Kingsbridge apartment fire displaces longtime day care serving local families

Flames and thick smoke tore through a Kingsbridge apartment building March 17, destroying a home-based day care that served families for more than two decades.

For 23 years, Maria Capellan ran her day care, The Kid’s Room, out of her fourth-floor apartment, at 3410 Kingsbridge Ave., caring for children as young as a few months old and as old as preschool-aged. The concept began as a temporary solution to care for her own children, but into something lasting.

Capellan had been working in marketing, but the demands of the job made it difficult to balance work and family. After discovering a nanny was mistreating her children, she said she made a decision that would shape the next chapter of her life.

“I said, no, I cannot. I cannot keep doing this,” she said. “So I quit my job.”

At first, she planned to return to her career once her children were older. But something shifted as she began teaching and caring for other families’ children.

“When I started seeing that the children at three were reading, knowing the shapes, the body parts, I got some sort of high out of it,” she said, “It’s like a drug, and I just developed a passion for it.”

Over the years, Capellan built more than a business. She said parents traveled from across the region — “from Jersey, from Queens, from Connecticut, from Westchester,” she shared — to bring their children to her program. The apartment became a place of routine, vibrancy and early learning.

That sense of stability was altered in a matter of minutes.

On the afternoon of March 17, a fire broke out in a third-floor apartment, according to the New York Fire Department — below Capellan’s unit. Smoke quickly rose through the building and into her day care. Inside, she said eight children were present and napping.

As smoke crept into the room, one child — the only one awake — noticed first.

“She said, ‘under the table, under the table,’” Capellan recalled.

At first, she thought it was an electrical issue nearby. Within moments, it became clear it was something much worse.

Capellan and her two assistants began evacuating the children to the fire escape through a window, relying on drills they had practiced month after month.

“Since we do fire drills, they thought it was another fire drill,” she said. “I always make it like a game. So they think it’s fun.”

Smoke filled the apartment, and the hallway became impassable. Capellan said she lined the children down the fire escape, trying to keep them calm while making split-second decisions.

“I have eight little lives that I had to keep my responsibility,” she said.

On the metal fire escape stairs outside, the children huddled together in the cold, some still groggy from their naps. Capellan recalled moving between them, steadying them and singing to keep them calm as voices rose from the street below.

At one point, believing help might not arrive in time, she made a choice to run into the smoke-filled apartment and slam the front door to alert firefighters she believed were out in the hallway.

“I said, ‘Oh my God, they’re not going to open the door. They think there’s nobody here,’” Capellan said. “I can’t see anything. I didn’t know if the firefighters were there or not.”

Eventually, Capellan said crews reached them and broke down apartment walls to lead them out to safety. Capellan said that the children survived without injury.

In the days that followed, the full extent of the damage became clear. The apartment, and everything inside it, was destroyed or contaminated by smoke and water, according to Capellan.

“All of that is gone,” she said.

She said her day care license has since been deactivated, and cannot be restored without a new space.

The loss has left families looking for alternatives and Capellan grappling with an uncertain future.

“I have no plan. I don’t know what to do,” she said.

Capellan said she believes New York’s current safety guidelines focus on routine drills — lining children up, grabbing emergency bags and exiting the building — but fail to account for real-life conditions, where smoke, chaos and blocked exits can derail even well-rehearsed plans.

“They don’t train what to do in the case of panic,” she said.

She also believes there are gaps in how emergency supplies are handled. The New York State Office of Children and Family Services instructs providers to keep a single backpack stocked with essentials — contact information, cash and first aid supplies — but in Capellan’s case, that bag was out of reach when the fire broke out.

She now believes emergency protocols should require multiple kits placed throughout a space, a change she said could prove critical in a fast-moving crisis.

In the aftermath, Capellan said support has poured in. A GoFundMe organized by her son, Dyangelo Capellan, to cover costs like repairs, loss of income and urgent bills, has drawn donations from strangers, families and colleagues — some of whom she had not heard from in years.

The GoFundMe raised nearly $14,000 of its $16,000 goal as of March 31.

“It shows that I did something,” she said. “I did something good.”