July 02--ROCK HILL -- With her eyes stinging from smoke and the heat rising in her apartment, Mandi Coley, seven months pregnant, found only one way to escape the fire that would soon gut her second-floor apartment early Tuesday morning.
Her bedroom window.
"I knew I had to get out the window," Coley said after a blaze that started in a first-floor rental unit of Building 862 at Oak Hollow Apartments spread upward, burning through her brick apartment home and eventually the roof. "I smelled the smoke."
The fire at Oak Hollow, at the intersection of Finley Road and South York Avenue in southern Rock Hill, displaced 25 people from nine families. Nineteen of them were adults and six were children, said Katharine Correll, executive director for the Upper Palmetto Chapter of the American Red Cross, which has agreed to assist those now without homes.
Twenty-five firefighters extinguished the flames at the apartments at about 4 a.m. Tuesday, according to a Rock Hill Fire Department report. Officials say the fire was confined to one apartment building. It's unclear how many units were burned, and damage estimates were not available.
When the fire started, smoke filled Coley's apartment. The temperature began to rise, but there were no flames in sight. Her boyfriend opened their front door and "couldn't see nothing" but smoke, she said. They called 9-1-1.
Emergency dispatchers relayed the call, adding that residents may be trapped. Larry VanderMolen, a Rock Hill police officer working the night shift, heard the news and radioed officers, asking them to assist, said Rock Hill Police Executive Officer Mark Bollinger.
Brent Bruggink, Tim Allen and Antoine Logan were first on the scene and evacuated residents, Bollinger said. They helped two people who were confused by the smoke, and caught three people who jumped from railings and windows.
One of those people was Coley, who, faced with burning in her home or jumping out a window, admitted she was "very" scared.
Still, the 20-year-old expectant mother jumped 10 feet. A policeman caught her.
"I was in shock," Coley said. "I didn't feel anything."
Coley and her family were taken to Piedmont Medical Center. The baby, a girl, was uninjured. They'll spend the next several days in a hotel.
Firefighters spent much of Tuesday tossing out blackened rubbish and debris through burned out windows, while police detectives spoke to neighbors and witnesses.
Suyatta Johnson, who said she lived in the apartment where the fire started, stepped from a patrol car moments after police questioned her. She crossed the yellow tape barricading the apartment and walked towards her burnt home until police officers stopped her.
Teary-eyed, Johnson, 30, said a cigarette that she accidentally dropped to the floor while she was drinking alcohol sparked the blaze.
"It was an accident," Johnson said. "I had an ashtray by the side" of the bed and "thought I put the cigarette out. It fell to the floor."
Johnson said she fell asleep until she felt heat coming from the side of the bed, she said. When she noticed the flames, she ran. Then, she started knocking on neighbors' doors to warn them.
"I didn't want to put nobody in harm's way," she said. "Thank God that He got us out (of) this situation."
Sirens and Johnson's knocking jolted Latika Odom, a mother of four, out of her sleep. Her boyfriend, Mondriquose Cunningham, 32, opened the front door of their second-floor apartment and saw "nothing but black smoke," he said.
The family ran downstairs and Odom, 28, went to the hospital after suffering from smoke inhalation.
The fire remains under investigation, said Bollinger with Rock Hill Police. Authorities would not elaborate on the details of their conversations with Johnson, aside from saying she was questioned because she was able to give fire investigators the best idea about where the fire started.
Arthur Cathey, 59, said Johnson knocked on his door minutes after the fire started. He lives in the apartment building to the right of Building 862.
"She was hysterical," he said, and shoeless. After loaning Johnson a pair of slippers, he looked outside and saw flames burning through the adjacent building.
"I looked her in the eye and asked her, ?did you set that fire?' She said no."
"She's had a lot on her mind," said Cathey, who, along with his girlfriend, has helped Johnson and her boyfriend pay rent. Johnson called Cathey and his girlfriend her "daddy and mama."
Johnson said she was in the apartment with her boyfriend when the fire started. He woke up, she said, "yelling and fussing." Police confirmed that Johnson's boyfriend was in the apartment during the fire. Authorities found him with burn injuries at a home Tuesday evening. He did not seek treatment.
Police last month charged Johnson with two counts of throwing bodily fluids on a law enforcement officer and public disorderly conduct after they say she pretended to be unconscious and then spit on officers when she refused to leave a woman's apartment. Last week, she pleaded guilty to two counts of resisting arrest and received credit for time served, court records show.
"The girl's been going through a lot," Cathey said.
Johnson said she was released earlier this year from Piedmont Medical Center's psychiatric ward and had been diagnosed with depression. She took several medications, including Lithium and Prozac, all of which burned in the fire.
Nearly in tears, she shared what she had learned after the blaze.
"Don't pass out while you're smoking."
Copyright 2013 - The Herald (Rock Hill, S.C.)
