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KENTWOOD, Mich. (WOOD) — The investigation into the fire that killed two people in a Kentwood apartment Friday morning centers on two questions: What cause the fire and did smoke detectors go off?
For most of the residents of the building at Wingate Apartment complex, the first sign of trouble came with a panicked, middle of the night warning.
“The window was opened and we heard a woman screaming there is a fire! There is a fire,” said Rachel Dotson-Hackworth, who lives next to the building where the fire happened.
Kentwood firefighters arrived in minutes and pulled the victims from the lower level apartment, but it was too late.
The victims have been identified as Mary Hopkins, 51 and 61-year-old Edward Newhouse who lived in the apartment together.
Investigators are trying to determine the cause of the fire, which started in a bed. One clue may be the smoking habits of one of the victims.
“There are several other causes that we need to eliminate, and smoking is one of them,” Kentwood Fire Chief Brent Looman said.
The fire did not produce much in the way of flames. It was likely the smoke that killed the victims.
There was not much smoke either, but a little toxic smoke goes a long way in a small apartment.
There were smoke detectors in the apartment, which investigators say met safety codes. However, an upstairs neighbor told 24 Hour News 8 she never heard the smoke alarms sound in the victims’ apartment.
“These buildings, when they were built, they met code to when they were built. If you built a new building today, it would be different with a possible fire suppression system, alarms systems,” Looman said.
Firefighter did find a smoke detector in the apartment. It was wired directly into the electrical system which is supposed to help prevent tampering. Experts will be brought in to take a closer look.
“The insurance company for the building will part of that with an electrical engineer that will help sift through this and try to figure out what actually happened with that. If it did or did not function,” Looman said.
Residents told 24 Hour News 8 that smoke detectors in their apartment also never went go off. But under the city’s building code, the complex is not required to have interconnected detectors.
The smoke may have not been enough to activate the detectors in the other apartments.
“It was very faint. I don’t know if it would have set ours off? But it was pretty faint,” said Dotson-Hackworth.
While the investigation in to what, if anything, went wrong with the electronic early warning system continues, it also appears there was a break down in the human early warning system.
The fire department says residents smelled smoke as long as 20 minutes before anyone called 911.
“Certainly early detection would put us here quite a bit sooner,” Looman said.
Looman says the investigation will be very thorough, but it may take time to get those answers.
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