The smell of smoke hangs like a pall over the 99-unit Banyan Apartment building at 1525 Paris Street, the site of an early morning fire on Sunday that displaced the residents of the burned unit, and later led to the discovery of an elderly couple found deceased after the fire was extinguished.
The investigation will now be handled by Greater Sudbury Police Service (GSPS) and the Ontario Fire Marshal's Office. GSPS spokesperson Kaitlynn Dunn said police were called to assist with scene control at the fire.
“Around 3:20 a.m. on March 27, we were called to assist with scene control at a structure fire on Paris Street as City of Greater Sudbury Firefighters were currently on scene of a fire at an apartment building,” Dunn stated.
“Around 11 a.m. we received a call regarding two sudden deaths in the same building on Paris Street. An 85-year-old man and an 81-year-old woman were located deceased in their unit by City of Greater Sudbury Paramedic Services.”
Dunn stated the detectives from the Major Crime Section of the Criminal Investigation Division would be “working in collaboration with the Ontario Fire Marshal’s Office in order to determine a cause of the fire and with the Coroner’s Office in order to determine the cause of deaths.” The post-mortem exams will be conducted by the Coroner’s Office in Sudbury on March 29.
“The investigations into the incidents are ongoing,” she stated.
The next door neighbor of the deceased couple, Donna Bailey, told Sudbury.com she tried to evacuate them, but was left with no time after she said there were issues with the fire alert systems in the building.
A resident of the building for the last 13 years, Bailey lives directly next door to the victims; the fire itself took the unit at the end of the hall, on the other side of her senior neighbours. Bailey told Sudbury.com the couple were in their eighties, and a delight to live beside. She said she did everything she could to alert her neighbours to the fire and to assist them in evacuating, but by that point the smoke was too thick for her to remain.
Bailey said that is because she didn’t hear a fire alarm until almost 20 minutes after the building had been evacuated, around 3 a.m. she said, and that was only because she was awoken by an alert on her phone. She said she almost lost her life as well.
“I didn't see the flashing lights from the fire trucks (that were in the parking lot already) until I came out in the living room,” she told Sudbury.com. “And the only thing that woke me up was the alert that the police put on, and I thought it was one of those child alert things.” Bailey is referring to the Amber Alerts that send a tone through a mobile phone. She said that her phone made that noise and that woke her; she said the alert told her of the fire.
She said once she got the alert to turn off on her phone, she heard the alarm in the distance. The alarm in her apartment did not go off. “But the alarm [sounded] so far in the distance, but that should have been ringing my ears off at my door,” she said. “I opened my apartment door to face black smoke from the floor to the ceiling.”
Bailey, a retired nurse, said she dressed quickly, knocked on the apartment across the hall from her and then headed to her neighbours to offer help.
“I went, ‘oh my God, I've got to get in there and get (the couple) because she'll not be able to breathe. And they don't walk very fast’.”
She said she knocked at the neighbours' door repeatedly, but was very quickly overtaken by the smoke.
“If I didn’t leave, they’d have to rescue me too.”
She decided to evacuate and then call the neighbours from outside, in addition to alerting any first responders she could find. Bailey told Sudbury.com she spoke to two officials on scene to tell them about the couple, but no one entered to look for them or help them evacuate.
When she finally emerged, her neighbours told her they had already been outside for more than 20 minutes.
“I told a couple of cops,” said Bailey. “If I hadn't had that fire alert, you would have been digging out another dead body. Because I would have slept right through it.”
She said she also told firefighters on scene, “that fire alarm is not loud enough.” she said she spoke to others on the second floor (all the affected apartments are on the first floor) and they also did not hear the alarm.
“They didn't hear it either; they almost slept through it,” she said. “So there's something wrong with that, that should have been knocking the building down with noise.”
A resident on the second floor told Bailey he didn’t hear the alarm either, but another on the fourth floor told her the noise just about “rang the walls down.”
“When I spoke to the firemen, I said, 'I have a question for you: how come when that alarm goes off, our alarms don't go off at our apartments,” she said. “And he said, ‘Well, they're not connected’. I said, ‘Well, every other building in Sudbury, when the main fire alarm goes off their apartment alarm goes off, it only makes sense.’ They had an excuse for it, but there's something that definitely has to be changed, that thing didn't ring loud enough.”
Bailey said the couple had resided in the building long before she had, and they made her feel welcome immediately. Since then, Bailey and the two would visit and chat, and she would do her best to support them in their everyday needs. She said they both had mobility issues and used walkers, and the deceased woman used an oxygen machine. It would have taken time to evacuate the couple, and assistance from others.
Bailey said the residents of the building are devastated at the loss of their neighbours.
When contacted by Sudbury,com, a spokesperson from the Office of the Fire Marshal sent a statement.
“The Office of the Fire Marshal was called in to investigate the cause, origin, and circumstance of the fire that took place at the Banyan Apartments on Paris Street in Sudbury. The investigation has only just begun and will take some time before we can make any conclusions. At this time, there is no further comment.”
Sudbury.com will continue to follow this story.
