Woman killed in Bronx apartment fire helped save rest of family, relatives say

A woman killed in a Bronx apartment fire helped save the life of the rest of her family, including her girlfriend who is now in critical condition, distraught relatives said Monday.

The roaring blaze that tore through the University Heights building Sunday, killing 50-year-old Cynthia Ruiz Lara, was sparked by an electrical wiring malfunction, Mayor Mamdani said a day later.

Ruiz Lara lived in the apartment with her girlfriend of five years and the partner’s three children, relatievs said.

“We were trapped,” Tasha Luciano, the daugher of Ruiz Lara’s girlfirend, recounted in a GoFundMe she created to help her struggling family.

“We all had to jump out the window to survive, but sadly my stepmother didn’t make it. My mother has suffered severe 3rd degree burns all over her body and my brother is also hurt. I have swollen feet due to running through the snow to get to my mother. My mother is in critical condition and I would like to bring justice to my step mother … she risked her life to save ours.”

The blaze broke out inside the six-story building near Grand Ave. and W. 183rd St. in University Heights about 7:40 a.m. It took firefighters about 80 minutes to bring the blaze under control.

“Everything we have is gone,” Luciano wrote on the GoFundMe. “We’re quite literally homeless and have nothing.”

Issac Lopez, 44, who lives in the building next door, saw Ruiz Lara’s panicked girlfriend telling firefighters her partner was still inside the burning apartment.

“She kept saying ‘She’s still inside, she’s still inside. I gotta go back in!’” Lopez said. “They tried to calm her down.”

Lopez remembered Ruiz Lara as a “hardworking woman,” an entrepreneur who would zip around the neighborhood on an electric bike dropping off homemade food.

Ruiz Lara’s brother, Andres Luiz, 56, said his sister’s girlfriend’s kids, who Ruiz Lara was helping to raise, are struggling to make sense of the tragedy as their mom fights to recover.

“Their mother is now in bad shape in the hospital,” he said. “Burns in the face, neck, leg, also arms.”

Ruiz Lara’s siblings, meanwhile, are shell shocked by her death.

“Who would have imagined something like this happening? Not in a million years,” Ruiz Lara’s older sister, Jiny Ruiz, told the Daily News. “Some things are out of your control.”