Editor’s Note: This post was updated Friday at 11:41 a.m. to clarify that the report came from the fire marshal, not the police.
Jonathan Kane, 45, knew something wasn’t right when he opened the door to his seventh-floor apartment in Silver Spring.
It was just before 6 a.m. and the lights that had been on when he and his friend, Rasheed Duvall, 43, left the apartment about 10 to 15 minutes earlier to run to 7-Eleven were now darkened. The light switches Kane reached not only didn’t work—they felt very hot.
Kane noticed smoke, and Duvall saw the source: flames near the sofa and recliner.
These details are from a recent fire marshal report obtained by MoCo360 and are the latest look into the fire Feb. 18 at Arrive Silver Spring apartments that claimed the life of 25-year-old Melanie Diaz. The fire caused an estimated $1 million in damage and sent 20 people including three firefighters to area hospitals for care.
The fire marshal investigation, which lasted nearly two months, found multiple possible causes for the fire and classified the cause as undetermined. According to the report, “no criminal acts or intentions are suspected.” Below are details of the day, as depicted in the report unless noted otherwise.
As the flames spread through apartment 720A, the men jumped into action. They ran through the hallway, grabbing fire extinguishers, rushing back and discharging them in an attempt to put out the fire. Propping the apartment door so it wouldn’t automatically lock, they continued grabbing extinguishers from the hallway and discharging them.
On the eighth floor, Daniel Black said he woke up smelling smoke. Outside his balcony, he saw dark smoke coming from somewhere below. His phone call to 911 at just before 6 a.m. would be the first of many.
He got dressed, knowing he’d have to leave his apartment.
“I wasn’t really thinking,” Black told MoCo360 this week. “Instinct kicked in.”
Other neighbors would call to say they were trapped in their apartments as smoke filled the hallways.
Kane’s next-door neighbors, David Mullis and Joseph Tresh, heard the commotion and Tresh joined in the dash for extinguishers, but soon the smoke was overwhelming. Mullis said the smoke was “banked down to the floor of the hallway” when he and Tresh evacuated.
As Mullis left, he said he heard Kane or Duvall say, “Don’t worry, we got this.”
Firefighters pulled up to the building on Georgia Avenue at approximately 6:01 a.m. and reported “nothing evident” from the front of the building. As firefighters entered and made their way up, they passed evacuating residents, one of whom told them that there was a fire that had been put out on the seventh floor. Still others needed immediate medical attention.
Inside apartment 720A, the fire was being fed with fresh air through the open apartment door as the men tried to extinguish it themselves. On the other side, the fire was being fueled by strong winds blowing through a balcony door left open “about a foot” by the men so that a cat could use a litterbox on the balcony.
Witnesses recalled hearing explosions (later determined to be spray paint cans) as the fire intensified.
When the firefighters reached the seventh floor, they were met with “heavy smoke, zero visibility, and moderate heat conditions” and called for a second alarm of what would become a three-alarm fire.
In apartment 1126A, four floors up from the fire floor, Melanie Diaz had apparently grabbed her two dogs. She joined other residents evacuating down the stairwell, but for reasons unknown, stepped off on the ninth floor.
That’s where a firefighter found her, unconscious in the smoke-filled hallway. Firefighters moved Diaz, initiating CPR on the sixth floor and continuing on the fifth floor, where EMS was waiting.
One of Diaz’s dogs was found dead on the ninth floor. The other was found dead on the sixth floor.
Another unconscious woman was found by firefighters in the seventh-floor elevator lobby and taken to EMS on the fifth floor. The woman was suffering from cardiac arrest and regained a heartbeat during transportation to MedStar Washington Hospital Center in D.C. Unnamed in the report, she was later determined to be from apartment 719A.
As firefighters worked to extinguish the fire, residents found refuge across Georgia Avenue in the lobby of the Double Tree hotel. That’s where fire and explosive investigators found Kane.
After their attempts to extinguish the fire proved futile, Kane and Duvall were separated as they evacuated. While Kane was being interviewed by investigators, Duvall had been stopped near the exit of a stairwell by another officer because witnesses said he was “seen leaving the building in a ‘suspicious’ manner carrying electronic equipment.” Duvall was later arrested and charged with burglary.
Duvall is being held without bond, according to the Circuit Court of Maryland. He will face a criminal trial in the upcoming months. Duvall did not respond to a phone call requesting comment.
Investigators—including a special agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and Eesa, a dog trained to detect accelerants—were able to access 720A not long after the fire was extinguished.
No accelerants were identified by Eesa. A “mass of melted debris” was found on one of the sofa feet near where the most extensive damage occurred. An X-ray showed a possible electrical wire in the debris.
While the fire marshal couldn’t determine a specific source, they were able to identify several factors that contributed to the fire’s severity. In addition to the strong winds and open doors, the report noted that there wasn’t a working smoke detector in the apartment and there was a delay in calling 911 as the men tried to put out the fire. Also noted in the report was that there wasn’t a sprinkler system in the apartment building. After the fire, State Del. Lorig Charkoudian, a Democrat, sponsored the Melanie Diaz Sprinklers Save Lives Act, which would mandate installing smoke alarms and sprinkler systems in high-rise buildings. The bill did not make it out of committee at the Maryland General Assembly.