NEW YORK (AP) – Two brothers – one a former football star, the other an ex-convict just home from prison – were killed early Saturday in a suspicious fire that tore through their home and threatened to consume an entire block.

The ferocious blaze engulfed the two story house on Staten Island’s Jewett Avenue before dawn, then spread and damaged five other homes. Police and fire officials said they suspected the fire had been set deliberately.

Stephen Manganaro, a 44-year-old sanitation worker, was making his early morning rounds when he saw black smoke pouring from the house. He headed toward the burning home, only to be pushed back.

“I was getting ready to kick the door in, and then the whole front of the house just exploded,” he recounted later Saturday. “The windows blew out. The flames went up and knocked the telephone wires into the tree, and that started a (second) fire.”

Covered in glass and unable to get into the blazing home, Manganaro and his partner on the graveyard shift, 51-year-old Kenneth Swain, split up and began banging on the other doors in the row of houses at around 4:30 a.m., screaming for residents to wake up and get out.

The pajama-clad neighbors, some crying, gathered across the street as the flames spread to their homes. Nine firefighters were injured getting the fire under control.

“It’s just madness inside,” Fire Lt. John Eccleston told the New York Daily News. “It was the worst private dwelling fire I’ve seen in 25 years. We could see the glow from a half mile away.”

Caught at the center of the blaze were Seandale Gutter, 27, and his brother Sha-Ron Gutter, 23, authorities said.

Seandale had a history of legal troubles and was released from state prison on Dec. 5. He had served 18 months on a weapons charge, according to state records.

Sha-Ron had been a football standout at Curtis High School. The New York Daily News gave him its All Star High School Football Player of the Year Award in 2002.

A police investigation into the cause of the fire was under way