Fire investigators will take another crack at finding cause of fatal Owen County fire

Herald-Times (Bloomington, IN)

Aug. 26--The cause of a predawn house fire near Freedom three weeks ago today that killed Dan Reynolds, Joy Reynolds and her 11-year-old son Bailey Little is still unknown.

"At this time, the investigation is still ongoing and we have no updates to provide," the state fire marshal's office said in reply to an inquiry about the Aug. 5 blaze at 2609 Firecrest Lane.

The fire burned at more than 2,000 degrees, melting copper pipes and destroying everything inside the home, which the family had moved into just days before. There was nothing left.

Soon after the fire, family members said they suspected a propane gas leak from a water heater may have been the culprit, but no official word supports that suspicion.

"It's not clear at all from what remains what happened," said Steve Shand from Shand Forensic Investigations near Fort Wayne. State Farm Insurance Co. hired his firm to investigate the fire's origin. "When you have a house burn to this magnitude -- the temperature inside reached over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit -- it's what we call 'burned to completion.'"

Shand said he and others with a stake in the cause will gather at the Owen County scene on Tuesday to sort through the rubble and attempt to determine where the fire originated and what caused it. "That's going to be a long day," said Shand, who was a volunteer firefighter for 30 years. "We will take a lot of debris out of there and will be checking the gas lines and the electrical branch circuit wiring."

Shand said he intends to identify the cause, to do "everything we can possibly do to try and determine what happened there."

A firefighter driving to work at the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center saw an orange glow in the sky that morning and reported the fire about 6 a.m. The brick house was engulfed by flames by the time he got there. Rescuers found Joy Reynolds and her son, both seriously burned, in the front yard. Dan Reynolds had gone down the road for help, and had collapsed.

All three died from the burns they suffered.

Shand and an investigator from the state fire marshal's office spent half a day at the fire scene the week after it happened. Shand said a thorough review involving "all the interested parties" is the next step.

"When you do an investigation like this, especially with three dead people, you have to make sure you get all the interested parties there at once," he said. "We try to be as honest and straightforward as we can be in these cases. We are not trying to hide anything. We're just trying to find the truth."

He said an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, a propane gas expert and others are expected to participate in the review of the fire-charred scene. "We can work all together," said Shand, whose company investigated and pinpointed the cause of the 2012 Richmond Hill neighborhood explosion and fire in Indianapolis that killed two residents and destroyed surrounding houses.

Shand said it's his job to find the origin and cause of the Owen County fire. He said the firefighters did the right thing upon arrival -- helping the victims. The house was beyond saving. "All they can do at that point is to tend to the people who got out of the house."

That no one involved survived makes the investigation more difficult.

"We don't have any idea about what happened," Shand said. "With no surviving family members (who were at the house), no witnesses ... oftentimes, we can have someone who can point us in a direction, or we can just look at the scene. But it's hard, with the devastation we have in this case."

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