How the Deadly Brooklyn Building Collapse Unfolded

AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTFirst Came the Sound of Falling Bricks, Then an ‘Earthquake’The sudden collapse of a Brooklyn building turned a busy neighborhood into a disaster zone and left families devastated.Crews work the scene of a collapsed building in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.Credit...Angelina Katsanis for The New York TimesNov. 12, 2026Outside the three-story building on Flatbush Avenue, loud popping sounds cut through the street noise.“I thought it was gunshots at first,” said Benewaa Bonsu, a neighbor who had been walking by the construction site next to the building.James Williams, who works at a deli across the street, had grown used to loud noises coming from the site, where crews had been digging below the earth to prepare a foundation for a new building.He looked out and saw bricks falling off the building and into the pit.“It went click, click, click, click, click — bricks was falling,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, hell, what is going on?’”Then, he said, “the building start to crumble.”Inside one third-floor apartment in the building, a harrowing scene was captured on video. A young boy fetches milk from a refrigerator while another, a toddler, plays on the floor. All of a sudden, one of the room’s walls falls away into thin air, with parts of it collapsing back into the room. The boy with the milk runs, and the one on the floor scrambles backward as a woman screams in the next room. In seconds, the whole building would be gone.In the deli nearby, Mr. Williams watched as the front of 1321 Flatbush Avenue just slid away. The side went, too. A check-cashing office he often visited on the first floor seemed to vanish. He saw clothes and a microwave oven fly out of the open building and into the dusty chaos. People screamed. And then, he said, the rest of the structure collapsed. It took with it an entire wall of a building next door, exposing apartment bedrooms and closets and halls in still-life.VideoSecurity Camera Footage Captures Brooklyn Building CollapseVideo from a security camera shows the moment an adjacent building in Brooklyn collapsed on Wednesday.CreditCredit...James a Williams, via StoryfulMeir Ballas watched in horror through the window of the Metro T-mobile shop across the street, where he works.“White debris, like smoke, was dusting up,” he said, “and it just kept coming.”He saw construction workers outside the perimeter holding their heads in their hands. Three construction workers would be named among the dead.“Your heart just drops,” said Mr. Ballas, 36. “You feel for the people.”In a nearby apartment, Kendall Cresci shot up. “It just felt like there was an earthquake,” she told her fiancé, Pat Cunningham. He’d been working with headphones on and felt nothing.Video taken from a neighboring apartment moments later showed construction workers scrambling in the debris as emergency sirens drew closer. The mother and two boys, whose harrowing experience on the third floor had been captured on video, were rescued quickly. Later Thursday, they were recovering from injuries suffered in the collapse, according to the boys’ father, who was not home at the time.Firefighters and paramedics swarmed the scene. Firefighters poured into the pit where the excavation had been taking place, hauling aside brick and concrete in search of victims and survivors. Ambulances parked nearby, awaiting patients to deliver to hospitals. Soon, drones would hover over the scene — some operated by emergency workers, others by news crews.A fire truck that had parked on Flatbush extended its long ladder directly into the apartments in the neighboring building that had been exposed to the open air — a jarring sight, like the cross-section of a dollhouse.A man approached the police tape outside the site and tried to cross it, but an officer stopped him. My wife is in there, the man said, and she’s six months pregnant.Distraught, he crossed Flatbush and waited. A reporter delivered the news: His wife had been rescued. More than a dozen firefighters carried her out on a stretcher.The man broke down crying.“She is still alive,” the man said in an impromptu news conference near the scene.Family members huddled on Flatbush as darkness fell, awaiting news on missing loved ones. The crews worked through the night, looking for anyone who might have survived and finding those who hadn’t.The family of a 26-year-old construction worker, Edgar Santiago Sapón Gutierrez, searched for him elsewhere, from the sidewalks outside the collapse to the city’s agencies for the dead.“We went to the morgue and didn’t find him,” said Marisela Vasquez, 35, whose niece is married to Mr. Gutierrez.They returned to the collapse site early in the morning and saw emergency workers pulling bodies out of the rubble.At 4:50 a.m. on Thursday, a man in his 30s was found and pronounced dead.At 5:44 a.m., another man, dead.And another at 6:05 a.m., and yet another 28 minutes later.Their bodies were covered and carried on stretchers by firefighters.Mr. Gutierrez’s family got devastating news. “Unfortunately, they told us that he had died,” Ms. Vasquez said. Mr. Gutierrez has a 6-year-old son.The painstaking rescue operation continued into Thursday afternoon as rainstorms arrived. Rescue workers worked carefully so as not to disrupt the debris and injure any potential survivors underneath.After 4 p.m. Thursday — 24 hours after the collapse — the Fire Department said the search was over. Reporting was contributed by Nate Schweber Chelsia Rose Marcius Andy Newman Ashley Southall Todd Heisler Maria Cramer and Troy Closson.Michael Wilson, who covers New York City, has been a Times reporter for more than two decades.Related ContentAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT