Brooklyn Fire Injures 11 - NYTimes.com The fire broke out at 375 Chauncey Street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood shortly after 9 a.m., and firefighters arrived within minutes. A suspicious fire ripped through a Brooklyn brownstone on Thursday morning, injuring 11 people, four of them critically, according to fire officials. Some residents of the three-story building said that they saw a woman lurking around the area in recent days, apparently searching for a former tenant, and that they believed she returned on Thursday and set the fire. Fire Department officials said that it appeared the fire had been intentionally set but that the investigation was continuing. The fire quickly engulfed the first and second floors and smoke filled the building, with about a dozen residents trapped inside, said Deputy Assistant Fire Chief James Leonard. "There was an unconscious person in the front on the third floor that was dragged to the rear and removed downstairs," he told reporters. We also had people trapped behind barred windows, and the firefighters needed to use saws to get the bars off the windows to rescue those people. By 10 a.m. the fire was under control. Twenty-two residents live in six apartments in the building, and many were home at the time of the fire, said Rhonda Scott, 42, the property manager whose mother owns the building. Ms. Scott, who lives in Queens, was terrified when she got a call about the fire. "I just jumped up and I dropped the phone," she said. Ms. Scott said residents told her of an angry woman who showed up several days ago looking for a tenant who had once lived in a second-floor apartment in the building. The woman, whom Ms. Scott did not know, broke down the back door, but when she did not find the tenant she left. Residents told Ms. Scott that they saw the same woman return on Thursday around the time the fire began. The blaze swept through the hallways of the building, trapping people in their apartments. Yvette Blandon, 28, was sleeping in a first-floor apartment, where she lives with her daughter, a friend and four other children. Her friend woke her up, screaming that the apartment was on fire. Ms. Blandon ran to the window, pulled out the air-conditioner, and began passing the children through the window to waiting police officers. "It seemed like it was all up in flames," she said. As smoke continued to billow from the windows, other neighbors were frantically waving from the windows calling for help. Eric Dukes, 26, was asleep when smoke filled his second-floor apartment. Unable to use the hallway, he said, he had no idea how to escape. Just then, firefighters appeared at the window, broke it, and brought him to safety. "I got out," he said.