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A mother and her four children — two boys and two girls — died in a fire that tore through their apartment in a four-family house on Staten Island before dawn on Thursday morning. Fire officials said they found no smoke detectors in the apartment.

The blaze gutted much of the two-story house at 302 Nicholas Avenue in the Port Richmond neighborhood. Fire marshals were still going through the debris at midmorning, looking for clues as to how the fire had started, and where. But fire officials said the blaze was probably not suspicious.

Neighbors said they were awakened shortly after 4 a.m. by shouts of “There’s a fire, there’s a fire!” They said the windows of the burning apartment were lit up by flames, and the blaze soon spread to the roof.

“You could see the flames shooting up in the air,” said Christine Valentin, who lives next door.

Firefighters were alerted by a 911 call from someone on the street at 4:13 a.m., and the first of 140 firefighters began arriving within four minutes. They hosed down at the top of an inside stairway leading to the burning apartment, and in the moment the flames died down, a lieutenant burst in.

He found the youngest child, a 2-year-old boy, and carried him out. The little boy was taken to Staten Island University Hospital, where he died.

The mother, identified by a city official as Leisa Jones, and the other three children died in the apartment. The two girls were 10 and 7 years old, neighbors said, and the other boy was 14. Neighbors said they were Jamaican and had moved into the apartment about a year ago.

In all, 17 people lived in the building. Everyone but the Joneses escaped.

Shannon Barback, 37, who lives in the other apartment on the second floor, said she and her three children got out because her boyfriend, Nicholas Cotton, 32, heard someone banging on a door downstairs.

“It was two girls from down the block,” Ms. Barback said. Mr. Cotton went to the window, she said, and “the girls were telling him, ‘There’s a fire, get out, get out.’”

He checked the apartment, Ms. Barback said, and found nothing amiss until he opened the bathroom door. Flames were racing through a shaftway. “He grabbed me and he said, ‘Get up, get up,’” she said. “He shook me. We grabbed the kids, sleeping in the living room, and went out.”

She said police officers and firefighters were downstairs, trying to knock down a door leading to the burning apartment.

Commissioner Salvatore Cassano of the Fire Department said at 6 a.m. that said the blaze was being investigated as a suspicious fire, but that is not unusual when there is no apparent cause, when a fire breaks out in the early morning and when there are so many casualties. Fire marshals were called in to investigate, and by midmorning officials were moving away from the idea that the blaze was suspicious.

James Long, a Fire Department spokesman, said the marshals were still working to determine the cause, “but it’s less likely this is a suspicious fire.”

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