Devastating Junction fire spurs community spirit
Couple raises money for uninsured neighbours after blaze engulfs their apartment
The fire had engulfed his front porch and was crawling up the front of the house when Adam Bagatavicius, cat carrier in hand, made the split-second decision to leap through the flames filling his front door.
“There were no lights. The entire space was filled with black smoke,” said Bagatavicius, 31, describing the Nov. 12 night he was forced to flee from his Sarnia Ave. apartment with two-and-a-half-month-old Smudge.
“It was just me and this tiny kitten with tiny lungs and a door with a raging fire engulfing it. I had to make a quick decision,” he said.
“So I picked up the cat carrier and just ran straight through the wall of fire to try and escape.”
Bagatavicius suffered first- and second-degree burns to his face, neck and arms. His partner Marla Schreiber, 31, ran out the back and was not harmed. The couple’s other cat Boomerang, or Boomi, died in the fire.
Smudge, who fell or jumped out of the carrier after they got outside, is missing, but the couple remains hopeful the tiny kitten will be found.
The couple had contents insurance but their neighbours did not, so Bagatavicius and Schreiber are trying to raise $25,000 to help the other seven uninsured occupants of the apartments, also displaced by the fire, to rebuild their lives. The owner of the home, who lived in a lower-level apartment, also had insurance.
They held a fundraiser on Saturday at Black Rock Coffee and Bar on Bloor St. W., where Bagatavicius is a manager, and raised $2,040. A YouCaring page will also be active until Dec. 24.
“While we are all starting over, at least we are not starting over from scratch,” said Schreiber, who is a visual artist and counsellor, with a master of social work degree.
“These people are like our family . . . We had this beautiful little community in these two houses.”
After a night of smoke, terror and loss, the couple and their neighbours also really needed a dance party, she said.
Bagatavicius and Schreiber, who met at age 14, fell in love at 18 and will celebrate 13 years as a couple in January, share a slightly macabre sense of humour, something they said has helped them navigate trauma.
“I couldn’t be more grateful to have him to rebuild my life with,” Schreiber said.
The couple moved into their twolevel apartment on the second and third floor of the house on Sarnia Ave., in the city’s Junction neighbourhood last year. They shared a vestibule with the occupants of an apartment on the basement and first floor. The adjoining house next door is a mirror image, configured the same way.
On Nov. 12, around 11:15 p.m., Schreiber had just arrived home when she and Bagatavicius heard their downstairs neighbour shouting that the couch on their front porch was on fire.
“Initially, when you hear your couch is on fire you don’t think it is a raging inferno, so we started to fill buckets with water thinking it was a tiny smouldering fire, then we realized the gravity of it,” Bagatavicius said.
“My partner was in the vestibule and she opened the front door and this giant cloud of black smoke and huge flames started flooding into the space.” Schreiber said: “Get the cats.” They both sprinted upstairs, where they could see a wall of flames through their bedroom window.
Schreiber grabbed her backpack and purse from the second floor and frantically searched for Boomi, the couple’s year-and-a-half-old cat. But with smoke filling the house, she had to run downstairs and out her neighbour’s back door. She thought Bagatavicius was behind her.
“I just had this moment where he is inside, but if I go back in I am going to die. In my mind I couldn’t have even imagined that somebody could have jumped through the front,” Schreiber said. “We were on either side of the house screaming for each other.”
Bagatavicius had run to the third floor, grabbed Smudge, also tried to find Boomi and then ran to the first floor. By then the power was out, smoke had filled the hallway and he couldn’t see or breathe, so he made the split-second decision to charge through the fire.
Bagatavicius spent several days at St. Joseph’s Health Centre.
Toronto Police are treating the fire at Bagatavicius and Schreiber’s apartment as suspicious, according to Const. David Hopkinson.
Hopkinson said that on Dec. 1, officers arrested a 20-year-old man in connection with a string of what are believed to be deliberately lit fires across the city that night. Makoons Meawasige-Moore has since been charged with six counts of arson causing damage to property and eight counts of arson having disregard for human life.
Hopkinson said officers made the arrest after getting a call about an attempted break-in near Bathurst and Ulster Sts., in the city’s west end. Police allege the man had a lighter in his hand and was attempting to light a tarp on fire.
Hopkinson said in October and November a string of fires were suspected to have been intentionally lit in and around the Junction, including a mattress propped against a garage door, an Adirondack chair on a porch and a recycling bin.
Police released a photo of the accused man and are asking anybody with information to contact detectives at 11 Division, Hopkinson said.
After the fire, Schreiber and Bagatavicius were able to quickly find a new home, in a shared house with people they describe as kindred spirits.
Some days they still “burst into tears,” said Schreiber, but when they are not crying “we are just transmuting this poison into fiery strength.”
Bagatavicius said while it has been the “most harrowing, nightmarish night of our lives,” they feel lucky to be alive and supported.
After he was released from the hospital, the couple returned to the scene of the fire to see what remained.
He didn’t go into the house, but Schreiber went upstairs and in a bathroom found a ceramic vase containing about $1,000 in unsinged $20 bills, money amassed through weekly savings. The vase is an heirloom, passed down from a thrifty granny.
The night of the fire, Schreiber had grabbed the container but set it down on a staircase and then forgot about it during the panicked hunt for Boomi. The money had been meant to fund a trip to Burning Man, an annual music and culture festival in Nevada’s baking hot Black Rock Desert.
Each year, at the end of the festival, a giant wooden sculpture of a man is set on fire. For the time being, the couple does not find the idea appealing.
“Adam was on fire. We were pretty good to not go to Burning Man ever,” Schreiber said.
Instead the money will be spent taking them to Iceland, she said, where they’ll revel in the cold and spend time together looking up at the Northern Lights.
“We are going to watch the sky on fire.”