Witnesses who watched a Brooklyn building come crashing down felt helpless amid the chaos

NEW YORK (AP) — The loud popping sounds outside alarmed Dervie Mapp enough to make her bolt out of bed. She ran to the kitchen window of her Brooklyn apartment and looked out across the construction site next door.

The 67-year-old retiree watched helplessly as a three-story building on the other side of the worksite collapsed, raining bricks and twisted metal onto the razed lot. Stunned survivors cried out amid piles of rubble that moments earlier had been people's homes.

“I saw the whole thing come down,” Mapp told The Associated Press on Thursday. “People were running up out of the pit, screaming and hollering. I couldn’t believe it — I froze.”

The deadly collapse that occurred without warning Wednesday afternoon took down a building that housed a store selling medical uniforms on the ground level and four apartments on the floors above.

At least eight people perished, including two children. Officials said 18 others suffered injuries.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday described the victims as “parents and children, young families building their lives in our city and immigrants from Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Trinidad and beyond.”

Among those hurt were four firefighters assisting with rescue efforts, which continued Thursday as crews searched for survivors through heaps of debris that included mattresses, a broken sink and a refrigerator with its door missing and food jumbled inside. Vinyl records, shoes and other personal belongings littered the rubble.

James Williams said he heard loud banging at the construction site all day Wednesday as he worked at a deli across the street. He said he noticed bricks falling from a building next to the site. Then the whole building came crashing down.

The collapse ripped away a wall shared with an adjacent building, which remained standing with the crammed closets and bedrooms of its apartments exposed.

Security camera video from the building showed an interior stairway shaking as the wall beside it fell in a loud crash and a cloud of dust. The camera later recorded a firefighter helping a resident descend the same stairs above a yawning abyss of debris.

“Nice and easy,” the firefighter said as the person clutched both his hand and the railing.

Despite the chaos, construction workers who had barely escaped with their lives turned around and began clawing through the wreckage to free survivors, said Mamdani. He said their swift actions saved lives.

The mayor said Thursday that two construction workers were among the dead.

They included 26-year-old José Luis Caguana Cosquillo, an immigrant from Ecuador who had a young child and pregnant wife. His brother, Carlos Caguana, told WNBC-TV that he was one of the people killed.

“He was the sole provider for the family,” Caguana said, adding that his brother's wife was devastated.

“She’s completely overwhelmed,” he said, “and can’t even find the words to speak.”

Rico reported from Atlanta. AP journalists Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa; and Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, contributed.