A woman is dead and a police officer has been taken to hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries after fire tore through a third floor unit at an apartment building in Rexdale early Wednesday morning.
It happened at a TCHC building on Kendleton Drive near Kipling Avenue and Albion Road at around 1:40 a.m.
The woman was without vital signs at the scene but was pronounced dead in hospital.
According to Captain Michael Westwood, a total of 45 firefighters responded the blaze and were able to knock it down within about 15 minutes of their arrival.
"Someone was yelling, 'help, help, help,' and I came out and realized what was going on," a resident at the building said.
"She was all black with the black smoke, but you could tell it was a white woman," building resident Tony Jack told CTV Toronto. "It looked like a black silhouette."
Jack lives in an apartment just above where the fire took place. He said he could feel the heat on his apartment floor from the flames below.
"(I could feel) the heat coming up. So I had to run out," he said.
Paramedics say that that the injured police officer is receiving treatment for smoke inhalation.
"I received information from Toronto Fire Service and Toronto Community Housing that annual inspection was just conducted yesterday on the building, and that on Monday, a member of Toronto Community Housing was inside the unit and actually ensured that the smoke alaram was working on that date," fire investigator Jason Williams told CTV Toronto.
The Office of the Ontario Fire Marshal has been called in to probe the cause of the blaze.
With files from Janice Golding.
