Friends and family will gather 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 will be held about a block away from the Kennedy Street apartment where he had lived.
When a fire broke out at the apartment on the 700 block of Kennedy Street on Aug. 18, residents struggled to escape amid broken smoke detectors and barred windows.
Solomon 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.
