A 12-year-old girl and her mother, 39-year-old Marie Bourque, are dead following a trailer fire in Lake Charles. Four people were home at the time of the blaze with two of them still hospitalized. State Fire Marshal spokesperson Ashley Rodrigue says firefighters got the call around 10:30 Tuesday night.
“That 911 call actually came from the female inside of the trailer. She was in a bedroom with her two children, a twelve-year-old girl and an eleven-year-old boy, and she reported that they were trapped in there and that smoke was coming into the room,” said Rodrigue.
Rodrigue says investigators are considering electrical malfunction as a potential cause, but they are continuing to work through the evidence before ruling anything out.
“Deputies were able to determine that the fire began in one of the bedrooms. It was not in the bedroom that the mother and two children were in. It was a bedroom that was on the other end of the trailer,” said Rodrigue.
Rodrigue says the home did not have working smoke alarms, which could have added critical seconds to the escape.
“That smoke can disorient you. That smoke can take oxygen out of your lungs and basically incapacitate to the point where you can no longer make the decision to escape a home so we’ve got to get this message out to people that smoke alarms save lives,” said Rodrigue.
This is the first residential fatal fire in Louisiana of 2020.
