A mother’s grief: “I’ve lost my babies”

The day after she lost her entire family in a blaze, Rose Danielle Etienne was curled up on the floor in a relative’s home in the fetal position.

"Mes bebes, mes bebes!" Etienne said in French, tears streaming down her face. "I've lost my babies."

It was less than 24 hours since Etienne, 26, an immigrant from Haiti, lost her partner of six years, Myrtel Jean, 42, and their two boys Fabrice Jean, 2, and Sebastian Jean, 1, in a fire that tore through her apartment on St. Mark's Avenue in Crown Heights , Brooklyn Wednesday.

Etienne had talked to Myrtel Jean at 11:45 a.m. Tuesday morning. He told her Fabrice was staying home from school because he had a bad fever, the mother said. The father and two boys were going to take a nap together. Etienne said she would call again later in the day.

That was the last time she spoke to him.

Etienne, who works as a home health care aide, said she wasn't supposed to work that day. She had been called in as a replacement. She took the extra shift because she said she needed to take care of her family and pay the bills. Jean had lost his job as a security guard in June, she said. For the rest of her 12-hr shift, she tried calling Jean repeatedly. But she couldn't get through.

"I had a feeling,” she said. “I said, 'Oh something bad happen.' "

She came home at 9 p.m. and was barred from entering her apartment by police and fire officials. She began looking for her family, going first to the local police precinct, then the morgue.

“All three of them is dead,’’ she said. “It's only me alive now. I'm by myself. I'm by myself."

Etienne was surrounded by family and friends at her aunt's house on Pulaski Street, where she spent last night.

"This is the first time something like this has happened in our family," said Renaldo Etienne, her brother. "She is mad with grief. She saw all three of them dead."

Rose Danielle Etienne said the apartment did not have a smoke detector. Fire inspectors at the building Thursday would not comment on whether the apartment was equipped with detectors or not.

Etienne said bars on the window would have prevented the three members of her family from getting out.

Etienne said she had complained about the apartment’s windows to the superintendent of the 6-story apartment building. She said the windows only partially opened.

A dispute over the response time by firefighters was also addressed Thursday.The Fire Department released a statement asserting that firefighters responded to 911 calls about the fire in 3 minutes, 9 seconds. An official at the fire department said the response time was well below the average, around 4 minutes. The department maintained that the 911 callers could not give the dispatchers an exact address.

On Wednesday the Uniformed Firefighters Association claimed that the response time was higher, 4 minutes, 31 seconds, and it blamed a new dispatching system mandated by the Bloomberg administration caused a delay in the response time to yesterday’s fire.

Renaldo Etienne said Thursday that he was pleased with firefighters’ response. He was directing his anger toward the building superintendent.