A nineteen-year-old man who lost his dog and all his belongings in a fire at a Burnaby apartment building Sunday morning, is speaking out about how the building was kept.
Jesse Vincent lived with his mother in the building on Smith Avenue near Canada way.
He says the electrical system wasn’t good, saying he’d turn on a light in the bathroom and it would flicker for a couple of seconds before coming on.
“We don’t have heat in our suite for I don’t know, how long do you live there, maybe, a year that we’ve lived there and there hasn’t been heat in that apartment at all, the elevator, I mean you’d get in the elevator and it would shake as if it was about to fall. I mean that building just was not kept very well at all. The manager and the owner was basically a slumlord.”
Vincent says he thinks the fire may have been electrical. He says if that was the cause, he’d like to see charges laid.
The same building was the scene of an arson in 2009.
Meanwhile, Burnaby RCMP were on-scene Monday morning guarding the wreckage of the building.
Officers say the fire is not considered suspicious at this time, but because there is so much rubble for investigators to sift through as they work to determine a cause, RCMP are using what they call “an overabundance of caution.”
Police say they don’t believe any of the residents are unaccounted for.
More than 30 families were left homeless by the blaze, with some residents on second and third floors having to be rescued by ladder.
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