CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — Venice Ishibashi has been scared since the night she grabbed her two young sons and fled a massive fire in her home. She's scared one her boys will fall through the three-foot hole in her balcony that the fire caused and that her landlord refuses to fix. And she's scared because her landlord is suing her for not paying the rent on her uninhabitable home.

"The kids could fit through that hole, they're skinny little things, " Ishibashi, a resident of the Ebbets Field Apartments, said at a protest against her landlords on Sunday. "We're on the third floor — that's quite a drop down." Ishibashi, 39, woke up New Year's morning at 1:40 a.m. to the smell of smoke and found an enormous fire growing on the balcony of her third floor apartment at 77 Sullivan Place, she said. She grabbed her two sons — aged 6 and 10 — and fled the apartment as fast as they could.



"The kids and I, we ran out of the apartment barefoot in the cold," she said. "I just thought maybe the whole building was on fire." It took firefighters more than an hour to extinguish the bright red blaze that sent smoke pluming into the apartments above hers and melted everything on her balcony, according to Ishibashi and city records.

FDNY officials don't know what caused the blaze but Ishibashi said residents often throw cigarette butts over their balconies. The two-bedroom apartment — and the clothes and furniture inside it — was so badly damaged that Ishibashi, her husband and sons had to move in with her mother for an entire month, she said.

"I wasn't able to work," said Ishibashi, who is currently employed by Medgar Evers, where she's also a full-time student. "My husband took me to the emergency room and I was put on an inhaler for the entire month."

Ishibashi has spent the past three months pleading with her landlords — who operate under a limited liability company called Fieldbridge Associates — to fix the gaping hole in her balcony the fire caused.

But instead of completing repairs, the LLC has filed suit against Ishibashi and her husband, Christian, for not paying their $3,050 rent in January, city records show. Her family has lived in the third floor apartment for five years and never before missed a month's rent, she said.

Patch was unable to reach a Fieldbridge Associates representative for comment.