A sad day for our neighborhood

Times Dispatch Article

ETERSBURG --As she jumped from the second-floor porch just before the flames engulfed it, the 13-year-old girl called back to three boys to follow her.

They didn't.

The boys -- 15, 11 and 6 -- perished in yesterday's early-morning fire in a rundown Petersburg neighborhood. The other seven members of the extended family were treated at VCU Medical Center for burns and smoke inhalation, which they suffered in the 2 a.m. fire that turned the city's sky orange.

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T he house had no smoke detectors and no electrical service, Petersburg Fire Marshal Charles L. Moore Jr. said.

Fire officials would not release the victims' names, pending formal identification by the state medical examiner, but friends and family members said they were among the seven children of Hope and Diamond Hazel, sisters who had rented the old frame house on South Harrison Street for the past year.

If the husband of one of the two women hadn't happened to awaken sometime shortly after 2 a.m., the tragedy could have been even worse, Moore said.

"The room was already pretty well charred by then," he said.

The husband's shouts roused the family, Moore said. One sister escaped the flames with her 6-month-old baby in her arms. The other woman followed.

A 14-year-old boy, after trying to fight his way through a ball of fire upstairs to reach the three younger boys, jumped from the second-floor porch. The 13-year-old girl followed, breaking her arm as she fell.

She was the last to escape.

"They were such nice little children," said neighbor Mattie Glass, whose great-grandchildren Alyicia Ward and Christopher Latimer knew the victims.

Glass dabbed two trails of tears running down 11-year-old Alyicia's cheeks. "I've never seen so much fire," Glass said. "It didn't just burn. It was engulfed."

Two doors down, a stone-faced Samy Artis, 13, slumped in a porch chair. "They was my friends," he said. "We used to ride bikes."

Neighbors called 911 at about 2:20 a.m. after seeing the front porch in flames.

"I saw them when they were jumping," said neighbor Charles Cheatham, who was almost too distraught to speak. "I was shocked."

Moore, the fire marshal, said he believes the fire -- which started in a first-floor front room that the family used as a bedroom had been burning for about an hour at that point.

"I saw the porch burning and called 911," said neighbor Theophilus Bland. "By the time I got back to the front, the whole top was burning. . . . It was so quick. Just up in flames, all the way up to the sky."

When firefighters from the nearby Market Street station swung open the garage doors to respond, they say the flames filled the sky, Battalion Chief Doug Ford said.

Emergency medical technicians immediately sent the two sisters and the 6-month-old baby to VCU Medical Center. The 13- and 14-year-olds and husband went to Southside Regional Medical Center, just a few blocks away, but were quickly helicoptered to VCU's trauma center because of the extent of their injuries. The seventh survivor was an adult male who left the scene but later checked himself in at VCU Medical Center. They were treated for smoke inhalation and burns, with some still in critical condition hours after the blaze was put out.

Firefighters scrambled to the duplex next door, waking residents and leading them to safety.

"It could have been me, fast as it was burning," said next-door neighbor Larry Cole, one of six people evacuated from the duplex.

By the time firefighters put out the fire in the Hazel sisters' home, about 45 minutes after responding to the alarm, it had burned one side wall of the duplex across a six-foot driveway and sent flames shooting through the length of that building's attic.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of the Hazel sisters' home was gone. All that remained of the house by late morning was some blackened lumber and a leaning front chimney, with twisted bedsprings and bicycles scattered about.

Donatus Amaram, a Virginia State University marketing and management professor, has owned the house since 1991, one of a dozen rental houses he owns in Petersburg. He said he was unaware of how many people were living in the house and that it had no electricity.

It was the second fatal fire in that block of Harrison Street in less than two years. In June 2005, a fire killed one of seven residents who shared an aging frame home. In November, another fatal fire claimed a life in the Battersea area.

"As many of these as I've been to, you never get used to it," Moore said.

Contact staff writer David Ress at dress @timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6051.
Times-Dispatch staff writer Paige Mudd and rewrite editor Mary Goodwyn contributed to this report.