The Brooklyn tot who was burned to death by a malfunctioning radiator in his family’s Midwood apartment took his first steps in life just a day earlier, according to his grieving aunt, who said the shattered family has “no intention” of ever returning to the tragic home again.
Eleven-month-old Benjamin Kuravsky was killed Friday after suffering critical burns from a faulty radiator that was pouring steam into a bedroom where he was sleeping, according to his aunt Natalie Akselrod and authorities.
“We have footage of him taking his first steps a day before this horrible tragedy happened,” Akselrod, 47, said Saturday from her Fair Lawn, N.J. home.
The family is completely destroyed by little Benjamin’s senseless death, she continued.
“They’re shattered — we’re all shattered,” she said of the parents, her brother, Alexander Kuravsky and his wife Bessie. “I don’t understand how we are going to recuperate — not I, not Alex, not his wife, not her parents, not the children. We can’t. It doesn’t make sense.”
She added: “Their belongings are still there. They have no intention of going back there.”
Cops responded to a 911 call for help at the apartment shortly after 6 a.m. Friday and found the 11-month-old unconscious in a bedroom suffering severe burns and not responding, authorities said. He was taken to Maimonides Medical Center where he was pronounced dead.
Benjamin’s one-month-old twin sisters — Ruchami and Hadassah — were also in the home at the time of the incident, and their mother Bessie was feeding one of them in a different bedroom when she heard a loud sound from the other room.
“I’m not saying the landlord deliberately caused it, but it is an old building, and the radiators are always malfunctioning and always making weird noises, and this is unacceptable,” Akselrod said of the nearly 100-year-old, four-story brick building on East 14th Street off Avenue J.
“This was a murder of a baby,” she raged. “For a baby to be steamed alive in his bedroom is unacceptable.”
An investigation found the leak occurred because a nipple connection to a radiator was off, discharging steam into the bedroom, according to the city’s Buildings Department.
The agency as a result issued a “cease use’ for the building’s boiler and ordered the landlord to make repairs to the leaking radiator.
The investigation remains ongoing, and landlord Ruvin Itskovich could face additional enforcement action and penalties.
Itskovich, whose entity RPDG LLC is listed in property records as the building’s owner, did not return messages.
“The landlord wasn’t even at the site,” she said. “I think he at least owed them an appearance and an expression of condolences, but that did not happen,” Akselrod said.
Akselrod said she plans to help oversee any possible litigation against the landlord.
Steam heat-related injuries are rare in the Big Apple.
In 2016, two young sisters succumbed to heinous burns from a faulty radiator at a temporary housing complex in The Bronx for homeless people.