A Cook County Circuit Court judge on Tuesday ordered that tenants be vacated from a South Side apartment building where four children died in a fire, while the owner made his first public remarks about the tragedy, calling it “very, very sad and heartbreaking.”
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The city had cited the 18-unit building in the Roseland neighborhood in June with municipal code violations that included failure to install and maintain smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. On Tuesday, the city filed a complaint in court for those violations and dozens of additional violations that inspectors found following the fire Monday, including “no working smoke detectors present in stairways, basements and most apartments.”
The city found the building “so dangerous and hazardous that it needs to be immediately vacated,” Judy Frydland, deputy corporation counsel for building and license enforcement, told Judge Joseph Sconza.
Although many of the violations from Monday’s inspection relate to the fire, the building was also cited for issues such as failure to maintain exterior door frames, leaking water and exposed wiring at light fixtures.
The building’s owner, Tahir Sheikh, a psychiatrist in the western suburbs, told Sconza he was heartbroken by the four deaths. He said he had already started evacuating the apartments and would “comply with whatever needs to be done.”‘
“I’ve spent my life saving lives, being a physician, and this is just beyond my comprehension,” Sheikh said before the hearing.
Sheikh has owned the building since September 2013.
He said Tuesday that his management company, which also oversees several other buildings he owns, told him in August that every tenant had reported having working smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.
A spokeswoman for J & J Real Estate Management and Construction said Tuesday the company took over management of the building in July and that “the smoke detectors were installed – we just installed them in August.”
A building’s owner is responsible for installing smoke detectors or replacing broken detectors, while it is the tenant’s responsibility to make sure they have working batteries.
A fire department spokesman said there did not appear to be working smoke detectors in the second-floor apartment where the fire is believed to have started or in the third-floor unit where the children died. But fire officials could not say if Sheikh’s managers had installed smoke detectors or if they were destroyed in the fire.
Frydland declined to say if the city’s finding of “no working smoke detectors” meant there were no detectors in the building or that they had been installed but did not have batteries or had been tampered with in some way.
“It’s something that you can’t just go to your building every four years or fours months and say, ‘I checked.’ You have to check all the time,” she said.
The fire broke out early Monday in the second-floor apartment, raced down a hallway and then up a stairwell to the third floor, trapping Shamaya Coleman, her boyfriend, Nate Johnson, and Coleman’s four children, fire officials said.
Coleman and Johnson were able to jump to safety from a window, but the children all died. Firefighters found the oldest child, Carliysia Clark, 16, in an alcove, apparently trying to shield a sibling.
The family identified the other children as Eriana Smith, 7, Shamarion Clark, 12, and Carlvon Clark, 13. The Cook County medical examiner’s office reported Tuesday that the four children had died of carbon monoxide toxicity and inhalation of smoke and soot. Their deaths were ruled an accident. Coleman and Johnson were injured.
Tribune reporters Marwa Eltagouri and Carlos Sadovi contributed.