A neighbor documents the car fire from across the street.
Fire officials are investigating how a car burst into flames at university students’ off-campus house early Friday.
Prince George’s County Fire Department headed to the house on the 7500 block of Dartmouth Ave. at 4:36 a.m. to put out the fire, which engulfed senior finance and government and politics major Tommy Carolin’s parked car. No one was injured.
One of Carolin’s housemates, senior marketing and supply chain management major Grant Germano, spotted the fire first. Germano said he woke up at about 4:30 a.m. and noticed his room was filled with light. He saw the fire when he looked outside, he said.
Germano immediately called 911 and woke up his roommates. As they ran to the backyard away from the burning car, Germano said he heard six to eight explosion-like sounds and found a small fire on a tent behind the house.
Roommate Daniel Popper, The Diamondback’s assistant sports editor, tried to put the fire out by beating it with a stool.
Police arrived minutes after Germano called, he said, and extinguished the fire in “no more than a minute or two.”
Carolin said the fire burnt his car, a Ford Escape, down to an unusable “skeleton,” and two of the other roommates’ cars were damaged. One of the house walls also became warped from the heat, causing the porch siding to hang down, Germano said.
“We’re still very shaken up,” Carolin said.
Carolin said he is unsure how the fire started but does not think it was an issue with the car. He said the car was relatively new, and he had not used it the previous night. Neighbors also told him they heard “mini explosions” before the fire, he said.
Germano said he is suspicious about the incident.
“The fact that both the car fire and the tent fire occurred in two separate areas without seeming to spread is suspicious,” he said.
A definitive cause of the fire is not yet known, PGFD Assistant Fire Chief Lt. Paul Gomez said, but the investigation is ongoing.
