Teen killed, sister critically injured in N. Bay Shore fire

Angela Alvarez didn't want to leave her brother.

As a fire raged and smoke filled her North Bay Shore home, her mother, standing outside, pleaded for her to climb out a ground-floor window.

But the 16-year-old girl remained barricaded in a bathroom with her brother, who was already overcome, said their mother, Zulma Zayas, 36.

Relatives Tuesday kept vigil for Angela at Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow, where she remained in critical condition with carbon monoxide poisoning. They hadn't told her yet that her brother, 17-year-old Luis Zayas, was dead.

Her condition was too delicate.

"I went out and they stayed inside," Zulma Zayas said in Spanish Tuesday afternoon at the hospital, tears streaming down her cheeks. "I was going to open another door because there's another exit, but I couldn't open it because it was locked . . .

"Angela could get out," Zayas said, "but she did not want to leave him."

A hot object - likely a portable halogen work lamp - left on a couch behind the house sparked the fire Monday night, Suffolk police Sgt. Thomas Groneman said. The fire does not appear to be suspicious, he said.

At least five people were in the house when the fire started at 8:30 p.m., he said. No one else was hurt.

Friends, classmates and relatives Tuesday mourned Luis, an 11th-grader at Bay Shore High School. He was a nice kid, a happy kid, they said. He was respectful to elders, made his cousins laugh.

Luis was tall and loved baseball, said his second cousin, Oscar Quintanilla, 20, of Central Islip. "I used to call him 'Gordo,' " Quintanilla said. "We always used to go out and play baseball."

Evelyn Blose Holman, superintendent of the Bay Shore school district, said in a statement: "Everyone remains deeply sorry for this tragic loss. Our hearts go out to this family."

Police and Islip Town officials said Zayas, who bought the house in 2006, lived with four children in one of two apartments on the ground floor. A third apartment was on the second floor, they said.

Police are still trying to determine how many people lived in the home, which was zoned as a single-family house, according to Lawrence O'Leary, the town's public safety enforcement commissioner. Zayas' mother, Angela Quintanilla, said Zayas' sister-in-law and her two children lived on the second floor.

O'Leary said the town has not issued any permits to Zayas that would have allowed the home to be converted into apartments and rented out.

The town has not issued a violation on the house or received a complaint about it since Zayas became the owner, O'Leary said.

Investigators believe the couch had been moved out of the house over the weekend and left against the back wall.

It was unclear who left the portable light on the couch or when.

Det. Lt. Gerard Pelkofsky of the homicide squad said the flames spread to the second floor and across the back of the house, preventing escape through a rear door.

Zayas said she was asleep at 8:30 p.m. in a bedroom with her son and daughter, who were awake, when the fire started.

Angela woke her mother.

"She told me there was fire at the door," Zayas recalled. She said she climbed out the bedroom window and tried to enter through another door to help her children escape. But she couldn't, she said.

Firefighters found brother and sister together, both unconscious. Luis was pronounced dead later that night at Southside Hospital in Bay Shore.

With Andrew Strickler, Gary Dymski and Chau Lam