A three-storey building in Brooklyn collapsed into an open construction pit on Wednesday afternoon, killing eight people — six adults and two children — and injuring at least 18 others, New York City officials said on Thursday.
The building, at 1321 Flatbush Avenue in the Flatbush neighbourhood, gave way shortly after 4pm on Wednesday, folding into the excavation site next door at 2625 Bedford Avenue, where construction crews had been digging. The 96-year-old building held four apartments above a commercial space at street level.
By Thursday afternoon, rescue crews had finished searching the site. “There are no words for a loss of this magnitude,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement on X. Six people died at the scene; two more died in hospital. The dead included two construction workers and two children, aged nine and ten. At least 18 people were injured, among them seven children and four firefighters. One person remained in critical condition on Thursday.
More than 250 firefighters and paramedics worked through the night in heavy rain, digging by hand in places where the rubble was too unstable for machinery. Fire department Chief of Department John Esposito compared the search to the recovery operation at the World Trade Center after the September 11 attacks — a measure of how dangerous and painstaking the work was.
The people who were lost
Officials released the names of seven of the eight victims on Thursday. Among them was José Luis Caguana, a 26-year-old construction worker from Ecuador who had moved to the United States about six years earlier. He leaves behind a young child and a wife expecting their second baby. His brother told reporters the loss felt “like a blow to the heart”.
The two children killed were Kevin Santiago Reyes Gonzalez, 10, and Nicole Daniela Salvala Rodriguez, 9. The other adults named were Mamadou Barry, 23; Juan Daniel Salvada Guzman, 31; Edgar Sapon, 26; and Gabriel Siguencia, 22. An eighth victim, a man in his early thirties, had not been publicly identified.
Witnesses described construction workers who had escaped the collapse running back into the rubble to pull out their friends — some of them, one account said, barely alive themselves.
What investigators are asking
The cause of the collapse is under investigation by the city’s Department of Buildings and the police. What is already known is troubling: an inspection report filed with the Department of Buildings in March had reportedly flagged cracks in the building’s north facade, and excavation work was under way on the empty lot beside it when the structure buckled. The city’s buildings commissioner, Ahmed Tigani, confirmed that workers were excavating next door at the time.
That sequence — a flagged weakness, heavy digging next door, then a sudden collapse — is now the centre of the investigation. New York has some of the strictest construction rules in the United States, including requirements for monitoring neighbouring buildings during excavation. Whether those rules were followed, and whether the March warning was acted on, are the questions grieving families in Flatbush will want answered.
All residents of the collapsed building have been accounted for. The site has been handed over to the Department of Buildings and the police for the investigation. Last month, a school shooting in Bend, Oregon, also left children among the dead — a reminder of how often American tragedies now count the young among their victims. And in Pakistan last month, a school roof collapse in Peshawar killed 30 children.
