Worcester County

Worcester City Manager: no more fire victims found

WORCESTER, Mass. — Manuel Lucero woke early Saturday morning to the sound of a carbon monoxide detector going off in his Gage Street apartment.

“I couldn’t see any smoke, so it was weird,” he said. “So I checked the gas and the gas wasn’t on. So I opened the back door and I looked behind and I see a glow coming from the basement — and immediately think, ‘Fire!’”

Lucero said he began warning others before getting out himself.

“The entire building went up into flames in less than forty seconds,” Lucero said. “Wallet, phones, car keys — everything’s destroyed. So we really don’t have anything. You see it on TV and you don’t have any realization how fast these fires actually happen.”

[ Two more bodies recovered from Worcester fire ]

Lucero, a graduate student, had lived in his apartment for about a year. He said the owner rented individual rooms to tenants within apartments — but that these apartments were not further subdivided.

Four people did not make it out of the fire alive, which started around 3:30 a.m. It quickly grew to four alarms, with some residents jumping through windows to escape the flames.

Tuesday, City Manager Edward Augustus, Jr. announced the grimmest part of the fire investigation is over.

“We do believe at this stage that there will be no more victims,” he said.

The final two bodies were recovered Monday. Augustus explained the reasons for the delay.

“The dangerous situation, with lots of water, made it very challenging to see that there was another victim,” Augustus said. “They brought the dogs in — didn’t pick it up initially.

Acting Fire Chief Martin Dyer also explained Monday that a collection of snakes in one apartment survived the fire — and that those had to be cleared out before a search for additional victims could proceed.

Augustus said the cause of the fire remains undetermined. But late Tuesday afternoon, numerous ATF agents and some Massachusetts State Police officers arrived on the scene. Six were seen entering the blackened building wearing protective suits.

[ Fast-moving Worcester fire kills at least two ]

If the fire is suspicious, authorities aren’t saying so — yet.

But Manuel Lucero said something happened that night that he considered strange: he heard noises outside his bedroom window in the early morning hours.

“It was a lot of like, hushed whispering,” Lucero said. “A lot of hushed whispering... rummaging around. It just felt odd.”

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