Samantha Peterson had just watched her children board the bus for school Monday morning when she noticed flames in the corner of a room in her Brookville Gardens apartment.
She had just enough time to escape her apartment and run upstairs to dial 911. In a matter of minutes, the flames charred all her belongings and the fire reached the second floor.
“It was scary,” said Peterson, a mother of four. “I just thank God I’m here and my kids were already gone.”
The fire, which started from a curtain making contact with a window unit heater, destroyed all the Peterson family’s belongings. Eleven other people living in three apartments in the building were displaced by the fire. The Northeast Mississippi Chapter of the American Red Cross provided hotel rooms and money for food and personal items. Peterson’s neighbors have since moved into different apartments at Brookville Gardens, according to Denise Davis, apartment manager.
But Peterson, who turned down the Red Cross’ offer for hotel rooms and is staying with her brother in Starkville, hasn’t decided whether she’ll return to Brookville Gardens.
The other families declined comment.
Peterson said the fire could have been prevented if apartment management had better handled what she called a faulty heating unit. She also said her fire extinguisher didn’t work at the time of the fire and her smoke detector didn’t sound.
“I never used the thing,” Peterson said of the heater, installed in the early ’70s. “I use space heaters and the oven to heat my apartment. It always would come on without you knowing, and I always felt like something would happen. They haven’t updated anything over there.”
Apartment management said the heaters, which are in all units, come on when it reaches a pre-set temperature. All residents are notified of such when they move in and were reminded with written notice of safety measures a month ago, Davis said.
“We do floor inspections yearly,” Davis said. “Any time maintenance has a work order, we always make sure heaters are working properly.”
Rachel Cutshall, a manager with Property Management Co., which owns Brookville Gardens, said the heaters can only be deactivated by turning them off at the circuit breaker.
Peterson said the only way she could turn off the heater was by doing so at the breaker.
“They’ll keep working unless you turn them off at the breaker,” Cutshall said. “We try to keep a safe environment for our residents. It’s an unfortunate situation, but we can’t control what residents do and don’t do as far as the instructions management gives.
“It’s strange the first thing one of the neighbors said was ‘We just got the notice about that.'”
Starkville Fire Department Chief Rodger Mann said the building didn’t receive much structural damage and should be repairable. All four units in the block experienced smoke and water damage from plastic pipes that burst during the fire.
Cutshall said she is unsure of the extent of damage and whether the unit will be repaired until it’s inspected by an insurance agent.
Peterson didn’t have renter’s insurance. She’s unsure of her next move but said she plans to contact the property’s owners about possibly paying for some of her losses.
“I don’t know right now,” Peterson said. “The only thing I know is we don’t have nothing. I just don’t want to put my kids back in that situation.”
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