An 11-month-old boy died Friday morning after being burned by steam leaking from a radiator in a bedroom of a Brooklyn apartment, police said.

Police received a 911 call for help just after 6 a.m. at the apartment, on East 14th Street in the Midwood neighborhood, officials said. When officers arrived, they found the boy with burns, police said. He was unconscious and unresponsive.

The child, whose name was not released, was taken to Maimonides Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead, officials said.

The cause of the leak was under investigation as of Friday afternoon, officials said. During the investigation, records show, police filed a request with the New York City Department of Buildings for an inspection “due to a defective radiator causing steam to fill the bedroom.”

The boy's mother was feeding her other child when the 11-month-old walked into the bedroom and was struck by the steam, police said.

The building's boiler was last inspected on Feb. 2, 2023, according to Approved Oil, the Brooklyn company that conducted the inspection. “No defects” were found at the time, according to a file submitted to the Buildings Department.

Steam heat is ubiquitous in New York City, but injuries caused by it usually occur in industrial workplaces and are relatively rare. Deaths are even rarer.

In 2016, two sisters, ages 2 and 1, died after being severely burned by steam from a radiator in a transitional apartment for the homeless in the South Bronx. In 2017, the girls' parents sued the city, the building's owner and the Bushwick Economic Development Corporation, the social services agency that managed temporary housing in the building.

The parents agreed last June to settle with the city for $300,000 and with Social Services for $4.5 million, court records show.

City agencies cited the Midwood property where the child died Friday for 57 violations, most of them between 2010 and 2013, city records show.

Ruvin Itskovich, who is listed in Buildings Department documents as the current owner, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The four-story brick building where the death occurred is in a middle-class neighborhood of similar apartment complexes and detached multi-family homes. On Friday morning, two police officers and two men wearing skullcaps stood outside the first-floor apartment and refused entry to a reporter, declaring it was private property. There were two strollers out front. At one point, Buildings Department officials entered through a basement door.

Victor Buzin, 36, who has lived at the address since he was a teenager, said he did not know the victim's family and noted that the building had a fairly high turnover. He said he had never had any problems with his radiator, but the building was old and had problems.

“It's terrible,” Mr Buzin said. “How could this happen?”

Steam has been an important source of heat in New York for about 150 years. It currently heats about 80 percent of the city's residential buildings, according to a 2019 report by Urban Green Council, a group that includes real estate developers and environmentalists. The largest steam system in the United States runs from the southern tip of Lower Manhattan to 96th Street, serve millions of people.

The council said steam heat was especially common in smaller multi-family homes of less than 50,000 square feet — a category that includes the Midwood building.

Most steam systems work with boilers that burn oil or natural gas. Steam heat is no longer used in most new construction because it releases greenhouse gases and can be difficult to distribute evenly throughout the building. Modern buildings use more efficient systems, including geothermal heat pumps.

Matthew Haag reporting contributed. Susan C. Beachy research contributed.