The Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE, Md. — A 3-year-old girl died in a smoky house fire in North Baltimore’s Waverly neighborhood Sunday morning, despite an attempt by her father and a neighbor to save her.
The girl’s father, Tavon Williams, 33, said he was asleep in the house, and her mother was at work, when he smelled smoke about 9 a.m. He rushed to carry the couple’s 8-month-old twins next door, then returned with a neighbor to try to rescue their sister, Azyrie Ariel Williams.
But the smoke and fire were too thick. “By the time I turned around to go back up, it was too late,” he said.
The neighbor, Alonzo Bentley, 49, said he wasn’t fully dressed yet when Williams came knocking on the door with his babies, asking for help. They left the twins with Bentley’s wife, and the two men — Bentley barefoot — ran into the burning house in the 500 block of E. 26th St. to try to reach the little girl on the second floor.
“Flames started to come out of the dining room wall before we could get to the top,” Bentley said. The fire blocked the stairway to the upper floor, and they had to turn around.
“We couldn’t do anything else,” he said.
Meanwhile, fire officials said, three other people who had been in the house — a 62-year-old man, a woman in her 70s and a 9-year-old girl — were outside on a ledge waiting to be rescued. Bentley said he and Williams were trying to climb up to get them when firefighter arrived with ladders and brought them down.
Bentley said he didn’t know the family very well, but had occasionally talked to Azyrie outside and described her as “a very smart little girl.”
Fire officials said she was found dead in a second-floor bedroom. The three people rescued were taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, officials said. Williams said the twins, Tamyra and Tamera, were not hurt.
The cause of the fire is under investigation. The house had working smoke detectors, fire officials said.
Outside the smoldering house later, Gloryann Walker, 24, the children’s aunt, stood crying in the street in pink pajamas. A neighbor had called to tell her that her sister’s home was on fire. When Walker arrived, she said, firefighters were already at work.
“I lost her,” she said of her niece.
Azyrie was the second child killed in a fire in Baltimore this year. In January, 2-year-old Nasir Smith was killed in a blaze caused by a space heater at a Reservoir Hill home. Workers from a nearby construction site rushed into the burning rowhouse and saved two of his siblings.
In all, four people have died in city fires this year. Last year at this time, there were seven fire deaths. Seventeen people were killed in city fires last year.
Sunday afternoon, relatives and neighbors stood on the sidewalk along East 26th Street holding palm crosses from church as Tavon Williams dug through soggy wreckage in the backyard. He wanted to retrieve any mementos or valuables before joining Azyrie’s mother, Latasha Walker, 26.
A bright red sign on the front door pronounced the house condemned, and water dripped from the ceilings and pooled on the floors inside. Laundry, now singed, still hung from clothes lines, and an empty screen door frame dangled on its hinges. Near the top of one pile, the cover of a children’s book, “Chadwick and the Garplegrungen,” was almost completely obscured by soot.
Williams stepped carefully, his shoes sinking into blackened mounds of destroyed belongings, as he sifted through the debris.
He uncovered a small blue box with a silver cross on a chain inside. He handed it to a friend, then returned to digging.
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