Eight Dead in Flatbush, and a Site the City Had Already Stopped

An apartment building on one of Brooklyn's busiest shopping streets fell into an open construction pit on Wednesday afternoon, and by Thursday morning the city was counting eight dead and nineteen injured from a collapse that neighbors heard coming.

Eight Dead in Flatbush, and a Site the City Had Already Stopped

Brooklyn, New York — Rescue crews were still digging by hand on Thursday afternoon at the corner of Flatbush and Bedford Avenues, where a three-story building that had stood since 1930 partially collapsed into the open excavation next door. Officials have not announced a cause. The record of what happened at that pit before Wednesday is already long.

Eight Dead, and the Count Moved All Night

Two people were pronounced dead at the scene on Wednesday. By Thursday morning, the Fire Department of New York had confirmed six bodies recovered from the rubble and two more deaths at a hospital, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani put the toll at eight. His statement, posted shortly after noon, said he was "heartbroken that eight New Yorkers have now lost their lives and at least 17 have been injured, including three firefighters." The injured figure has moved too: a later FDNY tally carried by NY1 put total patients at 27, made up of eight dead, four in critical condition, five with serious but non-life-threatening injuries and ten with minor injuries. Seven of the injured were children, and four of the dead recovered on Thursday are believed to be construction workers. The department said on Wednesday night that it did not know how many people were inside the building when it came down, and officials have not said since how many were there.

Two Children, Reported and Not Yet Confirmed

Bonsignore put the number of injured children at seven at the first overnight briefing. Whether any of the dead were children took longer to establish. ABC7 Eyewitness News, citing officials, reported on Thursday afternoon that two children were among the eight — a 9-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy — without releasing their names. The FDNY had not published ages or identities for any of the dead as of Thursday afternoon, and several other outlets, including the Guardian and CNN, were still reporting that it was not clear whether minors were among the fatalities. Council Member Farah Louis, who represents the district, described what she saw from the sidewalk on Wednesday night: "We've seen infants, toddlers being pulled out of the rubble on stretchers into ambulances to be rushed to the hospital." The collapse came on Veterans Day, when public schools were closed and, as the New York Times noted, more residents than usual were likely at home.

The Man From Ecuador

One of the dead has been identified by his family. Jose Luis Caguana, 26, was working on the construction site when the wall came down, his brother Carlos told NBC New York and Univision. He had come from Ecuador about six years ago and was the household's only earner, with a young child and a wife who is heavily pregnant with their second. "Her husband has passed away; he was the sole provider for the family," Carlos Caguana said. "Now that he's gone, she is going through an immense amount of pain. She is in a very bad state right now — she's completely overwhelmed and can't even find the words to speak." A second worker, Alvaro Miguel Caizaguano Toasa, 29, was at Kings County Hospital on Thursday, relatives told ABC7. They said he had been on the site for eight months, is the father of children aged three and seven, and that his wife is too ill to work. A family member told the station he was "not doing well."

Two Hundred and Fifty Firefighters, Working in Voids

Roughly 250 firefighters and emergency medical personnel, drawn from 69 units, worked through the night with pickaxes, power saws, buckets, search dogs, drones and Con Edison vacuum trucks. Firefighters handed debris down a line by hand. Rescue teams could be seen crawling in and around the wreckage looking for void spaces where someone might still be alive. "It becomes a very complex, time-consuming search," Chief of Department John Esposito said, before drawing a comparison to the department's largest recovery operation: "To me, it's very reminiscent of the searches we were doing at the Trade Center." Bonsignore called the work "dangerous and perilous" and said every movement was choreographed to avoid shifting the pile. Victims were carried out one by one through the evening, four of them in a single hour around 6 p.m., among them a woman who Council Member Louis said was about six months pregnant and in critical condition.

"Yes, They Were Digging Down"

The building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue held four apartments above a ground-floor commercial unit, according to city records, and shared a wall with a building at 1323 that is still standing with its interior exposed to the street. It fell into the excavation at 2625 Bedford Avenue, where crews had been digging for a new building. Asked at Wednesday night's briefing whether the crews had been working at the moment of the collapse, Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani was direct: "Yes, they were digging down." Tigani said the site had an approved plan for a three-story building even though the developer had filed for a nine-story structure in September. Zoning records obtained by CBS News New York show the larger plan called for 64 residential units and a ground-floor grocery store in a development of about 25,000 square feet. The department issued a fresh stop-work order on Wednesday citing "unsafe construction operations causing adjacent building (1321 Flatbush Avenue) to collapse."

The File on 2625 Bedford Avenue

The site next door was already known to inspectors. In March, the Department of Buildings issued a stop-work order during demolition of a one-story commercial building there after concluding contractors had failed to install required protection for neighboring properties, including netting and sheds, department spokesperson Andrew Rudansky told Gothamist. A month later, an inspector found that demolition had resumed in defiance of that order and issued another penalty. Records reviewed by Commercial Observer show a $10,000 penalty that was resolved in October; a May inspection recorded more citations, including a failure to provide proper protection for neighboring buildings. Then, in June, the project's owner sent a letter to neighboring landlords notifying them that excavation would begin. The lot is tied to Robert Fischman and Judy Swimer, purchased in 2024 for $4 million through the entities JS1024 LLC and FF1632 LLC, according to property records. None of them responded to requests for comment on Wednesday or Thursday.

Shoring, Seismic Monitors and Crack Gauges

The engineering file is the part investigators will read most closely. Structural plans filed by engineer Jeiming Wang of LMW Engineering Group called for extensive bracing to keep neighboring buildings standing during excavation, including steel, timber and concrete shoring, according to documents reviewed by Gothamist. The same plans required the excavation contractor to run seismic monitors to track vibration and to install crack gauges on surrounding buildings to detect movement, alongside visual inspections and reporting under a special inspector. The special inspector of record is MD Islam of Queens-based RI Consulting Services; the shoring work was contracted to Townhouse Builders, whose owner Mordchai Waisbrod received a permit in September. It is not publicly established whether any of those safeguards were in place when the building came down. Wang, Islam and Waisbrod did not respond to requests for comment. The Department of Buildings says the cause remains under investigation.

The Building That Fell Had Its Own Record

There is a second paper trail, and it belongs to the building that collapsed. Gothamist, citing city data, reported that 1321 Flatbush Avenue carried 98 open housing code violations before Wednesday, including unsafe electrical wiring, inadequate water supply to the sprinkler system, missing smoke detectors, water outages and a bed bug infestation. A separate analysis of housing data published by The American Civic Ledger put the figure at 52 open violations, 13 of them immediately hazardous. The building is owned by a different landlord, Olufemi Falade, whom a judge jailed for 12 days in 2006 over conditions at another property; the address has gone through the city's tax lien sale process at least five times since 2017. ABC News reported that its sister station WABC found no Buildings Department violations at the address of the building that collapsed — a distinction that matters, because housing maintenance code violations and construction code violations are separate enforcement systems with separate inspectors.

The Second Time This Year, and the Same Question

This is the second high-profile structural failure in the city in a matter of months. In July, several buildings in Manhattan were evacuated after support columns buckled inside a skyscraper that once served as Pfizer's headquarters. The Associated Press noted the parallel on Thursday. Glenn Corbett, a construction safety expert at John Jay College who has not examined the Flatbush site, said the mechanics of digging beside old masonry buildings are unforgiving. "When you go and dig next to these kind of buildings, there's always an issue of stability," he said. He pointed investigators toward the retaining walls and shores that hold back the perimeter of an excavation pit — whether the members were sized correctly, whether timber panels were large enough, whether the steel met the requirement. "They've got to find out why did that happen?" Corbett said. "And do we need to change the rules?"

Rain, a YMCA and What the City Cannot Say

Heavy rain and the possibility of severe storms were forecast for Thursday afternoon and evening, and Bonsignore warned that water would make the work harder. "It'll turn to mud," she told WNYW-TV, vowing crews would keep going. The Department of Environmental Protection shut down water mains so rescuers could work, affecting around 100 buildings before service was restored. The city and the Red Cross opened a reception center at the Flatbush YMCA on 1401 Flatbush Avenue; by 6 a.m., seven households — 14 adults and five children — had registered for emergency assistance including temporary lodging. Mamdani urged anyone unable to reach a person who may have been in the building to call 311, or 212-639-9675 from outside the city. Fox 5 NY reported, citing sources rather than officials, that all known missing people had been accounted for. What the city has not said is why a pit that had already produced a stop-work order, a violation for digging anyway, and a second round of citations was open beside occupied apartments on a Wednesday afternoon.

By Jessica Ali, Staff Writer

This article was produced with AI-assisted research and editorial support. Sources: Associated Press, BBC News, ABC7 Eyewitness News, Gothamist, NBC New York, CNN, The Guardian, NY1, Construction Dive, Commercial Observer, CBS News New York, USA TODAY, Fox 5 NY and New York City Department of Buildings records. Cover: Global 1 News editorial image. Photographs: Getty Images via Fox 5 NY; Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images; AP Photo/Julie Jacobson.