Firefighters say they received a call just after 4 p.m. about furniture that had caught fire at one of the homes. It was so terrible. Everything was pitch black. You couldn t breathe, eyes started getting watery, Marcos Archindia recalled. He said his brother saw the flames started. He said it started on one of the mattresses they had back there because that backyard was filled with garbage bags and mattresses; it was really dirty, Archindia told NBC New York. So I don t know what happened. They saw the fire started. They turned back and in a minute, it was 20 feet in the air.