MOUNT VERNON — A sunny, routine Thursday afternoon turned frightening for a family and their pets when their home at 807 E. Vine St. caught fire.
Wendy Lapiana and her sons rent the house from property owner Tom Woosley, whom they said purchased the house just a few weeks ago.
“I came home from dropping my mom off where she was working,” said son, Lee Seavolt, who was keeping his dog, Jo-Jo, warm in his car and checking in with his grandmother by cell phone while firefighters worked to put out the fire. His friend, John Perry, had been in the kitchen, and smelled smoke. Perry said he looked around the ground floor of the house and the basement, then went upstairs to discover a bedroom on fire and dense with smoke.
Stephanie Mayer, a registered nurse employed by Interim HealthCare, was in the living room monitoring a medical treatment for Lapiana’s 8-year-old son, Bobby, who suffers from chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy.
“John said, ‘The house is on fire,’” said Mayer, “and I called 9-1-1, then got Bobby’s shoes and coat and moved him to my car. My car was parked in the driveway, so I moved it so the fire trucks could park there.”
Asked if a patient’s house had ever caught fire while she was working, she said, “This kind of stuff doesn’t stop us nurses. It can’t.”
Holding onto his treatment device, Bobby watched the activity as firefighters tossed burning debris from a second-story window and firefighters on the ground sprayed it with water.
Seavolt and his brother, Marc Simpson, got their dogs, Romeo and Jo-Jo, out of the house and into their cars. Their mother’s husky, Blue-Eyes, was tied to a tree in the yard. The family’s cats, said Simpson, were safe in the downstairs of the house, which did not catch fire. But a fourth dog, a male Pomeranian named Pyro, was trapped inside by the fire.
Chris Menapace, assistant chief for the Mount Vernon Fire Department, broke the news to Lapiana with a sympathetic gesture.
“We found him,” he told her. “He didn’t make it.”
Simpson said he had barricaded the dog in his bedroom so the dog wouldn’t go into his brother’s room.
“We tried to get up the stairs to try to save him, but my room was on fire. It was probably my computer,” he said, speculating about the cause of the fire.
MVFD chief Shawn Christy said Simpson was evaluated for smoke inhalation, as a precaution, because he had gone back inside the house for the dog. A damage estimate on the house, Christy said, had not yet been determined.
“The investigation isn’t finished yet, but the tentative finding is that the fire was electrical in nature,” he said. “The origin of the fire was on the second story and there was significant damage to the second floor. Anytime you have a fire started high, the first floor may not be damaged by fire, but the water damage can be as financially devastating. The water wreaks havoc with the family’s possessions, just like when a fire starts on the first floor, the second floor gets all that nasty smoke.
“Fires are bad, no matter where they start,” Christy said.
Dee Hoeflich, Emergency Services Coordinator for the American Red Cross of Knox County, said the organization assisted the family with food, shelter and clothing. The four family members and their pets spent the night in a local motel.