Alpine Motel fire survivors start to collect belongings
After six months of waiting, some former residents of the Alpine Motel Apartments — the site of a fire that killed six people — were able to pick up their belongings Thursday morning.
“It’s a relief,” said 16-year-old Ashley Rogers, who arrived at the burnt building in downtown Las Vegas pushing a grocery cart, waiting to pick up her and her mother’s belongings.
The Dec. 21 fire also injured 13 people and left dozens homeless. From 2013 to 2017, the building had been the subject of numerous code enforcement inspections and failed fire inspections. A Review-Journal investigation published Thursday shows that Metropolitan Police Department officers had been working to get the property shut down as a chronic nuisance three years before the fire, but city officials opposed the action.
A plan approved in court on May 14 allowed former tenants to start retrieving their items from the building. Steven Jaffe, the lawyer for building owner Adolfo Orozco, has said the earliest crews could enter to start cleaning was Monday.
On Thursday morning, Helen Clark and her wife, Audrey Palmer, both shed tears while picking up their belongings.
“I didn’t want to go in the building; (there’s) a lot of death in there. It still gets to me. It really does,” Clark said just before a tear ran down her face.
Clark and Palmer arrived early at their old home to pile trash bags full of their belongings into a U-Haul truck. Like others who showed up to retrieve their items, they lived in a room that wasn’t affected by asbestos or fire, other than some smoke damage.
Palmer previously told the Review-Journal that she lived in the building for seven years while cleaning rooms and working security for Orozco, whom she described as “a straight slumlord.”
Clark said the couple kept some of their belongings in first-floor storage that was affected by the fire, and they’re not sure if they will get everything back.
“A lot of this is memories,” Clark said, looking at the garbage bags a worker carried out of the building and dropped in the parking lot, separated from others’ property with orange cones.
Rogers said she and her mother have been struggling to find a permanent home since the fire and didn’t know when they would get their property back. It’s still difficult for her to think about the fire.
“It’s pretty hard,” she said. “I can still remember running down that dark hall trying to get out with my mother.”
Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240. Follow @k_newberg on Twitter.
