Politics & Government

Behind the Door: After a Fire, Accusations and Rebuilding

In the third and last of our series on condemned houses, two homeowners are trying to renovate a house destroyed by a fire, amid questions about whether they set it in the first place.

This week, Wheaton Patch is looking behind the doors of houses in the area that have been condemned. Today, we look at the story of a house condemned by fire, and how the loss, compounded by foreclosure, affected the homeowners. For the entire series, click 

It was late when Gurja Asmeret went to sleep on a summer evening in 2007. After working her second job and arriving home at midnight, she fell asleep on her couch. Her son Ermias slept nearby. Her husband, Mesfin Kiflu, was at work at his job as a night security guard in Washington, D.C. 

Suddenly, her chest felt tight.

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“When I open my eye, I could not see. I could not breathing. The house was dark,” she said recently, recalling that night in July.

Their house on Claridge Road was burning. 

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Her next memories are a little muddled, but Asmeret said she remembers calling out to her son, falling down the front stairs as they fled the house and searching in wide circles in the dark for the phone she’d lost in the grass.

When the fire department came, she and her son were taken to the hospital. As they were being treated, a fire department investigator asked Asmeret questions. She was upset and confused.

The main structure of the house was not compromised, but the internal damage was so severe that the Montgomery County Fire Department labeled the property “unsafe to occupy” and notified the Department of Housing and Community Affairs. The house was then locked with a bolt, its windows boarded up. Officially, the house was condemned, and Asmeret and Kiflu and their family could not live there. 

The family moved to a motel, then to a temporary apartment. But their move turned out to be not so temporary.

In the next few months, Asmeret and Kiflu’s insurance company refused to settle the case, because the cause of the fire was still under investigation. The fire department had classified the case as “incendiary” — meaning that they deemed that the fire was intentionally set. In firefighting terms, an incendiary fire is the kind that would lead to an arrest for arson.

But no charging documents for arson have been filed, and four years later, the case remains open.

The couple had bought the house, a duplex, down the street from and in late 2003 for $219,000. They had lived in apartments since leaving Eritrea years before.

“My country was not safe,” Asmeret said about their immigration to the United States.

The house on Claridge Road was close to public transit, the family held barbeques in the backyard and they watched their daughter graduate from the University of Maryland all while living there.

“How can we burn our home?”

According to the fire department report, firefighters from Fire Station 18 in Glenmont responded to a call of a fire on July 19, 2007, at 4:40 a.m. The first arriving units saw smoke coming out of the duplex.

In the confusion, there were initial reports of a baby inside. Gurja said that she had called out to her daughter, an adult who had a key to the house but was not inside. As three firefighters climbed to the second floor, the stairs collapsed underneath them. They were transported to the hospital with injuries.

Through the investigation, the fire department found no working smoke alarms and determined the fire started on the main level, where they found an accelerant (investigators declined to say which kind) on several surfaces in the house. According to the fire report, the accelerant was observed on the main floor, the basement and the stairs leading up to the second floor.

When asked if they intentionally set the fire in the house, both Asmeret and Kiflu are insistent they did not.

“How can we burn our home? If I don’t like the house, I would sell it,” Asmeret said.

Kiflu said much the same: “How do we put fire to our house? We are a family. We need shelter.”

More questions than answers

Why then, did the fire department find an accelerant on the first floor?

Kiflu and Asmeret are adamant they did not start the fire. They believe the house was initially left unsecured and could have been tampered with in the time between the fire and when a sample of the carpet downstairs was taken for evidence.

Lt. Matthew Trivett, the investigator in charge of the case, said the fire department found evidence of the accelerant and took a sample of the carpet to be studied during “scene processing,” which occurs in the immediate hours after a fire.

“In investigations, you rule in or rule out,” Trivett said. “All accidental ignition sources were ruled out.”

Today, evidence of the fire in the second floor is as clear as it was four years ago.

The frame of the house is still intact, but the ceiling is charred, the sheetrock is almost gone and a few windows are boarded up. Kiflu and Asmerat have redone the first-floor walls and floors, as well as the stairs. New windows and a front door are stacked inside but not installed. In the basement, a leaky water pipe has damaged the floor, leaving a damp smell in the air.

Asmeret and Kiflu both say that in the weeks leading up the fire, their electrical system was acting up, with fuses blowing upstairs several times. Inside the house recently, Kiflu pointed out extensive damage in the ceilings, where electrical wires ran.

“Our house is burning upstairs,” Gurja said. “Why do they take the carpet from downstairs?”

Four Years On

Four years is not an unusual amount of time for an investigation, especially in the case of a house fire, Trivett said.

“We haven’t been able to get to the threshold for charging documents,” he said, explaining why the case remains open. That threshold is different for every case, based on finding probable cause.

Both Asmeret and Kiflu allege that a representative of the fire department — they could not clarify who — attempted to bribe their son to testify that his parents set the fire.

“I’m not aware of this allegation,” Trivett said, adding that in any house fire case, there are multiple investigations, including the insurance company’s investigation.

Their son Ermias was unavailable to talk about the incident, as he was in Eritrea, visiting his grandfather, Asmeret said.

Owning a Condemned House

The house went into foreclosure in late 2008. The last payment that the mortgage company — at the time it was Countrywide, which was soon to be bought by Bank of America — recorded was on March 18, 2008. Asmeret continued to pay the mortgage on time at least one month after the fire, the couple’s own documents show.

But paying for rent on an apartment in Petworth — where they currently live along with other family members — paying for the mortgage on the house and trying to raise funds to renovate after the fire damage has strained their finances past the breaking point.

The official foreclosure was filed in District Court on October 28, 2008. But in May of 2009, the court sent the trustees foreclosing on the house a notice that the case had been improperly filed.

In February of 2010, the court ordered the foreclosure case closed, as the trustees had filed no motions or updates to the docket in more than a year, which is cause to have a foreclosure case dropped.

Recently, Bank of America rejected Kiflu and Asmeret’s application for a mortgage modification. As of September of 2010, there are significant back fees related to the mortgage’s default.

“Countrywide was good,” Gurja said, pointing at one of the few statements related to her mortgage that she could produce at their family’s apartment in the District.

Both husband and wife are frustrated.

They’ve written letters to Bank of America, called Sen. Barbara Mikulski and sought county assistance for the renovation costs. Nothing has panned out, the couple says.

Yet, as recently as February, Asmeret and Kiflu started the process of rebuilding in earnest. They recently received a permit to finish fixing the first level of the house and to reinstall the electrical system. They estimate the rest of the house can be refinished for $10,000, and they’ve hired a contractor to start the work.

Because the house is still under condemnation, they’ve had to gain the permission of DHCA at every step of the renovation process.

In February of 2010, they were found guilty of failing to remove a condemned structure, a common citation for condemned houses that are in limbo. The fine was waived. A second set of citations has been pushed back several times in court. The next hearing will be held on July 11, almost four years to the date of the fire.

Still homeowners, they are focused on getting the house in better shape before July.

“They will see our home. If it is good, they will let us get in — if we get this $10,000,” Kiflu said. “We are working day and night to afford this.”


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