18-Month-Old Dies in Fire Accidentally Started by Sister, 5

An 18-month-old girl died in an apartment fire ignited when her 5-year-old sister was playing with matches, perhaps while blowing out candles as practice for her birthday.

Neighbors said the mother was next door getting a diaper when the fire began right before 11 p.m. Monday. City fire officials called the blaze accidental, and LAPD spokeswoman Charlotte Broughton said Tuesday that no criminal charges will be filed against the mother, Nilah Hassan.

The kindergartner who accidentally started the fire in southwest Los Angeles ran out of the burning apartment to meet her mother, said police, who did not release her name.

Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey said 18-month-old Sumayah Hassan had already died in the blaze, which consumed a first-floor bedroom, when firefighters arrived.

Charlotte Wilson, who lives across the street, said she and her husband entered the burning apartment and tried to save Sumayah. Wilson said she had hoped that her CPR training would come in handy.

“We could hear [the mother and sister] outside screaming, ‘Help! Somebody help us!’ ” Wilson said, flailing her arms to imitate the family’s hysteria.

“When we went in the house, my husband and I could see the bedroom where the baby was,” she said. “My husband tried to go in there. I told him, ‘Mario, come back’--the flames jumped up in the doorway and blocked the way. It was like the devil cut us off from getting the baby.”

Residents of the four-unit building huddled together in silence much of Tuesday afternoon.

Hassan had gone to the adjacent apartment of Brenda Rogers when the tragedy struck. Rogers’ two daughters--one with a 10-month-old and the other with a 4-year-old--lease the apartment damaged in the fire.

They were allowing the Hassans to live with them until they found another place, police said. The two mothers were not home at the time of the fire.

Wilson, the neighbor who tried to save the baby, sympathized with Hassan’s loss. “If she ever left the house,” Wilson said, “she would take her children with her--always. So she went next door to get a diaper. Nobody’s perfect. She was just very unfortunate.”

The Fire Department estimated property damage at $10,000. From the living room just inside the front doorway, it was clear that the bedroom was all but leveled by the fire. The living room walls were singed and sooty from fire and smoke. The remains of a burned mattress and other charred housewares leaned against a fence Tuesday.

Norma Johnson, a victims’ assistance coordinator for the city attorney’s office, said accidental tragedies of this type pose a greater counseling challenge than some murders.

“In those cases, the situations are equally distraught. But in this case, you had an accident, where there wasn’t anybody to blame. The child is a child--she hasn’t formed a concept of having done something wrong. She was just being a child.”

The victims’ assistance program is providing some counseling and housing assistance to the Hassan family.

The two sisters whose apartment was burned, Johnson said, do not qualify for victims’ assistance.