Diana Dawkins vividly recalls the night a massive fire razed her home at a downtown Vancouver SRO, destroying the four-storey heritage building, displacing 140 people and killing two who were unable to escape.
On Wednesday, she told a coroner’s inquest jury into those deaths that on April 11, 2022, she first heard the glass of windows breaking, then saw smoke starting to seep through a hole in the wall in her unit.
“Smoke starting coming so fast,” Dawkins said at the Burnaby courthouse. “I was having a hard time breathing.”
She told the jury that the building’s sprinklers never went off and she heard no fire alarms. To save herself, Dawkins waved to fire crews to alert them of her need for rescue.
She was assisted out of the building. Mary Ann Garlow, 63, and Dennis James Guay, 53, were not.
The inquest into their deaths began Monday. The pair’s remains were found 11 days after the fire in the wreckage as the building was demolished on Abbott and Water streets.
Dawkins said she knew Garlow, but not Guay. She told the inquest jury she lost all her belongings in the fire, including photos of her children, and continues to suffer negative health impacts, including difficulty breathing.
She had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease before the fire, she said in an interview with Global News.
“It’s been terrible. I think about it every day. I was going to open up a store with the stuff that I had and just didn’t get the chance to do that, didn’t get the chance to give my kids what I had put aside for them,” Dawkins said.
Friends and family of the victims and survivors of the fire have posed serious questions about the days leading up to the deadly blaze, and the time it took for officials to realize Garlow and Guay were missing, as well as find their bodies.
Dawkins and others have testified that the sprinklers didn’t go off on April 11, 2022, having extinguished an earlier fire at the Winters Hotel on April 8, 2022, and not been reset.
Vancouver Fire and Rescue Services (VFRS) believe unattended candles were to blame for the fatal fire, which took place just three days after it issued a notice of violation to the property owner — Atira Women’s Resource Society — to have the fire safety systems serviced and the sprinklers reset.
On Tuesday, firefighting Capt. Kris Zoppa testified that VFRS had put the Winters Hotel on a 24-hour fire watch after the April 8 fire. When he attended the Winters Hotel for that incident, he said he got a “a bad feeling about that building,” noting that the fire alarms weren’t working, it was in general “disrepair” and tenants’ hoarded items were posing a safety risk.
He said orders to service a building’s fire systems are meant to be complied with immediately.
Dawkins said she didn’t see any notices about the fire watch posted in the building between April 8 and 11, nor did she see anyone patrolling the hallways.
“If I hadn’t of woke up (on April 11), I would be dead,” she told Global News. “It is devastating. I just want what I’ve lost.”
No one from Atira Women’s Resources has testified yet, but the property manager originally said it was believed all residents of the Winters Hotel had escaped on April 11.
Nearly 30 witnesses are scheduled to speak at the two-week inquest, including doctors, police and fire officials. Legal counsel for the victims’ families, the City of Vancouver, the B.C. government, Winters Residence Ltd., BC Housing, the Management Commission, and Atira are all expected to attend.
The inquest will not determine fault but will document the facts related to the deaths, including the causes and circumstances.
In addition to the SRO, the Winters Hotel building contained a women’s shelter and seven businesses. One of those businesses was Nika Design, a leather restoration shop that had been close to the Winters Hotel entrance since 2007.
Owner Neda Pessione testified at the inquest Wednesday that she never participated in a building fire drill. When she had gone into the SRO, she added, “lots of garbage” dominated the halls and doorways of units, including bicycle parts, furniture, electronics, motors, extension cords, shopping carts, and more.
Pessione also testified that she saw a fire exit that was covered, locked and chained. She said she inquired about the blocked exit, and was told by the front desk that it prevented unwanted guests in the middle of the night from entering the building.
She is not the first witness to reference a chained exit — on Monday, Garlow’s niece testified on behalf of Garlow’s son, another tenant in the building. John, too, had seen “chains on the door,” Misty Fredericks told the jury.
Pessione knew Garlow and described her as a “very grounded,” “soft-spoken” person and “caring mother” before the jury.
She described the April 11 fire as “chaos,” and said she saw Garlow enter the Winters Hotel that morning, never to return. Pessione said she alerted the fire chief to that fact but was “really ignored.”
In an interview with Global News, she said on April 11, “in five minutes, everything was gone.”
“We told her, we said there are people still trapped up there. You got to back there,” Pessione recalled. “Her response was, ‘Thank you for your concern,’ and, ‘We have everything under control.'”
For eight months before the fire, Pessione said she and her husband had pushed repeatedly for improved living conditions at the Winters Hotel, particularly concerning rotting, broken windows and inadequate electrical outlets. They were met with so much “push back,” Pessione said they “gave up.”
The business owner knew Guay as well. She called him “Johnny.”
“He’s one of those characters in a pirate movie, if you’ve seen. Very, very special character. Very personal,” she recalled. “His way of seeing life is very interesting … we would talk, we had a lot of good connection.”
Dr. Eric Bol, a forensic pathologist, has testified that soot in the airways of Guay and Garlow indicates they were alive at the time of the fire. The pair suffered thermal injury and smoke inhalation, he told the inquest, after examining their bodies.
Forensic toxicologist Dr. Aaron Shapiro has also said there’s no evidence to suggest either were impaired by drugs on April 11. There were fatal concentrations of carbon monoxide in their systems, he told the jury on Tuesday.
According to the City of Vancouver, firefighters performed a primary search for occupants of the Winters Hotel when it first went up in flames. Normally, a second search is performed, but in their “defensive attack,” firefighters exited the building to fight the flames from outside and it was “too dangerous” to allow them to search the second floor and above.
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