By Paul Rioux
Times-Picayune
Copyright 2007 The Times-Picayune Publishing Company
COVINGTON, La. — The bodies of three elderly people were discovered Tuesday after a pre-dawn fire gutted a Covington area house, where a charred walker was in the yard near the coils of a burned-out mattress.
Firefighters found the bodies of a woman, her husband and her brother after extinguishing the 4:30 a.m. blaze in the Lonesome Pines neighborhood off Louisiana 36 east of Covington.
The names of the victims were withheld, but relatives identified the brother as Allen Martin, 76, a retired construction worker.
Autopsies were scheduled for this morning, said Mark Lombard, chief investigator for the coroner’s office.
Neighbors called 911 to report the fire after hearing a boom and seeing smoke pouring from the windows of the raised cottage in the 72100 block of East Sixth Street, a dead-end gravel road.
The house was engulfed in flames when firefighters arrived, said Ray Newton, a spokesman for St. Tammany Fire Protection District No. 12.
He said firefighters attacked the blaze and began searching the house for anyone trapped inside, but the victims were not discovered until the fire was doused.
The state fire marshal’s office is investigating the blaze, which appeared to start in a front bedroom, where a gaping hole was burned in the floor. Half the roof collapsed as the fire gutted one side of the house and caused heavy damage to the other side.
Freda Darby, Martin’s niece who lives nearby, said she heard an explosion about 4:15 a.m. and got a call about 15 minutes later that her uncle’s house was on fire.
“I don’t know what might have caused the explosion,” she said. “As far as I know, none of them had oxygen tanks.”
Martin, who used a walker after suffering a stroke a couple of years ago, moved in with his sister last year after his wife died, Darby said.
A deacon at the nearby Rose Hill Missionary Baptist Church, Martin loved to tell stories about how he helped build the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, Darby said. Martin and his wife were foster parents who adopted several children, she said.
“He was an all-around good guy,” she said. “Everybody loved him.”