Monday, November 29, 1999
Price Hill man killed in fire
Extension cord likely caused circuit overload
BY TOM O'NEILL
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Emergency workers treat Josephine Johnson, 79, who jumped from the second-story window of her burning home Sunday morning.
(Mark Tabeling photo)
| ZOOM |
|
As 79-year-old Josephine Johnson leaned out the second-story window of her burning Price Hill home Sunday morning and readied to jump, she wasn't thinking about herself.
And the neighbor in the predawn darkness readying to catch her wasn't thinking about himself.
“My husband's in here!” Mrs. Johnson yelled to Ellis Sweet, a neighbor she barely knew. “Jump!” he yelled back.
Then she leaped about 25 feet, and Mr. Sweet broke her fall. Both fell to the ground. She remained Sunday night in critical condition at University Hospital with burns and two broken legs.
Her husband, James, 80, was pronounced dead at the scene. Cause of death was not determined.
The fire appears to have started in the hallway outside the Johnsons' second-story bedroom, and investigators suspect it was electrical, Cincinnati District Fire Chief Roy Yocum said Sunday.
Mr. Sweet, standing at his pickup across the street from the Johnson home Sunday afternoon, focused on the life lost, not the life he possibly saved.
“I do not consider myself any kind of hero,” said Mr. Sweet, 36, who moved to Seton Avenue in June and knew the Johnsons only to wave and exchange pleasantries.
He called them Mr. and Mrs. Johnson “because I respect my elders,” he said. He didn't know their first names.
“I'm not being modest or anything,” he explained, “that's just the way I was raised. Somebody in trouble, you try to help.”
He was upset that when he first heard glass breaking and someone yelling, “Help me!” he thought it was a domestic dispute.
The sound was windows breaking from the heat. Mr. Sweet ran over to help, he recalled, and got halfway up the stairs but the intense heat and smoke forced him back.
Jack Seay, whom fire officials identified as a nephew or grandson of the Johnsons, was the only other person in the home at 1016 Seton when the two-alarm fire broke out. He was awakened and tried unsuccessfully to fight the blaze. He was not injured. A smoke detector on the third floor was working, Chief Yocum said.
Findings are preliminary, he emphasized, but the cause likely was a 50-foot extension cord that stretched from the basement to underneath a hallway rug on the second floor. Chief Yocum said it was a fire-code violation.
But, he added, it's not uncommon, especially during the holidays, when residents typically add lights and risk overloading a circuit. The cord in the Johnson home, he said, appeared to be for permanent wiring.
“Don't use too many of them,” Chief Yocum said of the danger of overloading a home's electrical system with extension cords. “But people do it all the time.”
Adult businesses moving to 'burbs
Flynt keeps coming back to Tristate
Path to grandma's was clear
Name Braun a Great Living Cinicinnatian
Beautiful church celebrates 75 years
Boone advised to add parks, pool
Mason students may attend funeral
Price Hill man killed in fire
Solstice performers maintain traditions
Targeted schools making progress
A bit of the world in Butler Co.
Church school has faith in future
War over turf now tax fight
Home for disabled built as example
Lawmaker targets bad septic systems in efforts to save farmland
Residents of housing project are sister's family
Student orchestra concert today
GET TO IT
Holiday TV schedule
TRISTATE DIGEST
