Fatal fire shocks Gillespie Avenue neighbours
Neighbours of a Gillespie Avenue house where a fire claimed the lives of two people in their 60s over the weekend say they didn’t hear or smell anything that night before the house went up in flames.
Adam Hayes and his girlfriend, Tasha Aubin, were awakened early Saturday morning and discovered their neighbour’s house fully engulfed by flames. The blaze at 668 Gillespie Ave., in the city’s south end killed a 69-year-old woman and a 65-year-old man. They have not been identified but were known to neighbours as June and Martin.
Hayes said firefighters pounded on their door at about 2 a.m. informing them they had to leave immediately due to the severity of the fire next door.
“I looked out the window and all I could see was fire,” he said. “I ran upstairs, I was yelling at my girlfriend to wake up, get your stuff on, get dressed we need to get out of the house.”
They threw on whatever clothes they could find and rushed out of the house in -20 C weather, he said.
“It was just something you don’t expect waking up, it was just confusing,” Hayes said.
He said he knew his next door neighbours well, engaging in conversations with them and greeting one another.
“(He was a) very friendly guy always said hello,” Hayes said. “Pitter pattering around the house, outside, he always shovelled the sidewalks, he always needed something to do, kind of took care of us in that sense.”
Neighbours in the Gillespie Avenue and McKellar Street area were like their own community, he said.
“We are all very close here, (he) is not too far off from that little circle,” Hayes said. “He would say hi to everyone too. I think it (the fire) has really damaged this whole corner of the street and this little community.”
He said the fire happened without warning.
“We didn’t know there was a fire,” Hayes said. “You couldn’t smell it, you couldn’t hear it, we were woken up, by a crazy violent knock at the door.”
Aubin wonders if they were up later they might have noticed a warning sign.
“We had gone to bed at 11 p.m.,” she said. “We just keep thinking what if we went to bed a little bit later or like my dog tried to wake me up to go outside.”
Hayes said it has really impacted him that he didn’t have a chance to do something to help.
“It hits pretty hard, it is a sense of helplessness, could we have done more, could we have been more alert,” he said. “We keep hearing from friends, like, ‘No, you can’t blame yourselves,’ but how could we sleep through something like that.”
It was an unimaginable experience, he said.
“It is the last thing that ever goes through your head, you see it in the movies, on TV, in the news, and then you wake up beside it and you are running out of your house,” Hayes said.
Now he plans to make a fire escape plan for their house to be prepared.
“We weren’t prepared for it. We said to ourselves over and over again, it doesn’t happen, but if it were ever to happen, we will be ready,” Hayes said. “We will have a fire drill planned; we will have a winter bag packed at the front door.”