Dallas firefighters didn’t find man’s body following a fire in a vacant house. Review underway after relatives find the body under debris.
From the AP:
Relatives of a missing Dallas man found his body Wednesday under some debris at a vacant home that had been destroyed by fire early Friday.
Dallas Fire-Rescue spokesman Ernest Gurule said firefighters didn’t go into the home before putting out the fire and didn’t see Earnest Sirls’ body during two sweeps of the house after the fire was out.
“It was not treated as a rescue,” Gurule said in Wednesday’s online edition of The Dallas Morning News. “What happened here is going to be thoroughly reviewed. We are going to make sure that everyone understands their role to minimize another occurrence. We express our deepest condolences to the family.”
Sirls’ sister and nephew found his body beneath a pile of debris, his mother, Rose Davis Braggs, said. She had filed a missing person’s report after she didn’t hear from the 46-year-old over the weekend.
Family members went to the vacant house where Sirls sometimes would go and asked people in the area if they had seen him.
Braggs said her son recently was released from a rehabilitation program for alcohol abuse and had been staying at shelters temporarily.
“He was doing good,” she said. “He was going to church.”
“I’m just hurt,” she said. “The fire department should have gone in there and looked.”
The cause of Sirls’ death and the fire are under investigation.
