Student dies in dorm fire

A suspicious fire struck a Catawba College dormitory early Sunday morning, killing one of the college’s students.

A helicopter flew Stephen Andrew Grooms, 20, to Winston-Salem, where doctors at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center tried to help him.

With burns covering his face and most of his body, the 20-year-old sophomore from Roswell, N.M., died at 12:50 p.m.

Investigators say the suspicious blaze was the third that night at the two-story Foil House dorm and began in a common room that students share. They were still examining the site this morning to determine the cause.

The building’s smoke alarms did not activate after the third fire, Salisbury Assistant Fire Chief Rick Fesperman said.

“We’ve...heard that they might have been disabled from a previous fire,” he said. “...We’re looking at everything there. It’s a tragic event out there. I know it’s hit the college hard.

“... We would have wanted to have been notified” after the first two fires, Fesperman said. “Since there were two earlier fires at this dorm and then there was a structural fire, we want to know if it was intentionally set.”

A number of students witnessed Grooms lying just outside the brick dormitory while flames still glowed in the windows of the Foil House on Sunday morning. Hundreds of students living on campus gathered on the grass around the building as Salisbury firefighters sprayed water on the building.

Grooms, who was majoring in business administration, tried to get out of the building through the hallway, witnesses said.

Ryan O’Shea Wolf, his roommate in room 7, jumped from a window to escape the fire. Wolf received minor injuries and was treated on the scene, firefighters said. A sophomore also majoring in business administration, Wolf is from Cumming, Ga.

No one else was injured, according to firefighters.

The suspicious fire began after two others were put out at the dorm, said Tonia Black-Gold, spokeswoman for the college. Around 1:30 a.m., a burning pile of leaves was extinguished just outside the Foil House. Shortly afterward, a security guard put out a second fire in the building’s laundry room.

Salisbury firefighters were called to the third fire at 3:27 a.m. When they arrived, approximately 30 percent of the building was in flames, the Fire Department reported. They had the fire under control at 5:20 a.m., officials said.

Sitting in a command vehicle as a cold morning dawned Sunday, Fesperman said the Foil House was constructed before building laws required installation of fire-stopping walls in structure ceilings. So once the flames got into the ceiling, they spread quickly.

“We had to pull lots of walls and ceilings,” Fesperman said. “The fire had run into the attic. We had to keep opening areas up to make sure we got all the fire out.”

By 10 on Sunday morning, smoke had disappeared and workers were covering some windows with plywood as a small group of students watched from behind yellow tape circling the building.

Though the dorm housed 24 students, just six were inside when firefighters responded.

The college immediately rented rooms at the Hampton Inn across town to temporarily house Wolf and 10 other students who lost their dorm rooms. Others found space on campus to stay.

“Our first priority is taking care of the students and making sure they are OK,” Black-Gold said.

At noon Sunday, a group of students were eating catered meals out of boxes in a conference room at the Hampton Inn. They said the college had told them not to talk to reporters.

Like most colleges, Catawba doesn’t typically compensate students for materials lost or destroyed in dorms. But the college will make an exception in this case.

“We typically do not have insurance on belongings,” Black-Gold said. “But because this was an extraordinary circumstance, we’re going to make an exception.”

With combustible items typically crowded into small rooms, fires in college dormitories threaten many lives because they tend to burn quickly, Fesperman said.

The smoke alarms in the Foil House were backed up by batteries and were checked regularly, Black-Gold said. But none of nine residence halls on campus have sprinklers. State building codes don’t require them in dorms less than three stories tall, Fesperman said.

A fraternity house on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill burned and killed five people in 1996. Lawmakers passed a bill after that fire requiring all fraternity and sorority houses on college campuses in the state to have sprinkler systems installed.

Many students said those living in the Foil House were able to escape the building quickly because it is small.

“It was terrible that it happened, but if it had happened anywhere else, a lot more people would have died,” said Jeremy Hall, a freshman from Denver, N.C., who lives next to the Foil House in the larger Abernethy Hall, on the second of three floors. “Everybody’s just really shocked.”

Jason Dalton, a junior from Winston-Salem who lives next to Hall, said students suspect that one among them may have deliberately set the fire.

“That was the most useless, horrible thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, standing outside his dorm and watching a candle burning in memory of Grooms by the Foil House. “How are we supposed to walk around this campus and look people in the face not knowing who did it?

“It’s kind of weird. You hear about this kind of thing on the news and happening in other places, but when you see it right here, it’s so real.”

Contact Brad A. Hodges at 704-797-4266 or bhodges@salisburypost.com .