fire / arson

First of all, hats off to the Portland Fire Dept. - they handled the situation expertly within minutes. Well done, ladies and gents - you do your city proud.

So, my roommate and I had just finished watching a movie and I headed upstairs to bed. From my window though, I suddenly saw flames across the street. I yelled out to the other roommates to call the police, as I ran across the street.

The woman there was standing on her doorstep. I called out to her to come away from the building and asked if there was anyone else inside. She sullenly replied that there was in fact somebody inside...but made no move to do anything about it or to move away from the building - she was clearly out of her mind.

There ended up being no one else inside - why did she say there was someone else? I had seen kids with them before so I was worried there were children sleeping in the house still. I'm glad that it was somewhat obvious she was lying or crazy and that no one had to risk running inside to grab a person that wasn't actually there.

She then began to walk into back into her flaming house, casually, as if nothing were happening (she does this in the video too, at 00:20). She came out a little bit later and then her husband stepped out of the car parked on the driveway - I guess he had been there all along - I asked him if there was anybody else inside in the hopes that maybe he was less crazy. He ignored the question and went to examine the fire. After a moment, he turned around and went back to his car and started to back out of the driveway and leave by himself. My roommate had come up in the meantime and she grabbed his license plate just in case.

The woman went back in the house. At this point, the scene was obviously surreal and these folks that I was yelling to were crazy and not listening. So, I went back across the street to my house, grabbed my camera and started filming.

Some backstory: this woman was arrested(?) a couple days earlier in front of our house, taken forcibly into an ambulance. Apparently she had since returned from the hospital; however, clearly not in a stable state of mind.

If this fire was truly an accident, I will eat my hat.

Here's the news story: www.kptv.com/news/23698178/detail.html

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• fire
• arson
• portland

[helloromantic]

hahahahaha oh my gosh! i mean, not to be rude or anything.

[joannamay86]

good news, roomie, she got arrested for setting the fire!

[newimprovedjack]

good thing you don't have to eat your hat!