Video: The blazing porch as firefighters arrive. Shot by Joshua Beinhaker around 11:35 pm on July 13, 2015. Note: Strong language.
By Kevin Coughlin
As investigators try to piece together what caused the fatal fire on Pine Street two weeks ago, another baffling question hangs over the tragedy:
Why was one attic tenant able to escape with his dog… while his apartment-mate, 31-year-old Kelly Smith, did not get out?
In this exclusive interview with Morristown Green, Jared Tamasco, 33, recalls a night of chaos and terror in which he narrowly escaped an inferno he described as the fastest moving thing he’s ever seen.
The following is based on Jared’s account of July 13-14, 2015.
‘GET THE —- OUT! THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE’
After watching The Making of the Mob on AMC, Jared called it a night, at 11 pm. He wanted to rise early the next day to take his dog, Emmett, to the park.
He shared the attic on the third level of a vinyl-sided house at 15 Pine St., a few doors from the Mayo Performing Arts Center, with his girlfriend Adrienne, another man, and Kelly, a beautician who had moved there in mid-May, seeking refuge from a noisier place across town.
There were three bedrooms, a pair of bathrooms, a shared kitchen and living room, and one stairwell in the front end of this top floor, leading down to the porch.
About 10 minutes before the fire, Kelly came upstairs — Jared heard a creaky hinge in the apartment — and she popped into his room, at the back end of the hallway, and reclined across the foot of his bed. She liked late-night talks, Jared said, but on this night he was intent on sleeping and nothing was said.
The smell of burning plastic soon jolted him from bed.
He started down the stairwell, heard crackling, and ran back upstairs to grab a fire extinguisher.
Returning to the second level landing, he heard a fire alarm and looked toward the porch. Grey smoke was coming up and there were “flashes of fire.”
“I ran up and yelled to Kelly: ‘Get the f— out, the house is on fire!,” Jared said.
She was running towards him — he thinks maybe she was heading to open a window.
Jared dashed off a 911 call, and fumbled with a room key left by an absent floor-mate, whose room accessed the fire escape. He dropped the key.
“The smoke was on me already,” Jared said.
‘I CAN’T SEE’
He remembered a folding ladder stowed under his bed. Jared’s father gave him the ladder for this very purpose, when Jared moved to 15 Pine five years ago.
Jared went to hang the ladder out his bedroom window, which faces the rear parking lot on King Place.
But when he opened his bedroom window, the suction drew smoke from the front of the house through his hallway.
“I breathed in all that smoke. I knew I would never attach the ladder in time,” Jared said.
And then, from somewhere inside the chaos, came the last words he would ever hear from Kelly:
“I can’t see! I can’t breathe!”
Jared’s bedroom went from light grey to pure black.
“It happened so fast,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything move that fast.”
From his bedroom window, he no longer could see his bedroom door–about seven feet away.
Inhaled smoke “burns, it’s heavy,” Jared said. “It’s panic when you breathe that in. When you’re inside, it’s like, claustrophobia.”
Across the street, neighbor Lauren Diehl was awakened by someone–she thinks it was a policeman–shouting: “Get out of the house!” She emerged to see flames climbing from the porch up the side of 15 Pine.
“From the roof it just shot up so fast!” she said.
Jared snatched Emmett, his 10-month-old rescue shelter mixed-breed dog, by the scruff of its neck, “like a Teddy bear,” and, in bare feet, climbed onto the narrow, sloped roof of a bay window under his bedroom window.
He cannot be sure how long he perched there shouting for help; it felt like an impossibly long time.
Lauren, his neighbor, praised firefighters for their heroics, but also said it felt like a long wait for them to spring into action.
“But maybe I was just in shock,” she said.
‘MY ROOMMATE IS STILL UPSTAIRS!’
Fire Chief Robert Flanagan said a dispatcher received a 911 call at 11:29 pm and fire trucks were on the scene in approximately three minutes. One of his volunteers, First Assistant Chief Paul J. Miller, was leaving a nearby restaurant, saw the fire, and ran there in his civilian attire, arriving as the trucks pulled up, Flanagan said. Police also arrived swiftly, he said.
As fire crews were setting up hoses, Miller ran toward the cries for help at the back of the building.
Flames were snaking all the way around from the front of the house; Jared kept shifting on his precarious perch to find gaps in the smoke for himself and Emmett to gulp air.
Onlookers gathered below; someone urged him to jump. His options weren’t good. Off to his left was a roof extending from the first floor. At 6-foot-1 and 210-pounds, he was a good athlete–a shortstop in his schoolboy days at Columbia High School in Maplewood—and he figured the leap was possible. But not with a 35-pound dog in his arms.
To his right were tree branches… and underneath them, a spiked fence. Directly below him was a neighbor’s white Hyundai. He contemplated jumping onto the car, thinking its roof might break his fall.
Police were on the scene and Jared yelled down:
“Where the —- is a ladder?”
“It’s coming!” he was told.
“I don’t have time!” Jared shot back.
Miller, from the fire department, and Police Officers Yeison de los Santos and Richard Rispoli fetched a ladder from a fire truck.
Several attempts to brace the ladder were hampered by utility lines.
The noxious smoke thickened.
Officer de los Santos scrambled up the ladder.
“Take my dog!” Jared said. The officer descended with Emmett and Jared followed them to the ground.
“My roommate is still upstairs!” Jared told his rescuers.
Miller relayed that information to his comrades, who were extinguishing the porch fire. Within minutes, firemen with oxygen masks entered the red-hot third floor via the fire escape and began searching, Chief Flanagan said.
Even with thermal imaging cameras, he said, it was virtually impossible to see anything. Firefighters had to feel their way through the dense smoke. As the night wore on, portions of the flaming roof collapsed.
Outside, Jared tried to resist being hustled to an ambulance. “I said, ‘No, my roommate is still up there.'”
Emergency crews prevailed. At Morristown Medical Center, in the wee hours of the morning, Jared learned of Kelly’s fate when police asked how to contact her next of kin.
Kelly’s body was found on a couch in the living room, near her bedroom in the center of the apartment.
AN ASH TRAY ON THE PORCH
The fire appears to have started on the porch, Chief Flanagan said.
Tenants enjoyed relaxing there, and a ceramic flower pot filled with sand served as an ashtray, Jared said. To his consternation, he said, he sometimes found trash, including fast food wrappers and cigarette cartons, in that ashtray.
Several factors likely contributed to the rapid spread of the fire, according to the fire chief. Old, dry clapboard beneath vinyl siding burns fast. The fire may have spread through windows. And then there is “balloon construction,” common to houses like this one, which town records indicate was erected around 1900.
The term refers to gaps between walls for wiring and pipes. Modern construction includes cross beams, which act as barriers to slow the upward travel of flames, Flanagan said.
While the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office has said the fire does not appear to be suspicious, it remains under investigation, according to Morristown police and town officials, who so far have declined to release police reports about the incident or inspection records pertaining to the house.
Town Administrator Michael Rogers said buildings with three or more housing units are subject to fire safety inspections every five years by the state Department of Community Affairs. A spokeswoman for that agency said it has no records of inspections at 15 Pine.
Landlord Ralph Catizone of Randolph said he only was required to install sprinklers for a first-floor apartment he created a few years ago.
Smoke detectors were in the apartments, Jared said. But he was unsure how many were working. Cooking smoke often set them off, he said, tempting residents to disconnect them.
MOTORCYCLIST: ‘WAITING FOR MY EYEBROWS TO CATCH ON FIRE’
Most of the 11 tenants at 15 Pine were not home when the fire broke out. One couple apparently was roused from sleep by a passing motorcyclist, Jason Burd, who said he saw the porch ablaze and started banging on first floor doors and shouting:
“Listen, you gotta get out! The fire is coming fast! It’s getting too big real quick!”
Burd said he had just finished working his sixth night in a row for a local retailer, and was unwinding with a late evening ride before his day off. As his Kawasaki Z1R rolled to a stop sign at Dumont Place, something caught his eye across Pine Street.
“I seen a flash, and wasn’t sure what it was. I looked up again, and saw it rolling up the porch,” the Morristown resident said of the fire.
When a young woman ventured back inside to look for her cat, Burd said, he went in to pull her out.
This is my worst nightmare, the distraught woman told him.
“It’s your worst nightmare if you stay in here,” he remembers responding.
A police officer broke down an adjacent door, Burd said, but the interior was “a maze” and conditions were too dangerous.
“My face started feeling real hot. I was waiting for something to catch on fire– my eyebrows, my hair,” said Burd, who marked his 34th birthday later that week with headaches and stinging eyes from the black smoke.
Burd said he laments being unable to save the victim. And he has empathy for the survivors. Hard times once left him homeless, too, until Morristown’s Market Street Mission helped set things right, he said.
“I did what I could, and said a prayer when I went home,” he said of the fire.
‘I COULD’VE GRABBED HER’
Since the fire, Jared has been staying with a friend in Dover. Emmett, who used to sleep on the floor, now jumps into Jared’s bed each night.
Jared loves Morristown and ventures back often, hoping to be allowed inside his former apartment to see what belongings he can salvage. During an interview outside the charred house, nearly two weeks after the fire, the pungent odor of smoke stung this reporter’s eyes and throat.
As things stand now, Jared has lost virtually all his possessions–computer, mobile phone, car keys, driver’s license, credit cards, a collector’s edition Ted Williams baseball glove, and a wardrobe that included Hugo Boss cashmere coats, Armani shirts, Ted Baker suits and $400 Ferragamo shoes.
His girlfriend, Adrienne Mendonez, 32, who was out with friends on the night of the fire, has created PineStFire.org, a crowd-funding site for the victims. The couple also are exploring help from a town fire relief fund established by public donations after an Elm Street fire in January.
For Jared, the fire is the low point of what already was a bad year. In May he was laid off from his job at a blood bank. Before that, he discovered a suicide in a shore house that he visits.
It’s all been very, very sobering.
“When you’re a victim and tragedy happens, that’s when you really, really get it. People have it worse than me,” said Jared, citing Kelly’s grieving family.
Sometimes he second-guesses himself.
“You never know it’s going to come to that; you think it’s just smoke. I could’ve grabbed her, and said, ‘Stay here.'”
All the possessions can be replaced, he knows. His apartment mate cannot.
“I can see her face as clear as day,” Jared said.
I have had my house burn and my dog die in the fire. It was devastating. I pray that everything works out for the people and dog that were able to escape. And I pray for the family that lost their daughter. If I read it correctly it was not safe to go back in the house because of the flames and smoke.
“Why was one attic tenant able to escape with his dog… while his apartment-mate, 31-year-old Kelly Smith, did not get out?”
Read the whole article, still didn’t see anything that explains this question. I hope your dog lives a long happy life.