ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 21, 1996 TAG: 9601220069
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
Four children and their grandmother died Saturday night, trapped upstairs by a Southeast Roanoke house fire that may have been sparked by faulty kitchen wiring.
One of the children was pulled from the blaze by firefighters about 10 p.m. and taken to Community Hospital of the Roanoke Valley, where he was dead on arrival.
Roanoke Fire Chief Jim Grigsby said the children's mother, Patricia Leftwich, was upstairs when the fire began. She smelled smoke and went downstairs to investigate. By the time she had turned around to go back up, flames had engulfed the stairs.
Leftwich ran from the house at 1228 Stewart Ave. S.E. "screaming and hollering, `The house is on fire,''' said next-door neighbor Tony Sheppard.
Sheppard called 911, then went next door to see if he could help. He entered the burning house, which is divided into three apartments, through its left front door, but was forced back outside by the smoke. The family apparently was living in all three apartments.
Elizabeth Ferguson, who also lives next door, said she talked to the trapped victims for a few minutes. She and Sheppard tried to get them to break through a window, but they couldn't shatter the glass. Then the victims stopped responding to her shouts, she said.
"The firemen had to beat the crap out of [the glass] to break it from the outside," Sheppard said.
Grigsby said the call was received at 9:44 p.m. and that the first unit arrived at the scene at 9:48. The fire was put out quickly, "and then we discovered the bodies," Grigsby said.
It was not clear late Saturday which child - Mark, 6; Clyde, 5; Patrick, 4; or Nancy, 3 - was taken to the hospital. Their grandmother Goldie Christie Duncan, 46, also died in the fire.
The victims died from a combination of smoke inhalation and fire, Grigsby said.
The children's father, Mark Leftwich, who lives in Botetourt County, ran up the street to the fire scene a little after 10 and learned from bystanders that his children and mother-in-law had been inside the house.
"Oh, my God," he shouted, pounding on a fence across the street from the small frame house. His children's red wagon and pink bicycle still sat in the yard. He paced frantically back and forth between the Roanoke police squad car where Patricia Leftwich sat weeping and the police tape that separated the gathering crowd from the fire.
Grigsby said about 30 firefighters, police and rescue workers responded to the alarm.
He said two fire marshals were at the scene Saturday night, and their preliminary findings indicated that wiring was the source of the fire. But he said a final report would not be made until Tuesday.
Another neighbor, who consoled Patricia Leftwich as firefighters worked, said Leftwich had no other family, "nothing. She ain't got nothing but her name."
This may have been the worst fire in Roanoke since a 1969 blaze on Centre Avenue Northwest killed three children under the age of 5.
Staff writer S.D. Harrington contributed to this story.
LENGTH: Medium: 68 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: WAYNE DEEL. City firefighters remove their equipmentby CNBafter extinguishing the
fatal blaze Saturday night. color. Graphic: Map by Andrew Svec.
color. KEYWORDS: FATALITY KATHERINE REED AND BETTY HAYDEN STAFF WRITERS
NOTE: LEDE