p>\n

Diaz\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Fourteen tenants were hospitalized after the fire, five with critical injuries. FDNY officials said.<\/p>\n

\"YolaineYolaine 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)<\/p>\n

Florentino and Garcia grew up in Inwood together and continued to talk daily after Florentino moved to Seattle for work.\u00a0The two were even chatting on Discord the night of the fire.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were just cracking a lot of guy jokes,\u201d Florentino said. But then Garcia went quiet.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen my other friends were trying to reach out to him and he also didn\u2019t respond,\u201d Florentino said. \u201cHe just stopped talking \u2014 because he had to attend to the fire and save his family.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just literally going insane,\u201d he added. \u201cHe\u2019s 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\u2019t okay at least finding out where he\u2019s at.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"LanceLance 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)<\/p>\n

An FDNY fire marshal discovered the three victims dead in the stairwell near the roof landing \u201cburned throughout the entirety of their bodies,\u201d about an hour after the fire broke out, according to the criminal complaint against Arias.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t move back, has launched a GoFundMe<\/a> to help the family recover.<\/p>\n

Florentino believes Arias should \u201crot and die in prison\u201d for his actions.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be scummy and just throw a cigarette butt in your building that you live in is crazy,\u201d Florentino said. \u201cI\u2019m completely disgusted.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"VictorVictor Arias leaves Manhattan Criminal Court Tuesday. (Barry Williams\/ New York Daily News)<\/p>\n

The landlord of 207 Dyckman St., Jack Bick, who heads JanJan Realty, is on the Public Advocate\u2019s list of the city\u2019s\u00a0100 worst landlords of 2025.<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Bick and JanJan Realty have been sued by the city\u2019s Housing Preservation and Development for not fixing violations in some of the buildings he is responsible for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 25-year-old man trapped in the massive fire that tore through his Inwood apartment building died after leading…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":797094,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,2451,3059,5295,1370,728,5249,405,403,5294,50,5226,5225,5228,5227,5293,5321,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-797093","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-city","10":"tag-county","11":"tag-crime-and-public-safety","12":"tag-latest-headlines","13":"tag-local-news","14":"tag-manhattan","15":"tag-new-york","16":"tag-new-york-city","17":"tag-new-york-county","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-newyork","20":"tag-newyorkcity","21":"tag-ny","22":"tag-nyc","23":"tag-nyc-crime","24":"tag-sub-county-region","25":"tag-united-states","26":"tag-united-states-of-america","27":"tag-unitedstates","28":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","29":"tag-us","30":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116576053254461498","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/797094"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}