Victim of northwest basement fire dies

One of the young people caught in a basement suite fire in northwest Calgary has died.

Jonathan St. Pierre, 19, died late Monday night after being pulled unconscious from the blaze that morning, and taken to hospital with severe smoke inhalation.

"I'm pretty devastated. I can't believe that it happened. I'm in shock. Last I heard, he was in stable condition," said St. Pierre's friend, Leo Pinto.

Firefighters found St. Pierre and three women, all unconscious, in the smoky basement suite in the 500 block of 33rd Street N.W.

Two of the women are in Edmonton for hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which delivers high concentrations of oxygen quickly into patients who have suffered carbon monoxide poisoning or inhaled large amounts of smoke. The third woman was taken to a Calgary hospital.

Investigators said the fire started near the rear door and was caused by a space heater placed too close to a sofa.

They said they found one smoke detector in the suite but don't believe that it was working.

Security barson some windows

Fire officials are also looking into whether security bars onsome of the basement windows were bent by the tenants trying to escape, or by fire crews fighting the blaze.

"In any type of basement fire, we're doing a primary search, and in that particular situation there was zero visibility. We need to ventilate that structure so we can see," said Jeff Budai, a spokesman for the Calgary fire department.

"Quite often we have firefighters come across a window they're going to do whatever we can to ensure that it's open and we're getting that fresh air intake, so again that's still questions that we are looking to answer."

Budai says this is a reminder for people who have installed security bars to know where the keys are in case of emergencies.

Depending on who installed the bars the landlord or the tenant and if they were removable from the inside will determine if any regulations were violated.

Robin Hannigan, the tenant who lives upstairs, told CBC News on Tuesday that he did some repair work for the landlord, including replacing a window at the back of the basement unit.

He said he took out security bars that were installed by a previous tenant to replace that window, but didn't put the bars back on.

Hannigan said he suggested removing the other bars which were "screwed on from the inside" from the other windows, but the current tenantsdeclined because they wanted to keep them for security reasons.

Thick smoke prevented Hannigan from going downstairs to help as the fire burned on Monday morning.

"If anybody was in the thick kind of smoke that I saw at the top of the stairs, it would've been worse downstairs. You know, two or three breaths of that and they might've been unconscious anyway so I honestly don't know if it would've made a difference," he said of the security bars.

The deceased had split up with his girlfriend and was in the process of moving out of the suite they shared, Pinto told CBC News.