An early morning fire on Barrack Road has left 3 business places in ruin, and a 21 year-old woman dead in the blaze.
It happened at around 4 a.m. on Wednesday, June 25, 2014. The fire started at Kimmy’s Club which doubles as a bar on the lower flat, and an apartment building on the second floor.
The bar had been closed for a few hours, when someone from the neighbourhood alerted Merlyn Moreira, the owner and her common-law husband that a fire was spreading on the lower flat. She had 2 other tenants in the upper flat, and they tried to warn everyone that the building was on fire.
When they got out of the building everyone tried to look for Jacqueline Arteaga, who was trapped inside the burning building. The entire structure was wooden, and so by that time, the fire had already destroyed large portions of the building. She and another female tenant was coaxed by the owners and by concerned neighbours for her to jump out of the window, but she refused saying that she was pregnant, and that she didn’t want to hurt her unborn child.
There was nothing that anyone could have done for her, and by the time the Fire Department arrived on the scene, she had already perished in the flames. The fire then took down the entire structure that was Kimmy’s Club, and it spread to the nearby building which was the headquarters of the computer store Business Computer System. Even with the effort of the firefighters, the out-of-controlled blaze destroyed that building, and then spread to the third business, Pandora’s Café. Fortunately, the firefighters on the scene managed to contain the blaze, and they got it out before it could completely destroy that third building.
Arteaga, was a tenant at apartment flat of Kimmy’s Club, and before that, she worked at the bar as a waitress. She was the mother of 2 children, who are now tragically without a parent.
Police are investigating what was the cause of the fire, but up to press time, they had not completed their analysis of the scene. The owner believes that arson may have played a role because she claims that she and her common-law husband were getting death threats.
