Hot Plate Source Of Fire That Claimed 7 Siblings

The bodies of seven siblings who died in a house fire are headed to Israel for burial, a day after their sobbing father told mourners in his ultra-Orthodox Jewish community how much joy they had brought him. "They were so pure," Gabriel Sassoon said Sunday of his children during a eulogy. "My wife, she came out fighting." Flames engulfed the family’s two-story, brick-and-wood home in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood early Saturday, likely after a hot plate left on a kitchen counter set off the fire that trapped the children and badly injured their mother and another sibling, investigators said.