Fatal fire comes two years after city flagged home as dangerous
311 records reveal frustrated neighbors made complaints about house in recent years
The shouts woke Carlena Johnson just a couple of hours after she’d fallen asleep. A wall of fire was consuming the walls of their bedroom.
“Get out! Get out! We’ve got to get out now!” her husband, Eric Johnson, cried, shoving her toward the door. She grabbed her 11-year-old son, Lloyd, and hustled outside — with Eric just behind, she thought.
He never emerged. The flames soon consumed the house they shared with three other tenants.
Hours later, firefighters found Eric’s body in the charred wreckage, and the carcass of the family dog, Angel. Three other residents escaped.
The fatal blaze early Friday morning in north Houston came two years after the city flagged the home as potentially dangerous while responding to a complaint about improper construction and less than a year after two residents of an unregulated boarding house died in a late-night fire in south Houston.
The city’s 311 records, meanwhile, show frustrated neighbors made at least five complaints about the north Houston house in recent years, but it remains unclear whether the city took any meaningful action.
The latest death follows a Houston Chronicle investigation that revealed holes in the city oversight of multiresident housing and subsequent efforts by the city to improve safety at lodging facilities and other congregate living facilities. City staff members plan to present a proposed new ordinance to the council’s public safety committee on Feb. 13.
“Everybody deserves a safe place to stay,” said Lara Cottingham, deputy assistant director for the city’s regulatory affairs administration.
Firefighters arrived to the home on East Crosstimbers at Roswell just after 2 a.m., when the fire was already heavy. By the time firefighters put out the blaze, the house was destroyed, Deputy Chief Douglas Harrison said.
“Everything is gone in there, we’re just down to the studs,” Harrison said. “We’re just digging through the debris.”
Many of the specifics of the blaze remain unclear. Arson investigators are looking into what started the fire, but foul play is not suspected, authorities said.
Johnson said she believed the fire may have started from a candle they lit that night for warmth. The room did not have electricity, she said.
Neighbor Carmelo Lopez, 23, watched in terror as flames melted their gate next door and raced up the rear wall of the house where he lives with his family.
“Flames started falling on this side, on the car,” he said, pointing at his ruined 2004 Lexus 330, as he walked through his driveway, glass crunching beneath his shoes. “That house wasn’t fit to be lived in.”
He surveyed the rubble hours after firefighters finally left, worried that the dog’s corpse, visible among the ashes, might threaten his young daughter’s health.
Nearby, his friend Jose Ochoa, 52, shook
his head in frustration.
“Look what happened,” Ochoa said. “If the city had done something, this never would have happened.”
Data from 311 shows neighbors have complained about the property at least five times since 2013.
City records show three complaints to the Department of Neighborhoods — one in July 2013 regarding “minimum standards” that was closed by inspectors six weeks later. The department received another complaint two months later about a “nuisance on property” and closed that case in late October.
In July 2015, the city’s neighborhoods department received another nuisance complaint about the building; that case was closed 11 days after it was opened.
“All three cases were closed as having no Chapter 10 violations,” Evangelina Vigil, spokeswoman for the neighborhoods department, wrote in an email Friday, referring to city regulations that set minimum standards for residential properties.
Violation of standards
In November 2015, city officials recorded two additional complaints — a parking violation and a complaint about improper new construction.
A city inspector visited the property and photographed the building but found there was no new construction requiring a permit, said Alanna Reed, Houston Public Works and Engineering spokeswoman.
The only other records the department has for the property are plumbing and electrical permits back to 1995, she said.
“The inspector did note that the property fell under a violation of minimum standards/ dangerous building,” she said, explaining that the inspector referred the case to the Department of Neighborhoods.
Vigil, however, said that her department could find “no record” of the case having been referred to DON by public works.
“The City is committed to improving quality of life in our neighborhoods,” Vigil wrote in the email. “We work hard every day and do the best we can with the resources available and in partnership with community groups and volunteers to eradicate blight and get owners to keep their properties in compliance with city codes.”
She continued, “We reach out to civic groups and residents to inform them about city services, urge them to report code violations and encourage them to get involved in neighborhood improvement projects in their own communities. As you know, under the mayor’s Complete Communities initiative, concerted efforts are underway to address blight and other issues in neighborhoods that are in most need.”
Trying to help
A fire at an unregulated boarding house in south Houston in March 2017 killed two people and displaced more than a dozen others. A subsequent Houston Chronicle investigation found such facilities face little scrutiny from local or state governments, with spotty inspections for occupancy or safety permits and a hodgepodge of city records and processes that complicates regulating them.
After the Chronicle’s report, city officials began to review how they regulate multiresident housing.
City officials are working to make comprehensive changes to address other types of congregate living facilities, such as boarding homes, lodging facilities and alternative housing.
Since then, the city has hosted nine community meetings across Houston and proposed new ordinances to improve safety at lodging facilities and multiresident housing, Cottingham said.
“The ordinances that we are proposing will streamline the inspection process, so if a case like this is called in as a potential lodging facility, there will be a clear line of communication to the appropriate building official that will trigger an inspection,” she said.
Houston Police Detective Christopher Elder said the owner of the house, who lives nearby, had allowed the residents to stay there and pay what they could when they could.
But after a water leak — which caused her to receive a high water bill — and other issues, she’d wanted them to leave because she couldn’t pay for repairs, he said.
“She was doing what she could for them, but she couldn’t really afford it,” he said.
By Friday afternoon, the acrid smell of charred lumber and chemicals filled the air. Water trickled from the interior out onto the street, and debris littered the lot.
‘Our protector’
Johnson, meanwhile, was trying to figure out where she and her son would spend the night. They would likely have to go to a homeless shelter, she said.
It brought back memories of Eric and the first time they met in 2008 after being displaced by Hurricane Ike. They sought refuge at the same shelter, she said. She was a new mom; her son was just a year old.
They’d been together ever since. Her husband had been a machinist by trade and worked at an automobile auction house. He’d struggled with alcohol and had a fondness for lo mein noodles.
On Thursday evening, they played outside with the dog before going inside to listen to the radio. They fell asleep around midnight, she said. Two hours later, she woke to the flames.
“He was our protector,” she said, holding a Red Cross blanket to her chest in the midafternoon chill.