By Don Jacobs
The Knoxville News-Sentinel
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — His shirt on fire, a man in a wheelchair fled his North Knoxville apartment early Thursday, ending up in the parking lot outside.
A neighbor found the unnamed man in his early 30s lying beside the electric wheelchair, his burning shirt nearby.
“I saw he had taken off his shirt and it was burning,” neighbor Bobby Cooper said. “I stomped the flames out.”
The man was being treated at University of Tennessee Medical Center after suffering what Knoxville Fire Department Capt. Mark Wilbanks termed “relatively significant” burns.
Authorities were alerted at 8:51 a.m. that a man was burned in the parking lot of Knob Hill Apartments, 1307 Wilson Road.
Knoxville Police Department Sgt. Rick Eastridge said the man is a paraplegic who lives alone and is mentally handicapped. Eastridge said the man told officers he was burned while “trying to clean his stove.”
“He forgot that he had a burner on and reached across it catching his shirt on fire,” Eastridge said. “The individual used his electric wheelchair to go outside into the parking lot.”
Cooper said he encountered the man as he drove into the parking lot after a night of work. He had suffered burns to his chest and arms.
Cooper said the victim last week burned himself while trying to light a cigarette on a stove eye. The man sustained burns to his arm in that incident.
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