Fire that killed two brothers caused by ‘grill left on’
A garda forensic expert yesterday told Cork City Coroner’s Court that he found the grill had been left turned on and that the oven was the seat of the fire at 106 Elm Park, Wilton, Cork, on Oct 30, 2011.
Firefighters recovered Calvin Ellard Punch, aged 4, his brother Cian, 2, and their mother Stacey from the smoke-filled two-storey terraced house. The boys died from the effects of smoke inhalation later. Their mother survived.
Ms Ellard wept yesterday as she recalled that night.
She had enjoyed a night out in the city earlier with her sister, Karen, and some friends, leaving her brother, Wayne, to mind her children. She had ordered pizza before leaving and kept a slice for herself.
Wayne said he used the lower oven to cook two pies for himself and insisted that he turned it off afterwards.
In her deposition, Stacey said when she got home around 2am, she reheated a slice of pizza.
“I heated the pizza in the microwave. I have no recollection of using the oven.”
Supported in the witness box by her partner, Ricky Punch, Stacey said she woke later to find intense heat and thick black smoke in her bedroom. “My first thoughts were to get Cian and Calvin out.”
She said she couldn’t see anything because of the smoke, she panicked and began screaming for help, before being overcome. “The next thing I remember was waking up in hospital.”
In her deposition, next-door neighbour Nicole Collins, 19, said she was woken by screams of “Oh my God” and could see and smell smoke in her room.
Two fire alarms in her house, one downstairs and one upstairs, were sounding and she phoned her mother, Sharon, who was with her partner, Paddy Fox, in a friend’s house nearby.
They both rushed back. But Ms Collins said as soon as they realised her house wasn’t on fire, they checked next door.
She raised the alarm as Mr Fox kicked in the front door and smashed the downstairs front window. “Thick black smoke came billowing out on top of me,” he said.
He put a jacket over his head and tried to get up the stairs but was beaten back by the smoke.
Sergeant Brendan McKenna and Garda Rory O’Connell, who arrived on the scene, were also beaten back. “We had no option but to retreat from the house,” Sgt McKenna said.
Firefighters arrived within minutes and two teams wearing breathing apparatus entered the house.
Third officer, Declan O’Shea said they found Ms Ellard lying over the body of one of her children on the floor of the main bedroom at the front of the house. Her other little boy was lying on the bed.
The children were unresponsive and were rushed to Cork University Hospital.
Cian was pronounced dead a short time later. He died from acute carbon monoxide poisoning due to smoke inhalation from a house fire.
Calvin lost his fight for life in the hospital’s intensive care unit on Nov 2. The cause of death was hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy due to smoke inhalation from a house fire.
A jury returned a verdict of accidental death in both cases.
Garda Jimmy O’Sullivan said he found the grill switch had been left on, to mark five, and that the grill door had been closed. He said an intense slow-burning fire could have been burning inside for up to two hours, before it travelled up through the extractor fan and burned through the ceiling and the underside of the upstairs floor joists.
City coroner Dr Myra Cullinane described the accident as a “tragically simple sequence of events”.
