Christmas tree ignited by child may have sparked deadly Philadelphia fire
Investigators are looking into the possibility that a five-year-old who was playing with a lighter set a Christmas tree on fire, sparking a conflagration that killed 12 people in a Philadelphia rowhome, officials revealed on Thursday.
The revelation was included in a search warrant application as city and federal investigators sought to determine the cause of the city’s deadliest single blaze in more than a century, which took the lives of two sisters, several of their children and others early on Wednesday.
Jane Roh, spokesperson for the district attorney, Larry Krasner, confirmed the contents of the search warrant, which was first reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Fire officials provided few details at an afternoon news briefing, declining to say how many people escaped the blaze or speculate on a possible cause, adding the fire scene was complex. Officials also did not say where the fire began, calling it part of the investigation.
“I know that we will hopefully be able to provide a specific origin and cause to this fire and to provide some answers to the loved ones and, really, to the city,” said Matthew
Varisco, who leads the Philadelphia branch of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. ATF specialists and other investigators took photos and combed through the charred, three-story brick duplex.
The building is owned by the Philadelphia
Housing Authority, the city’s public housing agency and the state’s biggest landlord.
Fourteen people were authorized to live in the four-bedroom upper apartment that “suffered the tragedy”, according to Kelvin Jeremiah, the housing authority’s president and CEO, while six people were on the lease in the lower unit.
When the family upstairs became tenants in 2011, there were six people – a grandmother, her three daughters and two of their children, Jeremiah said. He said the family had grown over the next decade to add another eight children.
PHA “does not evict people because they have children”, Jeremiah said.
“This was an intact family who chose to live together. We don’t kick out our family members ... who might not have other suitable housing options,” he said.
The fire department previously said none of the four smoke alarms in the building appeared to have been working. But housing authority officials said on Thursday the building actually had 13 tamper-resistant, 10-year detectors in the units, all of which were operational during the last inspection in May 2021.
Officials did not release the names or ages of those killed in the blaze, which started around 6.30am on Wednesday.
Wednesday’s blaze was the deadliest fire at a US residential apartment building since 2017, when 13 people died in an apartment in the Bronx neighborhood of New York City, according to data from the National Fire Protection Association. That fire started after a three-year-old boy was playing with stove burners.
Before that, the deadliest fire in an apartment building was in 1982 in Tennessee. Sixteen people died in that blaze, NFPA data showed.