By SADE AJISHEGIRI
Mahlon Hines, an 84-year-old veteran, is dead after his Brentwood house caught fire just before 1 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 24, at a duplex responders say contained signs of extreme hoarding.
News coverage of the incident has highlighted the removal of professional firefighters from Bunker Hill Fire Station, just a mile from the fire. As part of a fire staffing reallocation plan, professional firefighters were relocated from the Bunker Hill station, leaving only the station’s volunteer firefighters on hand to respond to calls from Mount Rainier to the Port Towns.
The Hyattsville Volunteer Fire Department’s engine 801B arrived at the scene four minutes after receiving an alert of the house fire at 12:39 a.m., attacking and putting it out in six minutes, according to HVFD Vice President Nick Seminerio.
It is unclear how long the flames blazed before anyone noticed. According to Brentwood residents and first responders, this deadly fire was the culmination of a problem that had been brewing for years.
Alex Anteneh, 34, who lives in the eastern side of the Webster Street duplex, said he was asleep when a neighbor woke him around 1 a.m., after calling the fire department.
Anteneh, an IT professional, said his smoke alarm didn’t go off until he opened his front door, and the air filled with gray haze. He said he then talked outside with emergency responders for about an hour before heading to a friend’s house. Anteneh said the firefighters told him they suspected the sheer amount of belongings filling Hines’ house kept the fire from spreading to his neighbor’s side, thus insulating Anteneh’s home from the smoke and the heat.
Anteneh said he had shared a wall with Hines for over a decade. When he moved into the brick duplex in 2013, he was greeted with the aftermath of another fire in Hines’ side of the building. Anteneh’s windows were broken — opening a path for the firefighters to get in.
A county fire department press release from that night in 2013 said there were places in the house with flammable materials packed from floor to ceiling, the hoarding conditions so dangerous that firefighters had to evacuate.
There was another fire on the front porch Oct. 18 of this year, according to a statement from Seminerio.
Anteneh said his neighbor could often be found sitting out on his porch. Hines was a friendly man, said Anteneh’s father, Anteneh Tesfawe. Whenever Tesfawe would comment on the junk piled on his son’s side of the yard, the older man would always agree to take care of it. But the piles never went anywhere, according to Tesfawe. Instead, they grew.
“When they say ‘You have to clean up,’ he’d be like ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ but then he won’t do it,” Anteneh said. “He’ll start, or maybe he’ll do it one day, and then go back 10 steps.”
Finally fed up, Tesfawe built a wooden fence between his son’s stoop and that of his long-time neighbor, tossing clutter from one side to the other.
Hines accrued at least a few citations for failing to keep the house up to code — court documents show one in 2013 and another two in October of last year.
A few months before the October 2023 citations, neighbors say, the town organized a cleanup operation and a third-party garbage removal company came to clear out much of the accumulated materials, uncovering parts of the yard that had been filled for years.
Hines’ neighbors commented on Facebook, sharing their memories of his generosity and stubborn self-sufficiency. Former Town Vice Mayor Stefan Leggin posted a tribute, relating the town’s attempts to help the elderly man, which Hines ultimately rejected. Leggin said he met Hines while volunteering during the pandemic.
“I found him to be kind and soft-spoken and despite his age, always offering to help load up his truck with a box of fruit and vegetables,” he said in the post.
The day of his neighbor’s death, Anteneh posted, too, saying he hoped Hines’ story would be told.
“Sad day today,” his post reads. “Hines was a good man in Brentwood for a long time.”
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Sade Ajishegiri is a graduate journalism student at the University of Maryland.
