A 96-Year-Old Brooklyn Building Fell Into the Pit Next Door — Months Earlier, an Inspection Report Had Described Its Wall in One Word

A construction worker climbed out of the excavation pit on Bedford Avenue to grab his hammer. It was a little after 4 p.m. on Wednesday, the light already going soft over Flatbush, and he was walking back toward the hole when he heard it — a loud snap, his cousin later told NBC New York. Then the debris started falling.

He survived. Many of the people around him did not.

Moments later, a 96-year-old, three-story building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue — a shop on the ground floor, apartments stacked above it — folded sideways into the construction pit next door. By Thursday morning, firefighters had pulled six bodies from the wreckage, at least 19 people had been hurt, seven of them children, and the question hanging over one of Brooklyn’s busiest corners was no longer just how many. It was why. And part of the answer may have been sitting in a city filing all along.

Rescuers Were There in a Minute — Then They Started Digging

The FDNY says it got the call just after 4 p.m. and had crews on the scene within a minute. What they found was a mountain of brick and splintered wood where a building had been, poured straight into the excavation site at 2625 Bedford Avenue. Two people were pulled out soon after.

By nightfall, roughly 250 firefighters and EMS workers were swarming the pile. They dug by hand, tossing chunks of rubble aside and passing orange buckets down the line. A drone hovered overhead. K-9 teams from the FDNY and NYPD picked their way across the debris, noses down, searching for any scent of life. When darkness fell, firefighters worked by flashlight.

Next door, at 1323 Flatbush Avenue, the shared wall had simply been sheared away. From the street, you could see straight into people’s homes — a bedroom, a closet still hung with clothes — like a dollhouse with its front pulled off. Officials worried that building could come down too.

“We do not know how many people are still in the collapse zone, and this will be a prolonged operation,” FDNY Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore said at a late-night press conference. “This is such a very fragile situation here… We’ll continue to look until we find everybody.”

Standing beside her, Mayor Zohran Mamdani warned that the toll was not final. “This has been an incredibly challenging and fast-moving situation, with precarious wreckage to navigate and dangerous voids beneath the surface,” he said. “The numbers may change as the work continues.”

The Long Night Under the Floodlights

They did change. Overnight, rescuers brought in Con Edison vacuum trucks to suck debris away from the spots where the dogs had signaled. At 4:45 a.m., ABC7 reported, they reached a third victim. Another came out just before 6 a.m., a fifth soon after, and a sixth shortly after 6:30. The four victims found Thursday morning were all believed to be construction workers. One firefighter was hurt clearing debris around 1:30 a.m. and carried out on a stretcher, conscious and alert.

By 7 a.m. Thursday, the FDNY counted 25 patients in all: six dead, four in critical condition, five seriously hurt and ten with minor injuries. Later Thursday morning, ABC7 reported that two of the injured had died in hospital, bringing the toll to eight — a number that may still rise, because officials say they still do not know how many people were inside.

One of the victims now has a name. Jose Luis Caguana, 26, came to the United States from Ecuador about six years ago and worked construction to support his family, his brother Carlos told NBC New York. Caguana’s wife is pregnant and due very soon. The couple also have a young child.

“Her husband has passed away; he was the sole provider for the family,” Carlos said in Spanish. “She is in a very bad state right now — she’s completely overwhelmed and can’t even find the words to speak.”

The Report Buried in the Paperwork

So what brought down a building that had stood for nearly a century?

Investigators haven’t said, and the official cause is still under investigation. But the attention has turned squarely to the hole next door.

Records show the lot at 2625 Bedford Avenue once held a one-story building that was fully demolished in 2025. Excavation began in September, according to city records reviewed by NBC New York, and that work included blasting rock. On Wednesday, Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said, crews had been digging in the hours before the collapse. The approved plans allowed for a three-story building. But the owner — a limited liability company run by Robert Fischman and his associates, NBC New York reported — was applying for something far bigger: a 56,000-square-foot, nine-story building with a grocery store and apartments. “They are currently applying for a nine-story building which has not yet been approved,” Tigani said.

Then NBC New York’s I-Team found the detail that has everyone talking.

Tucked inside the application for that bigger project was a pre-construction inspection report on the very building that fell. It included photos from nearly every angle. It noted cracks and masonry misalignments. And it concluded that the north wall — the one facing the construction site — was in “poor” condition, with a “wide range of major deficiencies.”

In other words, the wall that sat beside months of digging and rock blasting had already been described, on paper, as being in poor shape.

A Stop-Work Order and a Lot of Unanswered Questions

The construction site had its own history. Department of Buildings records show a summons was issued for the Bedford Avenue site in April, and a stop-work order was allegedly violated before the matter was resolved, ABC7 reported. Spectrum News NY1 said the department had recorded multiple issues with the project in May. ABC7 found no building violations on record for the building that collapsed.

The demolition contractor named on the April summons told ABC7 the company had finished its work and left the site by late April or early May, and said he was not aware of the condition of the shoring. NBC New York said the construction site’s owner did not immediately respond to messages, and it could not reach the owner of the collapsed building.

None of this proves what caused Wednesday’s collapse. Excavation of the kind going on next door is always sensitive work, NBC New York noted, and investigators will now pick through the debris to work out whether the building failed on its own, whether the digging played a role, or both — and whether the city’s rules need to change.

A Corner Waiting for Answers

At the Flatbush YMCA, the Red Cross and the city opened a center for families who suddenly had nowhere to go. By Thursday morning, seven households had registered for emergency help, including temporary lodging. Some had lived in the building that fell. Others lived next door, in the apartments now open to the sky.

Gov. Kathy Hochul wrote that her “heart breaks” for the families and said her administration had offered its full support to investigators. Flatbush Avenue stayed closed from Clarendon Road to Bedford Avenue as the search ground on, with heavy rain forecast for the afternoon.

Somewhere in that pile are the answers investigators need: the shoring, the bricks of the north wall, the edge of the pit. And on the other side of the debris line is a construction worker who is alive because, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, he went back for his hammer.