Residents said they didn’t hear fire alarms as their apartment building filled with flames and smoke.
But survivors of Saturday’s deadly predawn blaze remember the warnings of the maintenance man who raced through the hallways as many slept, banging on doors in the chaos that sent people jumping from windows in downtown Las Vegas and left six dead.
"Fire! Fire! Fire!” he yelled as he tried to get people out, one resident told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The toll could have been higher, survivors and family told local media, if not for a 63-year-old disabled Marine veteran named Don Bennett. But Bennett would die in the blaze he scrambled to save others from, multiple family members told the Review-Journal on Monday.
“There are heroes among us,” his brother Charles Bennett said to the Las Vegas newspaper.
Authorities have yet to release the identities of the six people killed in Saturday’s fire, and the Clark County Coroner’s Office had no update early Tuesday morning. The Washington Post was not immediately able to reach Bennett’s family.
Bennett joined the Marine Corps after high school, family members told the Review-Journal, mourning a friendly people-lover and father of three. He was living at the 41-unit Alpine Motel Apartments when the fire ignited, displacing dozens of people, the newspaper reported.
Anthony Meadows Jr. told the paper he and his girlfriend probably would have died if Bennett hadn’t rushed to alert everyone. The resident recalled a morning of horror: smoke, frenzied escapes, a pregnant woman leaping from the building.
Speaking to the Review-Journal, Floyd Guenther remembered Bennett helping people out of the complex — and wrestling with a locked back door.
“Don was trying to get people out of that back door and he couldn’t get it open,” Guenther said.
Authorities say the fire appeared to originate from a stove in a first-floor unit, and residents said they use them to keep warm because they did not have heat. At a Monday news conference, officials said they are looking into claims of fire alarms that failed to alert residents.
“There seems to be a lot of discrepancies going on at that facility,” said City Councilman Cedric Crear, though fire officials said that the aging building had no pending code complaints and past concerns were fixed within a week or two.
Malinda Mier, a building co-owner whom The Post could not reach early Tuesday, told 13 Action News that she was not aware of heating problems and that “everything that needs to be fixed gets fixed in a timely manner.”
“It’s beyond my scope of comprehension and it’s sad and I still don’t know exactly what happened,” she told the local news station.
Mier started crying, the Review-Journal wrote, when asked about Bennett’s last moments Saturday.
“Very nice man,” she reportedly said, noting his military service. “Always helpful.”