Alpine fire survivors gather property

Possessions hold memories, some traumatic, from fatal blaze site

After six months of waiting, some former residents of the Alpine Motel Apartments — the site of a fire that killed six people — were able to pick up their belongings Thursday morning.

“It’s a relief,” said 16-year-old Ashley Rogers, who arrived at the burnt building in downtown Las Vegas pushing a grocery cart, waiting to pick up her and her mother’s belongings.

The Dec. 21 fire also injured 13 people and left dozens homeless. From 2013 to 2017, the building had been the subject of numerous code enforcement inspections and failed fire inspections. A Review-journal

investigation published Thursday shows that Metropolitan Police Department officers had been working to get the property shut down as a chronic nuisance three years before the fire, but city officials opposed the action.

A plan approved in court on

May 14 allowed former tenants to start retrieving their items from the building. Steven Jaffe, the lawyer for building owner Adolfo Orozco, has saidtheearliestcrewscouldenter to start cleaning was Monday.

On Thursday morning, Helen Clark and her wife, Audrey Palmer, both shed tears while picking up their belongings.

“I didn’t want to go in the building; (there’s) a lot of death in there. Itstillgetstome.itreallydoes,” Clarksaidjustbeforeatearran downherface.

Clark and Palmer arrived early at their old home to pile trash bags full of their belongings into a U-haul truck. Like others who showed up to retrieve their items, they lived in a room that wasn’t affected by asbestosorfire,otherthansome smoke damage.

Palmer previously told the Review-journal that she lived in the

L.E. Baskow Las Vegas Review-journal @Left_eye_images Former resident Helen Clark picks up a mirror among her and Audrey Palmer’s possessions from their room in the Alpine Motel Apartments as their possessions are piled up outside and ready to be retrieved on Thursday.

Former resident Ashley Rogers reacts to what she finds Thursday inside a bag of possessions from her and her mother’s room in the Alpine Motel Apartments, which burned in a Dec. 21 fire.