As Bronx family reels from tragic blaze that killed 4, e-bike fires have skyrocketed across NYC, FDNY says

Leonard Greene, New York Daily News on Oct 31, 2026

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NEW YORK — As a Bronx family continues to reel from a devastating e-bike fire that took the lives of four family members, blazes caused by lithium-ion batteries have skyrocketed across the city, new FDNY statistics show.

The three new deaths linked to Wednesday’s e-bike blaze in Mott Haven’s Patterson Houses bring the city’s lithium-ion battery death toll to nine so far this year, FDNY officials said.

There was only one fatality linked to a lithium-ion battery fire in all of 2025. In 2024, there were six deaths, and in 2023 the city recorded its highest number of fatal e-bike fires with 18 victims.

The number of fires linked to lithium-ion batteries has also jumped this year to 401 as of last week, according to department data.

In all of 2025, there were 292 blazes, officials said. Injuries from e-bike battery fires have gone up, too. This year, lithium-ion battery fires have caused 74 fires. In all of last year, they caused 51.

In 2019, when the FDNY first started tracking these fires, only 13 blazes were attributed to the batteries. By 2020, the number had more than tripled to 44, and continued to rise until the number started to fall in 2024, according to FDNY officials.

Despite an aggressive public safety campaign and repeated warnings about how to properly store and charge e-bikes, tragedies like the one that fell upon 11-year-old Zion Maine and his family continue, FDNY officials said.

Zion died Wednesday after his father’s e-bike exploded in their 11th-floor apartment, officials said. The bike was being charged next to the apartment door — the family’s only means of escape.

“It was in a place in the kitchen that made it impossible for the residents to leave safely,” FDNY Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore said after Wednesday’s blaze. On Friday, Zion’s two teenage half-brothers, CJ Maine, 15, and Jamaree Adam, 16, and his father’s girlfriend, Syida Adam, all died from their injuries.

Courtney Maine, Zion’s father, remained in critical condition in the hospital — the lone survivor of the tragic blaze. Family members said the e-bike was gifted to Courtney by a friend so he could get additional work and provide for his family.

“They should never block exits and doors and windows,” Bonsignore said about e-bikes and lithium-ion batteries. “They should never charge when you’re sleeping or not in the room.”

Fire officials could not pinpoint the increase in lithium-ion battery fires this year, although FDNY First Deputy Commissioner Daniel Flynn told amNewYork he believes many of these fires were the result of these batteries nearing the end of their lives.

“Devices that have lithium-ion batteries in them eventually fail to work properly, and I think we’re probably getting to that point where the surge of lithium-ion battery ownership has caused these batteries now to reach the end of life,” he told the outlet.

“So, we want to make sure that everybody just monitors what they look like, what they smell like,” he said. “If they’re leaking, get rid of them.”

Bonsignore urged New Yorkers to store and charge batteries outside their homes when possible, never let them block doors or windows, never charge them unattended, and buy certified batteries free of leaks or damage.

“The battery’s cells go into thermal runaway, which makes a small fire turn into a very big fire, very, very quickly,” she said Wednesday. “These lithium-ion battery fires can kill you, they can kill your family, they can kill your neighbors, and they can kill our first responders. It is all our responsibility to heed the warnings.”

But it seems some of Bonsignore’s message has gotten across: out of this year’s 401 lithium-ion battery fires, 248 of them — more than half — occurred outside, leading FDNY officials to believe that residents have heeded the warnings about charging their bikes outdoors.

Others who died in similar fires this year included 18-year-old Caleb Matthews, 18, who was killed Aug. 28 when his e-bike’s battery exploded in his family’s apartment in the Albany Houses in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Another lithium-ion battery fire in August also took the lives of hair stylist Shantii Quinones, 39, and her customer Willy Reyes, 29, who died when a lithium-ion battery exploded and sparked a fire at the La Roka Barbershop in the Morris Heights section of the Bronx.

On June 26, a 48-year-old Queens man was killed after a battery charging in the kitchen of his basement apartment in Jamaica ignited.

He escaped by crawling out a window, only to later succumb to his injuries at Nassau County Medical Center.

Fire officials said one of the victims who died this year succumbed to injuries she suffered in a lithium-ion battery fire in 2023.