Two Credited With Saving Family From Duplex Fire On Broadway

A Spokane Valley couple credited their teenage son and a family friend with saving them from a fire early Thursday that gutted the duplex in which they were living.

Ron and Vivian Warner were asleep in an upstairs bedroom when the fire started in the living room about 1:30 a.m. The blaze chased the couple, their two children and three friends from the duplex at 10511 E. Broadway.

No one was seriously injured.

A family who lived next door also escaped injury. Flames and smoke sent them scurrying from their adjoining unit.

“We really only had minutes,” Vivian Warner said.

The Warner’s unit was destroyed. The unit next door suffered minor smoke, fire and water damage.

Both families are staying with friends.

Fire investigators are calling the fire accidental, but have not been able to determine a cause.

The Warner’s children - 17-year-old Ron II and 16-year-old Dawn - were in a downstairs room watching television with friends when they heard a pop and ran upstairs.

There, flames raced across the drapes hanging in the living room window. Heavy smoke lingered in the hallway.

Ron Warner II and Mike Williams, 28, pounded on the bedroom door to roust Warner’s sleeping parents.

“Mike and Ron (II) are heroes because I don’t think we’d have gotten up,” said Vivian Warner.

“Nope,” Warner’s husband, Ron added. “We’d have been dead.”

Ron Warner II hurried his father out of the bedroom while Williams pulled Vivian Warren toward the hall.

During the confusion, Vivian Warner got separated from the others while they crawled down the dark hallway. While everyone else escaped, Vivian Warner was lost in the smoky darkness.

When Williams reached the front door, he realized Vivian Warner was missing and went back inside the burning home to look for her.

Williams found her huddled at the top of the stairs and tugged. She tumbled down the stairs and landed in a heap against the front door.

“I got the mom and dragged her,” said Williams, who was trained as a firefighter in the Navy. “She kind of fell down the stairs, but at that point I wasn’t ready to discuss options.”

Although dazed from the jostling and petrified with fear, Vivian Warner managed to pick herself up and crawl outside. She suffered bumps and bruises from the fall, but was not hospitalized.

By the time firefighters arrived minutes later, fire had consumed the living room, kitchen and both of the bedrooms upstairs. Flames also had begun to crawl down the inside stairs.

The blaze broke out a sliding glass door, allowing flames to lick at the roof and the adjoining unit.

Heat from the fire melted headlight lenses and plastic moldings on the Warren’s white Geo Metro which was parked in a gravel driveway outside the duplex when the fire started.

A charred television set lay smashed in its place several hours later.

Inside the duplex, fire investigators Paul Chase and Eric Olson searched for a cause. They concentrated on the ashes in a front corner of the living room where the fire appeared to have burned the longest.

But Chase and Olson found few solid answers.

“The more we look, the more questions we have,” Olson said.

, DataTimes