January 18, 2004 -- A desperate mother hurled her young daughter to safety from the second floor of a blazing Brooklyn house yesterday as firefighters fought a two-alarm blaze in a landmark neighborhood, officials said.
Investigators are still probing the cause of the fire at 1422 Ditmas Ave., but suspect it may have been caused by a lit candle.
Officials said the woman was trapped on the second floor and threw her 2-year-old child into the arms of firefighters below. Neither of them were injured.
But a 60-year-old woman who jumped from the second floor of the three-story, three-family building, broke her leg after landing in the bushes. A second jumper was unhurt.
Records show the white Queen Anne-style house sits about a block away on Ditmas Avenue near a modified Tudor home once owned by silent-film stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who lived there in the 1920s, when the Vitagraph movie studio flourished in Flatbush.
The neighborhood boasts a range of architectural styles including Victorian, Queen Anne and colonial revival houses.
Neighbors said four members of the Baker family were inside when the blaze began on the second floor and spread to the third.
The family had been re-modeling since March and had just put the finishing touches on the project.
"It was a shame," said one neighbor. "Unbelievable. They were just finished."
