The Associated Press: NC Fire Survivor Recounts Narrow Escape
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Fallon Sposato awoke to a blaring alarm and smoke seeping into the first-floor bedroom of the beach house where she and 12 friends had been partying just hours earlier. With her lungs and eyes burning, she ran with her boyfriend through the smoke-filled house, assuming her friends were already outside.
"And then nobody else was out yet," the 19-year-old University of South Carolina sophomore recalled during an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday.
Seven students died in the blaze. Six others made it out of the house in Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., into the arms of neighbors and rescue workers.
"We were all hysterical. They were holding us back, trying to get our friends," said Sposato, a native of Orlando, Fla.
On Tuesday, officials at the University of South Carolina and in Ocean Isle Beach officially identified those killed in the fire: Cassidy Fae Pendley, 18; Lauren Astrid Kristiana Mahon, 18; Justin Michael Anderson, 19; Travis Lane Cale, 19; Allison Walden, 19; William Rhea, 18; and Emily Lauren Yelton, 19.
The group partied into the early morning on the back deck. Sposato said she was the first to go to bed, turning in at 4:30 a.m. after calling her father to say she had lost her camera.
Several hours later, Sposato and her boyfriend, whom she declined to identify, awoke to the alarms, flames and smoke. Called by neighbors who saw the fire, emergency personnel were pulling up when she got out of the house, Sposato said. Several hours later, Sposato would learn her roommate was among the dead.
Another student who made it out of the burning house told ABC's "Good Morning America" on Tuesday that he decided to jump into the canal behind the house to escape his smoke-filled upper-floor room.
"You knew you had to jump at some point; that was the only option," Tripp Wylie said on the show.
