Cicero Assistant Fire Marshal Ron Opalecky said the fire is believed to have begun in the back porch area of the building at 3034 S. 48th Court early Sunday morning. "Nothing has been ruled out," he said when asked whether it was intentionally set.
Investigators have talked to witnesses, and are checking electrical equipment as well as heating and air conditioning units to track down a cause. "We'll go through all that. We'll call an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer.
"We will be working with other towns and the state fire marshal through the process to see what we can come up with," Opalecky said.
Asked if smoking may have been the cause, he said "because of the extensive damage, it's going to be hard to conclude anything like that.
"The back porch is totally gone," he said. "There's nothing there whatsover."
A single stairwell in the second-floor kitchen appeared to have been the only entrance to the attic, Opalecky said. Relatives said flames shot up the stairs and cut off escape.
Officials
from the Cook
County medical
examiner's
office today
refused to issue
causes of death
for the victims,
citing "pending
police and fire
investigation[s]"
to determine the
cause of the
blaze.
Relatives identified the dead as Byron Reed, 20; his girlfriend, Sallie Gist, 19; their sons Rayshawn Reed, 3, and Byron Reed, 3 days old; Gist's brother and sister, 16-year-old twins Elijah Gist Jr. and Elisha Gist, and 18-year-old family friend Tiera Davidson.
Next door neighbor Esther Soto, 53, said she drove Elisha to and from Morton East High School. Soto knows she'll start crying Tuesday morning when Elisha doesn't knock on her door.
She said Sallie Gist had planned to bring the baby, Byron, over on Sunday. "That's why I took it so hard, because they were really nice people," Soto said.
The flames damaged the Soto family's back porch, but she and her children were able to occupy the rest of the building this morning. Soto believes her home would have been more badly damaged had the wind been blowing in a different direction.
The Cook County medical examiner's office says preliminary results from autopsies on the victims will be available this afternoon.
It's unclear how many people lived in the apartment building. The landlord said it had two two-bedroom apartments and two three-bedroom apartments.
"Investigators will carefully look at the circumstances of the building," Hanania said, adding that there was not necessarily wrongdoing in the zoning or partitioning of the apartments. "When you lose so many people like this in one building, I think it justifies a close examination."
In the coming days, the town will examine occupancy regulations on the building, which reportedly encompassed four residential units, one of which was vacant, he said.
"This building for some reason had multiple families living in it. That's something that we're going to have to look at," Hanania said.
