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OAKLAND — “RIP Boobie.”
The graffiti, scrawled in black spray paint on a concrete pillar beneath Interstate 980, was a small, final tribute to Dominic “Boobie” Jarvis, who was gunned down in September at a homeless encampment.
A year earlier, the 34-year-old had a roof over his head, serving as a building security officer and living at 2551 San Pablo Ave., less than half a mile from the encampment. But on March 27, 2017, Jarvis and as many as 100 of the city’s most vulnerable residents at the halfway house found themselves on the street and scrambling for housing after a five-alarm blaze ripped through the three-story building, killing four people and injuring six others.
A year later, the survivors are spread far and wide, the lucky ones landing rooms in subsidized housing or leaning on family and friends with spare couches, the unlucky — like Jarvis — living under freeway overpasses.
“A lot of them are living outside,” said Gail Harbin, the former live-in cook at the building. “It’s impossible to find anything in Oakland, the rent is just too high. Only one person I heard of was able to find housing, and that’s in Berkeley.”
The city says it distributed more than $600,000 in relocation funds to 66 families and individuals displaced by the fire. The Housing Resource Center confirmed 20 cases where survivors relocated to homes in California and neighboring states, according to the city spokeswoman Karen Boyd.
Dozens of those displaced residents have joined at least nine lawsuits against the city of Oakland, the building owner, the lead nonprofit who leased the apartments and other individuals and corporations who they say allowed the building to fall into disrepair and become a deadly fire hazard.
A year after the fire, has anything changed?
The blaze, coming less than four months after a deadly fire killed 36 people attending a dance party at the Ghost Ship warehouse in East Oakland, highlighted many problems in the city’s fire inspection procedures.
Firefighters who visited the San Pablo building had documented their concerns about fire safety in the months before the deadly blaze, but no attention was paid until three days before the fire. By then it was too late.
City officials say new computer software to improve fire department communication is several months away, but an interim fix — procedures for email notifications — has alleviated previous gaps in information.
“Staff are diligently and methodically working to ensure the data entered into the system is accurate for the tens of thousands of facilities and properties requiring inspections,” city spokeswoman Karen Boyd said.
The department released a final report on the fire, obtained by this news agency, detailing how an unattended candle sparked the deadly fire. But an attorney representing some of the victims and survivors says she believes the fire may have been electrical.
Urojas, the nonprofit agency that occupied the property at the time of the fire, still exists. It is operating out of a Fruitvale neighborhood building and looking for another facility, according to its attorney, who added that the organization continues to house vulnerable people and help individuals battle addiction and mental illness.
In January, building owner Keith Kim sold the property to a San Leandro dentist, William Choi. It’s unclear what the future holds for the property, but physically the charred shell of the nearly 32,000-square-foot building, built in 1895, remains mostly the same.
On a recent rainy afternoon, a red-tag notice from the day after the fire remained taped to the front entrance as construction workers sawed wood inside. Windowless units on the second and third floors exposed a blackened interior, almost identical to the carcass left a year earlier after firefighters rescued tenants dangling off fire escapes and hanging outside windows with bed sheets tied together.
Room 210
Elmore Briggs was candid with Oakland police and firefighters in the hours after the fire. A candle he lit started the blaze, according to the final four-page Oakland fire report that provides never-before-told details of the event.
Briggs describes lighting a candle on a paper plate atop his television to provide some light inside his room before going into the hallway around 5 a.m. to talk to some other residents, including Jarvis. About 15 to 20 minutes later, Jarvis noticed the fire, and Briggs tried to extinguish the flames on his carpet but only made the fire worse, according to the report.
“I left my room with the door open. I went yelling and banging on doors down the hallway. I was trying to get everyone out of that building,” Briggs told police.
Jarvis also tried to help, telling investigators “he went to every floor knocking on doors before leaving the building himself.”
The report said one man was found dead in a hallway and another in a bathroom. The fire was ruled “accidental/unintentional” and firefighters said the candle “melted and fell on top of the television to the floor igniting the rug and other combustible materials in the room.”
Attorney Mary Alexander, who is representing family members of victims who died in the fire, disputes the candle theory.
“We don’t think that it was a candle in the middle of the room,” Alexander said, “because the fire patterns show that the fire started on the north wall of the room near an electrical outlet.”
Oakland Fire Chief Darin White said he could not comment on findings by people outside of his department.
“I trust in the expertise of our fire investigation staff and I defer to their findings,” he said.
No one has been charged criminally in the case, but the multiple lawsuits have been consolidated, and all sides will meet on Tuesday’s anniversary for a status conference.
Where are they now?
One lawsuit was filed on behalf of the parents of Olatunde “Philip” Adejumobi, a 36-year-old Nigerian native and math whiz who died in the fire. Coroner’s officials originally could not identify his burned body, and they had difficulties tracking down family of the man who once researched the use of complex pseudo-random strings and computer theory at UC Berkeley before a mental breakdown.
Edwan Anderson, 64, Cassandra Marie Robertson, 50, and Ashantikee Wilson, 41, were also killed.
Many tenants received city assistance to relocate, but it’s been a hodgepodge of success.
“It runs the gamut,” said attorney Robert Salinas, who represents nine survivors. “Some were fortunate to get another place, some were staying with relatives and friends, and unfortunately some of them are now homeless.”
At least two of his clients are under freeways, and one man lives in his car at the Berkeley Marina, he said. Former tenant Marcelio “Marty” Harris suffered from diabetes and seizures and died at age 57 of heart failure four months after the fire, the second known resident to succumb while living in marginalized housing or on the street. Harris had lived next door to Briggs’ apartment and also was listed in the fire report as a witness. He died inside an East Oakland motel where his friend stayed, according to the coroner’s office.
For survivors, the ordeal has been equally tragic. Harbin, another client of Salinas, considers herself lucky for having family in Oakland. The 57-year-old is renting a room from a relative, where she moved in a week after the fire. But the death of three friends in the fire continues to haunt her.
“We were like family,” said Harbin, who now sees a therapist. “I’m just now able to talk about it.”
