If you look straight-on at the house at 1012 Jefferson Drive, it might be hard to tell a fire gutted it Tuesday night.
The soot-caked windows do well to conceal the damage within. Fortunately, William and Dorothy Glover made it out safe, with an assist from one of their neighbors.
Mark Fisher was riding by with two friends that evening and when they were approaching Jefferson Drive from Tyler Road, he glanced out the car window and saw something he didn’t expect.
“I looked to the side and saw this bedroom, and the curtains were open, but inside it was all dark — all you could see were flames inside of the bedroom,” Fisher said. “The inside of the house was definitely on fire. I was like, ‘Oh my God, the house is on fire,’ and they thought I was lying, so we backed up and I showed it to them.”
After the car parked in front of the residence, Fisher rushed in. He found William Glover first and tried to get him out of the house.
“I grabbed him and took him out of the house, because it was so smoky, you couldn’t hardly see anything,” Fisher said. “I could tell the fire was coming out of the bedroom and started spreading to the rest of the house. He had a cell phone and he was trying to call 911, but couldn’t at the time, and I was already on my cell phone calling 911. I asked him, ‘Is there anybody else in the house?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, my wife is.’”
Fisher went back in and reached Dorothy Glover in the living room. He said she was circling the room. He grabbed her and took her outside, but she wanted to go back in. The Glovers had a cat. He hadn’t been found.
“I said, ‘Who’s Norbert? Is that a little kid or something?’ She said, ‘No, it’s my cat’,” Fisher said. “I said, ‘Ma’am, if there’s no one left in the house, I can’t go back in that house’.”
Fisher and William Glover made an attempt to get the couple’s car keys from near the side door — in order to move the car and possibly prevent an explosion — but the smoke was too thick.
The Kinston Department of Public Safety responded shortly thereafter.
“The alarm came in about 8:48 last night,” KDPS spokesman Woody Spencer said. “The damage to the property was about $65,000. Damage to contents was about $30,000.”
In all, three fire engines, a ladder truck and Battalion Commander Kevin Scully were called to the scene.
“It was determined a discarded cigarette started the fire,” Spencer said. “We couldn’t find evidence of a smoke alarm in the structure — that’s not to say there isn’t one, but there was no evidence of a smoke detector found.”
Wes Wolfe can be reached at 252-559-1075 or wes.wolfe@kinston.com. Follow him on Twitter @WolfeReports.
Facts:
About 1,000 people are killed every year from smoking material home fires
People close to where a smoking material fire starts are harder to save, because the fire spreads fast
Most fires caused by smoking materials start on beds, furniture or in trash
Source: U.S. Fire Administration