It wasn't yet 10 a.m., but the heat of a summer Tuesday when temperatures in Brooklyn, N.Y., would climb to the mid-90s was already apparent.
There were other signs of summer—signs of the role luck would play in a tragic day. Over a bakery on 18th Avenue, an apartment was quiet, its tenants away on vacation. The bakery itself, where a dozen people would normally be at work, was closed. Two doors away, a family had just left an apartment. And on the normally busy commercial street in front of the bakery, the apartments, and the 18th Avenue Plumbing Supply Co. in between, just one person was walking by.
In a few moments, 4 people would die and 13 would be injured—but it could have been many more.
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