Furnace suspected in fire at small apartment building
Royal Oak firefighters responded to a fire inside a wall at a small apartment building Tuesday morning after the owner saw smoke and called them.
“The guy that owns the building also owns another building south of there where he has a workshop,” said Fire Inspector Sean Lambouris. “He stepped outside and saw the smoke.”
The apartment is one of three, along with a storefront business on Rochester Road at Windemere, one block north of 13Mile Road.
It turned out that the smoke was coming from inside an outer wall of the second-floor apartment at 420 E. Windemere where the owner lives.
Firefighters were called about 10:45 a.m.
No one was injured, but fire officials said there is smoke and water damage throughout the apartment.
The blaze is still under investigation, but Lambouris said it appears the fire’s source was a furnace on the second floor of the building.
“The guys went in and the apartment was filled with smoke,” he said. “They tore down the inside and the outside of thewall” to extinguish the fire.
No one was inside any of the apartments or the storefront businesses when firefighters arrived.
“This could have been a bad fire if no one had seen the smoke,” Lambouris said. “Fortunately, the owner spotted it and the fire department got there quickly.”
The second-floor apartment next to the one where the fire started was the scene of a brutal murder nine years ago.
Christopher Hearn, 24 at the time, was convicted of second- degree murder in
in the Sept. 19, 2011 knife slaying of Ranae Ann Chupick, 41, a beautician who lived there.
Hearn was sentenced in Oakland County Circuit Court in 2012 to serve 48 to 90 years in prison.
Chupnick had an intermittent relationship with Hearn and was convicted of stabbing her multiple times while he was drunk.
“No one deserves to be butchered the way she was,” Circuit Judge Nanci Grant told Hearn at his sentencing. “That’s what you did. You butchered her.”