UPDATE: The Anne Arundel County Fire Department identified the victim of the fire as Anthony Slough, 59, and his death resulted from the fire. This is the second fire fatality in Anne Arundel County this year.
ORIGINAL STORY:
By all rights, the home on Summit Avenue in Glen Burnie should have been vacant.
“Everybody that lived in there, the three guys, they didn’t belong in there,” said Jesse Griffin who lives nearby.
But after a fire destroyed the house on Friday morning, investigators knocked on Griffin’s door, looking for help in identifying the male victim they discovered inside.
“You had all them homeless people living in there, which the landlord, because it’s a rental, the landlord should have got them all out of there and that would never have happened,” Griffin said.
We’re told there was an eviction hearing scheduled for next week, but if three people had been squatting in the rental, there was no sign of the other two when firefighters arrived on the scene.
“There was no other person inside the home. Just the one,” said Anne Arundel County Fire Capt. Jenny Macallair, “and investigators are still trying to determine if the death was caused by the fire and also who the person is, because right now, we do not have an identity on the deceased male.”
This is the second time in the last 48 hours that someone has died inside a fire in Anne Arundel County.
54-year-old John Billing perished inside a home on Central Road in Pasadena on Wednesday, and investigators say it appears the wheelchair-bound victim nearly made it to a door to exit the burning structure when he was overcome by the smoke and flames.
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“One of the messages that I really wanted to get across in that fire is just having that fire escape plan,” said Macallair, “There was excessive storage in that home, which made it difficult for our crews to access it, and we believe also made it difficult for the male to get out of that home.”
