Child playing with lighter starts blaze

Monday, June 20, 2005 | 11:09 a.m.

A fire ignited by a 4-year-old with a lighter destroyed a southeast Las Vegas apartment about 1 p.m. Sunday, but no one was seriously hurt, Clark County Fire Department spokesman Bob Leinbach said.

Susan Claudio lives next door to the apartment that went up in flames at 4776 Topaz St., near Tropicana and Eastern Avenues. She said she heard the 4-year-old believed to have started the fire, as the family fled the apartment.

"He was crying and crying," Claudio, who lives with her son and her brother John Hughes in the nearby apartment, said of the boy. The family's last name living in the apartment where the fire started is not known.

The boy's mother was not at home when the fire started, Claudio said. The boy's grandfather was away doing laundry and the boy's father was in another part of the apartment, Claudio said. The whereabouts of two pet cats after the fire was unknown.

The American Red Cross Las Vegas Branch had moved the next-door neighbors to a motel because their apartment had $200,000 in damages, Leinbach said.

The two-alarm fire was confined to the red-tiled apartment where the flames originated, Leinbach said.

Leinbach asked parents to lock up matches and lighters to keep them out of the hands of small children.

"These are not bad children, they just make bad decisions," Leinbach said.

Children under the age of 5 are in the top two or three causes of household fires nationwide, Leinbach said.

"Not only keep smoking materials out of sight, but out of reach," Leinbach said.

A friend of the family's woke in the room where the fire started and alerted the rest of the family in the apartment, Leinbach said. "Luckily, it was not late at night," he said.

Six people were removed from the gutted apartment and three from the next apartment, Leinbach said.

Claudio's 27-year-old son, Shaun, was still at a local hospital after he cut his hand smashing the glass door to a fire extinguisher, she said.

"He needed stitches," Claudio said of her son's injuries.

Claudio's apartment had smoke damage and she loaded a silver van late Sunday to move to another unit in the complex.

"It's a very nice apartment," Claudio said, and she hopes to move back into it when the smoke is cleared and water damages are repaired.

When the fire sent flames through the front windows next door, Claudio was concerned for photographs kept in a closet next to the adjoining apartment's wall. Her husband died last year "and those were the only memories I have," she said.

Fortunately, she said she and her brother moved the boxes from the closet before water began pouring down the walls.

"Why did he have a lighter to begin with?" she asked.