Sept. 09--Two people died early Monday after being pulled from a burning home in Sandy Springs.
The fire broke out around midnight in a duplex on North River Parkway.
Sandy Springs fire Deputy Chief Jeff Scarbrough said crews dispatched just after midnight arrived in seven minutes to find light smoke coming from the front of the unit at the River Rill complex and heavier smoke coming from the back.
"We made entrance, and when we got inside the door, we had a male down in cardiac arrest," Scarbrough told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The man was taken to North Fulton Hospital, Scarbrough said.
"As the firefighters got further into it and doing a search, they found a second person on the second floor," he said. "It was a female and she was in cardiac arrest also."
The woman was taken to St. Joseph's Hospital.
The Fulton County Medical Examiner's office said both the man and woman later died.
Their names have not been released, but Scarbrough said the man appeared to be around 50 years old, the woman in her 80s.
He said three firefighers sustained minor injuries.
"One of them, when he went upstairs to bring the person down, actually did something to his knee," Scarbrough said. "He's been taken to the hospital and is in the process of being released."
A second firefighter suffered a minor burn to his hand, and the third "just got overcome by heat trying to get in and get things done," Scarbrough said.
The cause of the blaze remained under investigation just before daybreak Monday.
"It appears that the fire had burned to a point and actually started to go out, so that's why we didn't have a lot of fire when we got here," Scarbrough said.
He said the unit that caught fire apparently had no working smoke detector, alarms in the other half of the duplex went off, and a resident of that unit called 911.
The fire "had apparently been burning for a little while, so there was a tremendous amount of smoke and heat in there," Scarbrough said.
"Just because there weren't visible flames doesn't mean it wasn't a very deadly environment," he said. "What kills people is the smoke."
The chief said his crews were hampered by a "lot of clutter" inside the home.
"I don't know if you would call it [hoarding], but my firefighters said there were a lot of items in the unit."
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