Mothers and their children frantically scrambled down fire escapes to survive the inferno that consumed their Bronx homes. 
 
 They dashed out into the frigid night in whatever they were wearing, without jackets, without shoes, just holding on to their lives. 
 
 They were the lucky ones. 
 
 A raging fire quickly swept through the five-story building on Prospect Ave. at E. 187th St. — taking with it 12 lives — including a 1-year-old child. 
 
 Six of the deadliest fires in New York City history 
 
 The toddler’s final moments were spent in a bathtub, held by its mother, as they perished, sources told the Daily News. 
 
 Heartbreak was etched of the faces of firefighters and medics who tried in vain to save the victims. 
 
 Five people perished inside the 25-apartment building, and seven died at two hospitals, authorities said. Three of the other victims were children. 
 
 Four others were in critical condition at St. Barnabas Hospital and Jacobi Medical Center, officials said. 
 
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 FDNY firefighters battle raging blaze in the five-story building on Prospect Ave. at E. 187th St. in Belmont, Bronx. (Sam Costanza for New York Daily News) 
 
 Twelve other people were rescued from the building, Mayor de Blasio said. 
 
 Among the missing is a U.S. Army soldier. 
 
 Kwabena Mensah, 62, said his 28-year-old son, Emmanuel, was home for the holidays. Mensah said his son’s roommate last saw him when the fire broke out on the third floor. 
 
 “He was telling the roommate to not come out of the apartment because there was smoke. But when they rescued everyone from the windows, we couldn’t find him. I went to four hospitals, I can’t find him,” Mensah told The News. 
 
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 At St. Barnabas Hospital, Brian Whittaker, 36, was lending his support to an injured friend’s relatives. 
 
 “It's such a tragedy because they lost so many family members,” Whittaker explained. “The rest of the family is upstairs in the back. They keep passing out and crying. The father is burnt up real bad.” 
 
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 Whittaker’s friend was badly burned and is in a coma at Jacobi Medical Center. The man’s daughter and three nieces were killed, Whittaker explained. 
 
 “They were on the fifth floor so they weren't able to make it. Who knows how intense the heat was? I saw it on the news and got a call from a bunch of friends. We came over here around midnight and been here since.” 
 
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 Witnesses recalled terror in the bone-chilling night. 
 
 Thierme Diallo fled the building in a panic, awoken by a neighbor. 
 
 Emmanuel Mensah, 28, is still missing. (Obtained by Daily News) 
 
 "Someone knocked on my door yelling 'Fire! fire! fire!’ I left my cellphone. I took only my wallet because I need to save myself." 
 
 Diallo shivered in his sandals and gym shorts. 
 
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 “I don't know how I got out. By the exit there was glass coming down in the flames. I didn't have socks or shoes. Nothing.” Luc Hernandez, a fourth-floor resident, said she came home about 15 minutes after the fire started and “saw black smoke everywhere.” 
 
 The shaken 37-year-old told The News she rushed into her apartment, grabbed her 11- and 7-year-old boys and scrambled down the fire escape. 
 
 Meanwhile, someone who lives across the street from the blaze said he saw children rushing down metal grate fire escapes. 
 
 “All they had was shorts and shirts,” Rafael Gonzalez said. “No socks. No nothing. I know they were cold. They were screaming for help.” 
 
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 Firefighters were battling the inferno in cold and icy conditions. (Gregg Vigliotti for New York Daily News) 
 
 Gonzalez, 19, said it seemed like the firefighters were so busy battling the blaze they couldn’t help the kids right away. 
 
 Another resident, Esther Sakyi, 49, was making a phone call in her fourth-floor bedroom around 7 p.m. when she first noticed something was amiss. 
 
 “I was so cold so I went to the living room to see if the heater was working and smelled smoke,” Sakyi told the Daily News on an MTA bus headed for a hotel in Brooklyn where evacuees will be temporarily housed. “I rushed to open the door and the smoke just hit me and pushed me back so I closed it and went to the fire escape.” 
 
 
 
 She fled into the frigid night before putting on her clothes. 
 
 “I was naked,” she said. “I didn’t have time to put clothes on. I didn’t know what was going to happen.” 
 
 Cigarette sparked Midtown blaze that killed man on Christmas Day 
 
 The smell from the thick smoke lingered long after the flames were gone as Mayor de Blasio visited the fire scene. 
 
 Mayor de Blasio seen (r.) speaking to and comforting a woman outside the Prospect Ave. five-story building in the Bronx, Thursday night. (Gregg Vigliotti for New York Daily News) 
 
 “This is the worst fire tragedy we have seen in this city in at least a quarter of a century,” de Blasio said standing on a street filled with black ice. 
 
 “We’re shocked by this loss,” Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro said, calling the tragedy “historic.” 
 
 The men spoke just blocks away from a 1990 arson at the Happy Land Social Club that claimed the lives of 87 people. 
 
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 More than 160 firefighters responded to the five-alarm blaze near the Bronx Zoo. The inferno broke out at 6:51 p.m. on the first floor and quickly spread upward. Firefighters responded in three minutes, after receiving more than a dozen 911 calls. 
 
 The investigation remains active and ongoing. The cause of the fire is to be determined by FDNY Fire Marshals. 
 
 Sources said the blaze may have been sparked by a space heater, but de Blasio said it was too early in the investigation to tell. 
 
 Building residents pictured shivering underneath a Red Cross blanket after being evacuated from the Bronx five-story apartment building. (James Keivom/New York Daily News) 
 
 A database in the New York City Housing Preservation and Development revealed one of the apartments on the first floor — where the fire started — had open violations for bad carbon monoxide and smoke detectors. 
 
 Attempts to reach the building owners were unsuccessful. 
 
 Milka Garcia, who lives on the fifth floor of the building said she came home to find her children had been evacuated. 
 
 Mother, 3 kids killed in house fire likely caused by menorah 
 
 Garcia, 40, said her three kids — one girl and two boys — saw tons of smoke and had to get out through an emergency door. 
 
 She said her 10-year-old daughter went to school with one of the victims, who’s about 8 years old, at Public School 205. 
 
 “This is horrible,” Garcia said of the fire. “It makes me sad because they were my neighbors, and friends of my daughter’s.” 
 
 The fire broke out at 6:51 p.m. on the first floor and quickly spread upward. (James Keivom/New York Daily News) 
 
 City Councilman Ritchie Torres said he cried when he learned a child was among the dead in the disaster inside his district. 
 
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 “It’s traumatic and tragic,” he said. “The only silver lining is the heroism of the FDNY.” 
 
 “We're all struggling with unanswered questions and broken hearts,” said Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. 
 
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 With Elizabeth Elizalde, Rocco Parascandola, Ginnie Teo, Bruce Diamond ||||| Tonight in the Bronx we've seen the worst fire tragedy in at least a quarter of a century. It is an unspeakable tragedy, and families have been torn apart.pic.twitter.com/0kCFMzxt79 ||||| Firefighters respond to a deadly fire Thursday, Dec. 28, 2017, in the Bronx borough of New York. The New York City mayor's press secretary says several people have died in the blaze on a frigid night,... (Associated Press) 
 
 Firefighters respond to a deadly fire Thursday, Dec. 28, 2017, in the Bronx borough of New York. The New York City mayor's press secretary says several people have died in the blaze on a frigid night, and several more have been injured. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II) (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW YORK (AP) — New York City's deadliest residential fire in decades spread through every floor of a Bronx apartment building within a matter of minutes, city officials said, killing 12 people and sending other residents scrambling outside into the cold and down fire escapes to safety. 
 
 The dead included a child around a year old, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said during a briefing late Thursday, adding that four more people were fighting for their lives. 
 
 Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro called the fire, "historic in its magnitude," because of the number of lives lost. Excluding the Sept. 11 attacks, it was the worst fire in the city since 87 people were killed at a social club fire in the Bronx in 1990. 
 
 "Our hearts go out to every person who lost a loved one here and everyone who is fighting for their lives," Nigro said. 
 
 The blaze broke out on the first floor of a five-story building just before 7 p.m. and quickly tore through the roughly century-old structure near the Bronx Zoo. 
 
 Some tenants of the building, a mix of native New Yorkers and Latino and African immigrants, climbed down fire escapes. But the flames moved so fast that many never made it out of their apartments. 
 
 The cause of the fire remained under investigation. 
 
 About 170 firefighters worked in bone-chilling cold, just 15 degrees, to rescue about a dozen people from the building. 
 
 Thierno Diallo, 59, a security guard originally from Conakry, Guinea, who lives in a ground floor apartment said he was asleep when he heard banging on the door. It took him a moment to realize what was happening. 
 
 "Only when I heard people screaming, 'There's a fire in the building!'" he said. "I heard somebody, 'Oh! Fire! Fire! Fire!'" 
 
 He ran outside in his bathrobe, jacket and sandals. 
 
 Kenneth Kodua, 37, said he left his apartment to get food, leaving his roommate behind, and came back to find people fleeing in a panic. 
 
 Hours later, he was still trying to find out whether his roommate had escaped. 
 
 "I tried calling her. I tried calling. No answer," he said, still clutching his bag of uneaten food. His phone was dead. 
 
 Many questions remained in the immediate aftermath of the blaze, including how the fire spread so quickly in a brick building built after catastrophic fires at the turn of the 20th century ushered in an era of tougher enforcement of fire codes. 
 
 The building had more than 20 units. It was not new enough that it was required to have modern-day fireproofing, like sprinkler systems and interior steel construction. 
 
 Witnesses described seeing burned bodies being carried away on stretchers and young girls who had escaped standing barefoot outside with no coats. 
 
 Twum Bredu, 61, arrived in the neighborhood looking for his brother, who had been staying with a family in the building. The family, a husband and wife and four children, got out. But there was no word about his brother. 
 
 "I've been calling his phone, it's ringing, but nobody picks up," Bredu said. "He was in his room, and we don't know what happened." 
 
 The death toll surpassed the 10 who died, including nine children, in a four-story home in another part of the Bronx in 2007. That blaze had been sparked by a space heater.
– A horrific fire that killed at least 12 people in the Bronx Thursday night is New York City's deadliest, excluding the 9/11 attacks, since 1990, when 87 people died in the Happy Land Social Club arson, authorities say. "Tonight in the Bronx we've seen the worst fire tragedy in at least a quarter of a century," Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted. "It is unspeakable, and families have been torn apart." Authorities say the fire broke out on the first floor of the five-story, century-old building in the Belmont neighborhood just before 7pm and spread to every floor within minutes because of gusty winds, the AP reports. Some 170 firefighters responded to the blaze and witnesses reported seeing residents, some without shoes, fleeing down fire escapes into the bitterly cold night. Five people died inside the 25-unit building and another seven died in area hospitals, the New York Daily News reports. At least four victims were children, including a baby around a year old, authorities say. Four other people were critically injured in the blaze. There has been no official comment on the cause of the fire, though sources tell the Daily News it may have been sparked by a space heater. The New York Times reports that city records show the building had six open violations, including one for a defective smoke detector on the floor where the fire began.