The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Questions remain on burned house where 2 officers shot
PA. >> An excavator dug through smoldering rubble Thursday in the Philadelphia suburbs, where officials feared that a family of six might be dead in the wreckage of a house that burned down after two police officers were shot.
“There are at least three adults and three children who are unaccounted for, and that we fear were in the home,” Jack Stollsteimer, the Delaware County district attorney, said at a news conference. He said it was possible that others may have been in the house as well when it caught fire Wednesday afternoon.
Arson investigators combed the ruins of the residence in East Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, and found a rifle, while firefighters continued to hose down hot spots. The district attorney said it might take a long time to recover human remains and that any that are found might have to be identified using dental records.
“I can’t even begin to tell you an estimate of how long it’s going to take for us to continue to do that work,” Stollsteimer said. “It’s a very unsafe scene.”
It remains unclear exactly what happened at the house on Lewis Avenue. Late Wednesday, Stollsteimer said that authorities had received a report that an 11-year-old girl had been shot there. Two officers were hit by gunfire when they went to investigate.
Officer John Meehan, 44, of the East Lansdowne Police Department, was taken to Penn Presbyterian Medical Center with a gunshot wound to his left arm, the district attorney’s office said Thursday, and Officer David Schiazza, 54, of the Lansdowne Police Department, was shot in the leg.
Neither officer was badly hurt. “They’re doing good,” said Christopher Eiserman, president of the Delaware County Fraternal Order of Police.
A short time after the shooting, the house went up in flames, Stollsteimer said. Firefighters had to be cautious while trying to extinguish it, he said, because they did not know whether the gunman was still a threat. “We had men — police officers with automatic weapons — trained on the house while they were putting out the fire,” the district attorney said.
Stollsteimer said he was not sure whether investigators would be able to determine what had started the fire, whether a girl had actually been injured or who had shot at the police. “We believe it could be a member of the family,” he said, “but we don’t know.”
Deputy Chief Steve Castellano of the East Lansdowne Fire Co. said that all three floors of the house had collapsed.