VICTIMS SERVICES ASKED FOR HELP WITH FATAL FIRE CASE
Alfred-Plantagenet Councillor Suzanne Lafrance has asked Prescott-Russell Victims Services to step in to help some residents of Alfred deal with the trauma of a fatal fire in their neighbourhood.
“I used to sit on the victims services committee,” said Lafrance during a phone interview. “They are supposed to begin contacting the residents now.”
Lafrance received a phone call from one of the people living in the Devista Boulevard neighbourhood, in Alfred, a few days after February 11, when a house fire took the life of a local man.
The circumstances surrounding the fire are now under investigation by the Ontario Special Investigations Unit (SIU) because members of the OPP were at the house that day, trying to assist officials from the provincial sheriff’s department with the serving of court documents. At the time, the man inside the house refused to come out and soon after, officers noted a fire had begun inside the premises. The man’s body was later found inside, after local firefighters extinguished the blaze.
Carol Rose lives across the street from the house where the fatal fire occurred. She knew the deceased and she watched from her house that day when an official from the sheriff’s department tried to serve legal papers to the man inside.
“I saw the sheriff knock, and then tape a paper to the door,” she said, during a phone interview. “I could see him (deceased), pacing back and forth, through the window.”
Rose went across the street to ask the officer why he was there, and was told he was delivering court-approved eviction papers to the person inside. She told the officer that she knew the man inside, that he had a heart condition and was under some stress. She went back to her house and continued watching the situation until she had to leave, later in the afternoon. She is an elementary teacher and had to go take her turn on picket duty that day, as part of the protest action by teachers’ unions against the provincial government.