Multiple deaths ‘pretty rare,’ official says, about Las Vegas house fire
A Las Vegas fire official whose team responded to a fatal house fire Thursday that killed two adults and two children said it is rare to see so many lives lost in a fire.
“Anytime somebody loses their life in a fire, it’s a difficult situation,” said Matthew Gordon, a team leader with Nevada Task Force 1, a federally funded urban search rescue group, and battalion chief for the Las Vegas Fire Department. “More than one is pretty rare.”
Fire crews were called in the early morning hours Thursday to a fire at 8332 Langhorne Creek St., near the area of West Windmill Lane and South Jones Boulevard.
A mother and child jumped from a third-story window and were treated for injuries and taken to University Medical Center. Later that evening, officials announced that four people who had been unaccounted for had been found dead.
Her brother-in-law Awet Adem and a GoFundMe fundraiser identified Senait and Amani Adem as the mother and child who escaped. He said both have since been discharged from the hospital.
The victims were Abraham Adem, his brother Abdul Adem and Abdul Adem’s children Anaya and Aliyah, according to a GoFundMe page.
Awet Adem, who was not at home at the time of the fire, gave different spellings for some of the victims’ names. He said those who died were his brothers Ibrahim Adem and Abdul Adem, as well as Abdul Adem’s children Anaya and Aaliayh.
Nevada Task Force 1 was called in to assist with recovery efforts, Gordon said. “They wanted to use one of our dogs,” he said.
Gordon’s team has two kinds of dogs: human remains dogs and live-find dogs.
“They work totally separately and have different abilities,” Gordon said. “And in that case, they wanted the human remains dog.”
The dog wasn’t in town at the time, but the team did bring wood cribbing used in structural collapse scenarios. The material was used to secure the building to allow firefighters to go in and look for victims, Gordon explained.
While Gordon wasn’t on the scene, he talked to people who were.
“It was pretty tough,” he said.
Children losing their lives in fires is something that Gordon has seen before in his 27 years of experience. “But it’s not an everyday thing, thankfully,” he said.
As a battalion chief, Gordon said he hopes to get messaging out to neighborhoods before an event such as Thursday’s occurs. But if there’s a fatality, the team will target that neighborhood and speak to residents.
“We’ll have our fire prevention folks out there,” he said. “We’ll do smoke detector checks.”
Sometimes firefighters will walk through homes to suggest exit paths.
“That’s an effort that we certainly do after something tragic like that happens,” Gordon said. But, “we try to get in there beforehand.”
Contact Estelle Atkinson at eatkinson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @estellelilym on X and @estelleatkinsonreports on Instagram.