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The smoke awakened the neighbors first — not the sight of thick, gray-black clouds that swelled outside apartment 5G, but the smell. Then there were the sounds in the quiet of the night: a noise like an explosion, the crackling of glass as windows flew out and the voices of children, screaming.

A fire that officials said apparently began on the kitchen stove was racing through the three-bedroom apartment in Harlem. Six people were trapped inside. None of them would survive.

“You could hear when they would say, ‘Mom,’” said Jennifer Nunn-Stanley, who lives across the street and heard the shouts coming from inside the burning building.

The Fire Department sent 100 firefighters to the site of the blaze, at 2441 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard at 142nd Street, a 109-year-old building run by the New York City Housing Authority. But the fire commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, said that when firefighters reached the apartment on the fifth floor, “The fire met them at the front door.”