Fire kills Lynch Station couple inside their home

LYNCH STATION - A Saturday morning fire killed a Lynch Station couple inside their Leewood Road home and left nothing but the foundation and a deck standing.

The victims' names were not released, pending notification of family members.

Capt. L.T. Guthrie, with the Campbell County Sheriff's Office, said a 911 call came in at 7:02 a.m., and firefighters arrived on the scene at 658 Leewood Road, just off Dearing Ford Road, at about 7:10.

Even then, the house was beyond recovery.

Will Copes, a firefighter in Lynchburg, lives right across the street. He said he had seen the house from the outside an hour before the call and hadn't observed any sign of fire.

"At 6:00, I left to go hunting, and I didn't see anything," he said.

Copes' wife, Elizabeth, said she made the 911 call when she looked outside and saw the inferno.

"I couldn't even tell that it was definitely the house, I mean it was so much fire," she said.

"All that you could tell that was still a house was just the chimney. Everything else was just flames."

Guthrie said nothing indicates the fire started before Will Copes walked by.

"We have to believe it started between 6 and 7:02," he said.

He added that the fire could have been burning for a while inside, but it probably intensified once a hole opened up, allowing for more oxygen to enter.

He also said, the day being Saturday, most of the people that would have seen the fire were likely asleep.

Also complicating things was the rural nature of the neighborhood.

Guthrie said that, and the amount of woodwork in the house, added up to the fatal outcome.

"I've really never seen a house burned up like this one. It just burned completely up," Guthrie said.

Shirley West lives with her husband, Aubrey, up the street from the couple, and said neither of them saw any smoke or fire.

She said they were "pretty good friends" with the couple.

"Last Sunday, actually, we were just sitting out here on the porch," she said.

"It's just hard to believe they're gone."

She said the couple didn't leave the area much, but that the man would walk around with his dog, Gizmo.

"They just kind of stayed around the house. He liked to work in his garden," she said.

Aubrey West said he didn't think anything in the house would have caused the fire.

"He was a particular type person," he said. "If something in the house was wrong, he was going to have it fixed."

The dog was in the home at the time, and also died in the fire.

The fire is still under investigation, and Guthrie said there was no cause readily apparent.

He said there was no evidence the fire was set intentionally, and it appeared to have started from inside the house.

"We're still in the preliminary stages of (the investigation)," he said.

Thompson is a staff writer for The News & Advance in Lynchburg.