By james art A Las Vegas fire official whose team responded to a fatal house fire Thursday that killed two adults and two children said it’s rare to see so many lives lost in a fire.
“Anytime someone loses their life in a fire, it’s a difficult situation,” said Matthew Gordon, a team leader with Nevada Task Force 1, a federally funded urban search and rescue group and battalion chief for the Las Vegas Fire Department. “More than one is pretty rare.”
Fire crews were called in the early morning hours Thursday to a fire at 8332 Langhorne Creek St., near the area of West Windmill Lane and South Jones Boulevard.
A mother and child jumped from a third-story window and were treated for injuries and taken to University Medical Center. Later that evening, officials announced that four people who had been missing had been found dead.
Her brother-in-law, Avet Adem, and a GoFundMe fundraiser identified Senaite and Amani Adem as the mother and child who escaped. He said both have now been discharged from the hospital.
The victims are Abraham Adem, his brother Abdul Adem and Abdul Adem’s children Anaya and Aaliyah, according to a GoFundMe page.
Avet Adem, who was not at home at the time of the fire, spells the names of some of the victims differently. He said the dead were his brothers Ibrahim Adem and Abdul Adem, as well as Abdul Adem’s children Anaya and Alia.
Nevada Task Force 1 was called in to help with recovery efforts, Gordon said. “They wanted to use one of our dogs,” he said.
Gordon’s team has two types of dogs: human remains dogs and live dogs.
“They operate completely separately and have different capabilities,” Gordon said. “And in this case, they wanted the human remains of the dog.”
The dog was not in town at the time, but the team brought wooden cribs used in structural collapse scenarios. The material was used to secure the building to allow firefighters to enter and search for victims, Gordon explained.
While Gordon wasn’t on stage, he talked to people who were.
“It was pretty tough,” he said.
Children losing their lives in fires is something Gordon has seen before in his 27 years of experience. “But it’s not everyday, thankfully,” he said.
As a battalion chief, Gordon said he hopes to send messages to neighborhoods before an event like Thursday’s happens. But if there is a fatality, the team will target that neighborhood and talk to the residents.
“We’ll have our fire prevention people there,” he said. “We’ll do smoke detector checks.”
Firefighters sometimes walk through homes to suggest exit routes.
“It’s an effort we certainly make after something tragic like this happens,” Gordon said. But “we try to get in there beforehand.”
Contact Estelle Atkinson at [email protected]. Follow @estellelilym on X and @estelleatkinsonreports on Instagram.