Friends and family gathered Wednesday to mourn and bury a 9-year-old boy killed in a fire in an unlicensed Northwest D.C. apartment.
Yafet Solomon's funeral was held about a block away from the Kennedy Street row house where he had lived.
"We had our whole career planned out," Yafet's best friend said. "He wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to be an engineer."
Instead of sending Yafet to fourth grade at Barnard Elementary School, which he was looking forward to, his loved ones sent the boy to his final resting place.
"I never thought I would have to bury my best friend at 9 years old."
"This is something you don't ever want to have to experience, and it's just something that's so unfathomable and unthinkable," first grade teacher Eleni Marsie-Hazen said.
When a fire broke out at the row house in the 700 block of Kennedy Street Aug. 18, residents struggled to escape amid broken smoke detectors and barred windows.
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Yafet was hurt in the fire and later died.
He was an "extremely funny" child who loved to read and dreamed of being a lawyer, his teachers from Barnard Elementary School wrote on a GoFundMe page.
D.C. authorities were made aware of dangerous conditions in the row house that was illegally divided into tiny apartments up to five months before the fire. A criminal investigation is underway.
More than a dozen Ethiopian immigrants lived in the home, which was not licensed for any residential use.
