A fire in Harlem on Friday that the FDNY said was caused by a lithium-ion battery claimed the life of a 27-year-old journalist whose colleagues described him as generous, gifted and committed to telling stories about New Yorkers.
Police confirmed Fazil Khan died from the intense blaze that broke out around 2:15 p.m. Friday in his six-story building near St. Nicholas Place and West 149th Street. Another 17 people were injured, some critically, according to FDNY officials.
Fire marshals said on Saturday that the fire was caused by a lithium-ion battery, though they did not offer additional details. Khan’s death marks New York City’s first lithium ion-related fatality of 2024, according to the FDNY, which has repeatedly warned of a surge in battery fires.
Khan, who came to New York from India to get a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University, most recently worked as a data journalist at the Hechinger Report, an outlet focused on education. Over the weekend, his friends, colleagues and former teachers paid tribute to him in an outpouring on social media.
“Fazil was a treasure,” Hechinger’s deputy managing editor Christina Samuels wrote on X. “Funny, kind, and not at all impatient with our off-beat requests and ideas (and we had plenty of those…) We will all miss him so much.”
Liz Donovan, a journalist who collaborated with Khan on an investigative project about a lack of mental health support for children whose parents died from COVID-19, recalled Khan’s “sensitive spirit and brilliant mind.”
“This all feels so deeply unfair and I can only imagine the amount of impact his work and friendships could have had with the many more years he deserved,” she wrote in a Facebook post.
Khan moved from New Delhi in the fall of 2020 and graduated from Columbia with a master’s degree in data journalism the following year, according to his LinkedIn profile. He had previously worked at media outlets in India.
After graduate school, he earned one of…
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