How fleeting choices, circumstances doomed 17 in Bronx fire

Each winter, some apartments in the Twin Parks tower stayed comfortable while others did not, forcing residents to improvise, said Stefan Beauvogui, a 67-year-old immigrant from Guinea who lives on the fourth floor.On Sunday, he and his wife had space heaters running in both bedrooms and their sitting room because the building’s heat ”don’t work for nothing.” He said he had complained, but it hadn’t been fixed.Fathia Touray’s family was the first to arrive at Twin Parks from the west African country of Gambia in the mid-1980s. She moved out in 2005 but her family remained, forced to flee Sunday’s blaze.Investigators say an electric space heater set up in one of the bedrooms of a duplex on the third floor of the building had been on for a “prolonged period” when an unspecified malfunction set off a fire around 11 a.m. Soon, flames began billowing from the unit’s windows.Down the hall, resident Karen Dejesus heard one of the building’s hard-wired smoke alarms going off on the other side of her apartment door. Before she could stuff towels into the opening, it filled the room, forcing the family to flee down the stairs to the lower floor of their duplex.When firefighters arrived a few minutes after the blaze was reported, they broke down her door and rushed all three family members out a window onto a waiting ladder.But while the flames never escaped the third floor, smoke poured into the building’s stairwells and, with a second door left open on a 15th-floor landing, rapidly swept throughout the building.