Flames broke out Thursday morning at a family-owned tire shop in South Los Angeles. Firefighters are calling the fire suspicious, as there had been a fire in the same building a few weeks earlier.
Bright red, towering flames engulfed the building as highly flammable piles of tires continued to burn inside the fire around 3:30 a.m., Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Erik Scott said. After firefighters extinguished the fire, Scott said firefighters continued to investigate and collect evidence.
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“Well, it’s a suspicious fire. That’s why you see a number of arson investigators behind us combing through the rubble, talking to witnesses, looking at the burn patterns,” he said, adding that authorities are taking into account the fact that another fire occurred there earlier this month.
“This was the site of a previous fire in the early morning hours of August 2nd,” Scott said. “So our hearts go out to the business owners who are fighting this.”
The tire shop, located in the 6900 block of Vermont Avenue, has been owned by a local family for 20 years. The owners were at the business early Thursday morning as firefighters extinguished the blaze and said their store was a complete loss. They also said the security cameras in the building stopped working when the fire broke out, so it’s hard to see exactly what happened.
The owners posted a GoFundMe saying their store sustained $6,000 in damage from the fire earlier this month.
Scott said the fire department is “taking this very seriously” as an arson investigator has been assigned to the Aug. 2 case, and now two more arson investigators will be investigating Thursday morning’s fire. The arson investigator assigned to the case earlier this month obtained surveillance footage, interviewed witnesses and visited the scene to collect evidence, he said.
When the other fire broke out, surveillance footage captured someone throwing an object over a fence just before the fire started. Scott said investigators are considering that footage and other evidence as they try to figure out what happened.
“It’s definitely a concern,” Scott said, comparing the two incidents. “There’s a similar pattern, it’s, you know, pre-dawn in the same location. It appeared to be an exterior fire that moved in.”
He said firefighters managed to extinguish the flames that had spread to a house behind the tire shop, preventing further damage. Although the house is yellow-tagged, he said, residents were allowed to return because the damage was not too severe.
