Fire officials are investigating the cause of an early morning fire that killed two young girls in Pompano Beach Saturday.
The incident happened at around 9:30 a.m. at the Banyan Club apartments at the 1800 block of Northeast 48th Street.
Neighbors called 911 after seeing smoke billowing from an apartment. Rescue crews arrived and put out the fire, where the found the remains of two young girls inside the home. The girls were five months and five years old.
A neighbor who tried to save the children from the fire told NBC 6 he and another resident went into the unit with a fire extinguisher calling out to victims, but the smoke was too thick and he said no one answered.
"I could only go into the living room," said Daniel Grache. "The kitchen was not on fire. The flames came from the room the children were in."
The mother of the girls, Jocelyn Martinez, 23, had left the girls and her two-year-old son in the car of her 15-year-old sister while she went to work.
“The truth is that it impacted me when my wife called me and told me the apartment had caught fire,” said Carlos Castro-Posada, a friend of the victims’ family. “It’s such a sad event. One does not expect this.”
A neighbor said the sister went with the two-year-old boy to buy milk and left the apartment door open. An investigation is now underway.
"I feel sad... devastated," said Ruben Calderon, a neighbor. "The five-year-old girl played with my son."
