Flatbush Resident Tony Celestine Dies in Apartment Fire

A dramatic early-morning apartment fire in Flatbush saw two men leap from the building’s third-story windows and four others injured in the fire.

And by this afternoon, one of the jumpers was pronounced dead.

Family members and neighbors identified the man to reporters as 59-year-old Tony Celestine, a Haitian immigrant and father of three who loved the Knicks. According to DNAinfo, Celestine ran a flower shop called TMC Florist on the building’s first floor for 15 years, before the space was rented by the Golden Krust chain.

The other man who jumped, Jean-B Maurice, told DNAinfo that Celestine had knocked on his roommates’ doors to alert them of the fire before he tried to save himself.

“To me, he’s a hero,” his daughter, Menushka, told reporters. “He’s this area’s Superman.”

Witnesses had gruesome accounts of Celestine’s attempt to escape the fire. One resident, Ricardo Arturo Lopez, told the New York Daily News he had placed a box-spring mattress under the window to break Celestine’s fall. But when Celestine hit the mattress, Lopez said, “Everything on him broke. I felt a knot on my throat. I did what I could.”

Photos from the scene showed the mattress covered in blood.

“The old man was laying on the box spring, bleeding and broken up,” Charles Andre, who works nearby, told DNAinfo. “He was still conscious. He was screaming, ‘I can’t move!’ It was terrible.”

Celestine was rushed to Staten Island University Hospital, where he was reportedly pronounced dead a few hours after his arrival.