Deaths of 2 men found inside burning Brooklyn apartment eyed as homicides: sources

Two men who were found dead after a Brooklyn apartment fire on Sunday night may have been murdered, sources told The Post.

The deaths are being investigated as homicides after one of the two was found with a stab wound to the neck and the other was found with head trauma inside of the Bath Beach building at 159 Bay 29th Street, according to the sources.

Neighbors are now wondering whether the blaze that broke out at around 6:45 p.m. had been intentionally set.

“When we went downstairs the flames were coming out like a rocket ship,” said one neighbor who lives above the apartment where the fire started.

He said his girlfriend, Kim, heard yelling in the apartment below before the fire erupted. Their smoke detectors never went off, they said.

“The flames were coming out the windows and the smoke was coming up the stairs,” he said. “If my girlfriend didn’t hear the yelling, who knows if I would still be alive.”

Others tried to help the people inside the burning apartment as they fled, but were forced to abandon them as the flames raged hotter.

“I could see into the apartment. I could see a man standing in the apartment on fire,” said Jonathan

Irizarry, 50, who lives in the unit next door. “I started running with pots of water, trying to clear the guy inside a path. He was standing in the living room.”

From the look he got inside the apartment Irizarry thought the pattern of the burn didn’t make sense — and led him to believe it may have been intentionally started.

“The fire was around the house, not a continuous blaze. It looked like someone lit it because the fire was in three different sections at the same time without being connected,” he said.

“There were major gaps between the fires — in the kitchen, the living room and the walkway from the living room to the front door.”

Irizarry described the neighbor who lived in the apartment as a “big drinker,” and claimed that he’d been arguing “for the past few days” with a friend who frequently dropped by and caused problems every time.

“He comes every month, every two months and stays for a few days then disappears. It always ends up in them fighting and him being thrown out. Sometimes he sleeps in the hallway. First they’re drinking, then they’re fighting. Yesterday the same situation happened.”

About three hours before the fire, the friend knocked on Irizarry’s door after being thrown out of the apartment and had to be told to leave, he claimed.

“He was just standing there staring at me like a maniac,” Irizarry said. “A few hours after that everything was just chaos.”

Several neighbors described the man who lived in the apartment as a longtime resident in his early 60s, who spoke Russian primarily and was generally kind but frequently drunk.

“We drank together, smoked cigarettes, smoked marijuana and hung out. He had a lot of friends over. It was a party house,” Kim said.

“They get drunk a lot,” said another neighbor, 51-year-old Mohammad Hossain.

Others told CBS 2 there had been “three of four incidents” over the last few years where people in the apartment got drunk and fell asleep, leading to calls to the fire department after food left on the stove caught fire.

It remains unclear whether an arson investigation is also on the table. Tenants were finally let back into the home around 1:30 a.m. in the morning.

“The whole apartment building smells like smoke,” Hossain said.

Additional reporting by Snejana Farberov