Smoke Detectors

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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More