Officials: Door propped open for cat spread fire that killed woman
By FRAN SPIELMAN AND MAUDLYNE IHEJIRIKA Staff Reporters January 9, 2012 11:07AM
A 32-year-old woman died and nine others were hurt early Sunday in a fire at a Lakeview high-rise at 3130 N. Lake Shore Drive which began about 2 a.m., began in an apartment on the 12th floor of the 21-story building on January 8, 2012. | Richard A. Chapman~Sun-Times
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Updated: February 11, 2012 8:12AM
The door to a burning lakefront apartment where a 32-year-old neighbor died had been left propped open by a fleeing couple because their cat refused to leave, fire investigators said on Monday.
The couple’s decision to use a rug to prop open the door apparently doomed Shantel McCoy. McCoy, 32, lived down the hall from the burning 12th-floor apartment at 3130 N. Lake Shore Dr. but had no idea a fire was raging on her floor when she returned Sunday morning carrying takeout food. When the elevator door opened on the 12th floor, McCoy was hit by a wall of heat as high as 1,500 degrees, fire officials said. One breath would have been enough to kill her, officials said. Had the door been closed, the fire would almost certainly have been contained to the unit where the fire originated until responding firefighters had a chance to arrive on the scene and make it up to the 12th floor, according to Deputy District Fire Chief Joseph Roccasalva. Building residents who began returning to their apartments on Monday morning were shocked to learn the latest development. “I can’t believe that,” said Helen Gunnison, 37, whose boyfriend lives in the building. “How absolutely tragic!” Automatic door closures on units leading to a common corridor have been required in Chicago buildings at least four stories tall since 1957. The 21-story building at 3130 N. Lake Shore Dr. was equipped with them, but the fleeing couple told fire investigators they propped their door open, Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford said. “They woke up from a smoke alarm. They had to crawl out. They grabbed the dog and crawled through the apartment to get out, but the cat or cats wouldn’t come,” Langford said. “So they propped the door open, I assume, to give the animals a chance to get out if they decided to get out.” Asked how fire investigators knew that the automatically-closing door had been propped open, Langford said, “They were interviewed. The question was, `How did that happen?’ Their first statement was they left the door propped open with a rug.” With the door propped open for the cat or cats, McCoy, who
A Philadelphia native, McCoy had come to Chicago in March to pursue her career in marketing, said her mother, JoAnn McCoy, speaking from her Philadelphia home where her family had collected to mourn.
“She was definitely a go-getter,” Joann McCoy said, The victim’s father, Ronald Brinkley, said, “She was a sweet and good girl.” McCoy worked for Wirtz Beverage Group here as a sales coordinator and analyst.
“She was just a really hard worker, and committed to her job,” said Jeff Roth, her supervisor at Wirtz. “She was very energetic, very bubbly, a great personality. People just gravitated towards her.”
The couple whose apartment the fire started in could not be reached for comment. They are in their ‘20s, neighbors said, and escaped the fire unscathed, though shoeless and wrapped in sheets outside.
Resident Dave Sheehan, 52, who knew both the couple and the victim, called it a tragedy all around. “I loved Ms. McCoy. She was a beautiful lady, outgoing and sweet. The couple are wonderful people too. They’re devastated,” Sheehan said. Fire investigators said Monday that further forensic analysis of some electrical devices in the couple’s apartment was needed in order to narrow the cause of the fire. The couple’s next-door neighbor, a Northwestern University student who moved into the building in August, said after being awakened by his dog, he opened the door to find the couple in the hallway. “The wife said to me, ‘Our house is on fire,’” said the man, who asked not to be identified. He grabbed his dog, and the three of them dashed down the hall, down 12 flights, and out of the building, he said. “They told me they had been watching a movie earlier and went to sleep only to be awakened by the fire alarm. They had no idea how the fire started,” the student said. The student’s apartment and one directly above the couple’s sustained the most damage, their windows boarded up, along with the couple’s. The 21-story building wasn’t equipped with a sprinkler system. Nor did it have a hard-wired alarm or communications system to disable elevators and alert residents of the roughly 300 apartments. The building is one of 759 pre-1975 residential high-rises exempt from the sprinkler requirement that were supposed to make other, less-costly life safety improvements by Jan. 1. Last month, Ald. Tom Tunney (44th) co-sponsored an ordinance giving building owners three more years to make the improvements, arguing struggling building owners were having trouble footing the bill. In the wake of the fatal fire, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was asked whether he has any qualms about having given the older buildings the three-year reprieve. “It’s not like a final exam [and] waiting til the last hour of the last day to figure this out. ... You asked for that time. But, I don’t expect you to use the time all the way `til the end,” the mayor said. “Get it done by 2014. Get it done by 2012. Get it done by 2013. Don’t wait when you have a responsibility as the owner of that building.” A lot of building owners will see what happened here and will speed up,” Emanuel predicted.
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