An early morning fire Saturday took the lives of two university students during what was supposed to be a relaxing summer vacation before the start of the semester.
Junior Christine Renee Maier, 19, a geography major, and Kennedy Michael Fitzgerald, 20, an environmental science major, died in Fitzgerald’s Eastern Shore home. Fitzgerald’s sister, Margaret Rose “Maggie” Fitzgerald, 18, also died in the two alarm fire. The cause of the blaze is still under investigation, fire officials said.
Maier and Kennedy Fitzgerald, who have spent most of the summer together after they began dating during a Department of Geography field course to West Virginia in June, were spending the weekend with friends and family in Fitzgerald’s home in Arcadia Shores – a small Talbot County community.
As the couple was downstairs watching a movie, their three friends – junior sociology major Rosemary Sharpe, 20, Ashley McNerney, 21, and Tyler Graf, 20 – and one of Fitzgerald’s younger sisters were asleep upstairs when the fire began around 2 a.m. Maggie Fitzgerald returned to the house around 1 a.m., and her location in the house during the fire is still under investigation, Sharpe said.
Sharpe was woken up suddenly by McNerney, a student at East Carolina University, after hearing a fire alarm. Sharpe said she and McNerney tried to find Maier, but the fire was too intense.
“We went out to the hallway to find Christine but the smoke was overwhelming and started burning my eyes,” Sharpe said. “It was like an inferno coming up the stairs.”
Sharpe called 911 and then escaped out a second-story window onto a roof landing. Before jumping off the roof to safety, she saw for the first time the flames coming from the house.
“I started freaking out because I realized it wasn’t a small fire, it was a big fire,” Sharpe said.
Strong winds were blowing embers off the burning house, forcing the group of survivors to a neighbor’s house. Sharpe said at that point she thought everyone in the house had escaped, but Kennedy and Maggie Fitzgerald and Maier were still inside.
“I could not even fathom that [Maier] was in the house,” Sharpe said. “It was a big house and it was completely covered in flames.”
It took 50 firefighters about 45 minutes to contain the fire. By then, the house was completely destroyed, said Deputy State Fire Marshal Joseph Zurolo Jr.
The fatal fire occurred two days before the National Fire Protection Association announced a report about the growing danger of on-campus fires in a press conference on McKeldin Mall.
The annual average number of college housing fires has increased from 1,800 in 1998 to about 3,300 in 2005, the report said.
“The leading cause of dormitory fires is cooking,” said Lorraine Carli, an NFPA spokesperson said in an interview.
A reason the press conference was held on the campus is because the university’s fire protection plan is a model throughout the country, Carli said.
“The university does a great job on fire protection,” she said.
Fitzgerald and Maier are the third and fourth university students to die in a house fire in almost three years.
Contact reporter Cassie Bottge cbottge@gmail.com.