One dead, one hurt in Camden blaze at abandoned site

The Cherry Street neighbors had complained, they said.

Junkies and prostitutes would march into the pistachio-green abandoned building in Camden, a reputed house of prostitution attached to a long-closed car-detailing business.

"Somebody's going to start a fire if we don't board it up," Lanse Merrill, who spoke to city officials, recalled saying. "Nobody came. It falls on deaf ears."

On Tuesday, a three-alarm fire in the same vacant building, in the 200 block of Cherry Street, killed one man and injured a woman, Camden fire officials said.

The woman was taken to Cooper University Hospital for smoke inhalation, Camden Fire Chief Thomas Quinn said.

The call came shortly before 10:30 a.m., he said. A dozen fire units, mostly from Camden, responded. The body of a male victim, whose name wasn't released, was recovered upstairs.

A firefighter was injured when a nail went into his leg. He was treated and released, officials said.

Merrill, 36, who lives next door and had chased people off the property, said the death happened "because the city didn't do their jobs."

He had feared that there could be chemicals left over from when the property was the detail shop he remembers years ago when he was a child.

Also, neighborhood children were prey for junkies shooting up there, he said. Boarding up the building could keep out squatters, addicts, and prostitutes.

Patrick Keating, Camden's public works director, said city records showed no complaints about the property, which wasn't on a board-up or demolition list.

"There are a lot of things we can do in retrospect," he said. "The fact of the matter is that it was never put into our action pattern."

Keating said the sanitation inspector had spoken to neighbors at some point about the property and requested that it be investigated.

"The folks that lost their lives, it's not good no matter who they were or what they were doing there," Keating said. "Was it preventable? I don't know."

The Cherry Street neighborhood includes clusters of vacant homes, weed-covered lots, and boarded-up, crumbling buildings, wedged between South Camden and the port.

Tuesday's fire was concentrated in the two-story building, where the roof collapsed. Flames traveled to a vacant garage, where the detail business once operated, according to officials.

Another neighbor, George Arroyo, 57, said he had seen Camden County sheriff's officers with K-9 dogs go inside the building and "come right out."

He also said, "There's a flow of traffic of girls" going into the building.

As firefighters steadied a hose at the Cherry Street building, Arroyo pointed to another abandoned house, another potential fire hazard.

Flickering candles can be seen at night through an upstairs window, he said.

"Candles," Arroyo said, "don't light by themselves."