But in the basement, Aldrey’s cousin, 18-month-old Augustine Pope, was discovered more than two hours after the fire began, alive and unhurt. The youngster was treading water to keep himself afloat in the flooded basement when a fire chief happened to look in the window.
“And I just saw these two eyes staring back at me,” Battalion Chief John Gribbin said.
Gribbin ordered an immediate rescue, and within moments the boy was brought out to cheers from bystanders on the street.
“It was a pretty sad night when we realized we lost the boy on the second floor,” Gribbin said. “I know everybody took that really hard.”
“This is a good thing,” he said of the 18-month-old’s rescue. “I still didn’t believe that it happened.”
“In essence, it’s a miracle on Vine Street because more lives weren’t lost,” Mayor Tony Mack said.
Aldrey’s mother, Evie Anderson, suffered a compound fracture to her leg when she jumped from the window. Two young children who escaped the home with another adult were treated at the hospital for smoke inhalation.
The cause of the fire remains under investigation by police and the county prosecutor’s office. Gribbin, the city’s fire marshal, is also investigating.
“At this point, we don’t have anything that looks suspicious,” he said of the fire.
Evie and Aldrey Anderson were asleep on the second floor of the house while young Augustine and his mother, Monkanjay Sengblah, along with family friend Mamie Deah and her 5-year-old daughter, Ferdisha, and Sengblah’s 7-year-old goddaughter, Bithia Jeanpierre, were in the finished basement.
Around midnight, Sengblah left the house to drive her boyfriend to work. While she was away, a fire broke out on the first floor, police said.
The blaze spread upstairs, and the house was soon engulfed in flames.
“So when I opened the door from my house, I saw flames rushing from the kitchen,” said a woman whose house has a rear entrance just feet from Anderson’s back door.
“But the fire was blasting out,” she said.
Neighbors raced into the house and woke everyone in the basement while Anderson escaped through the second-floor window.
At 12:18 a.m., firefighters were alerted. Engine 1 arrived four minutes later to find the first and second floors fully involved in flames, fire officials said.
Sengblah returned and pulled up to the house, saw it on fire, and desperately alerted firefighters about the children remaining inside the house.
“I kept saying, go upstairs, my nephew is upstairs,” she said. “Go downstairs, my son is downstairs.”
Firefighters tried to gain entry, but the flames were too intense.
“It was a really hot, fast-moving fire,” acting Fire Director Leonard Carmichael Jr. said.
Crews struck a second alarm at 12:31 a.m. and a third alarm at 1:16. The fire was not brought under control until 2:52 a.m., Carmichael said.
Neighbors all along the narrow one-way street heard the commotion and went outside their homes to see what was happening.
“I woke up and saw a lot of smoke and heard a lot of screaming and saw a lot of cops,” said a neighbor, who asked that her name not be used.
“It was out of control,” she said.
Flames spread next door, gutting the second half of the duplex and threatening to jump across a narrow alley to more homes. Firefighters had the blaze mostly contained when Gribbin, who had been called in from home two days after returning from a long medical leave, walked to the side of the house.
“For some reason, I went over and I wanted to look in that basement window,” Gribbin said.
Pipes had burst during the fire, and the water, combined with hours of flow from hoses, had left about 3½ feet of water flooding the basement, Gribbin said. It was there that he saw little Augustine, struggling to stay afloat with his head nearly submerged.
“I started talking to him,” Gribbin said.
The boy waved. Gribbin called to firefighter John Barone.
“John come over here. I got a kid here,” Gribbin remembered saying. “Get inside man, he’s drowning! You got to get him out, you gotta get him out!”
Augustine’s head slipped below the waterline twice as Barone rushed into the home. He got into the basement and grabbed Augustine.
“The little boy put his arms around John and hugged him,” Gribbin said.
Despite Augustine’s salvation, there is still grief for Aldrey.
“Evie was just crying when she saw me,” said Anderson’s neighbor. “Because every morning she opened the door for him to come to my house.”
Both the neighbor and her mother said Aldrey was a mature, intelligent, special boy.
“He’s so grown up,” the mother said. “He had that ambition that he would be someone someday.”
“He was like a grownup,” the neighbor said. “He was so sweet.”
The neighbors knew Aldrey so well because of the close nature of the city’s Liberian community.
“They come over. We eat with them. They eat from us. We are family, together,” the neighbor said.
Anderson and Sengblah’s father came from Liberia and raised them in the Vine Street house. Last night, dozens of members of the Liberian community gathered at Father Rocco Park in Trenton’s North Ward for an emergency meeting of the Liberian Community Association of Central New Jersey & the Metropolitan Areas.
“Actually, there’s no Liberian vernacular that calls someone a cousin,” said Andrew Gursay, a member of the group. “It’s, ‘my mother’s sister’s child.’”
Instead of that cumbersome term, even distant relatives refer to each other as immediate family members.
“So it’s my mother, my brother, my sister, my child,” he said.
The Liberians filled the bleachers at the soccer field, as group president Tarlow Miller spoke about paying for a funeral for Aldrey and a new home for his mother. A goal of $5,000 was set.
As others were speaking, Sengblah arrived, quietly filing into the bleacher row with Augustine in her arms. She sat among friends and her sister Saycon, her voice raw after a grueling night and day. One of the friends broke in to introduce Sengblah and Augustine.
“This is the miracle baby!” she said. Attendees gasped and applauded. Another woman stood up.
“I don’t have much to say, but I want to start with $50,” she said, offering a donation.
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