By Elizabeth Rhodes – Seattle Times

Burien’s worst residential fire in nearly two decades claimed three lives, injured five other people and left 31 homeless when two adjoining apartment buildings burned early this morning.

The cause of the blaze, which destroyed the eight-unit Tara Apartments and heavily damaged the identical Jenny Marie Apartments, has not been determined and the names of the dead have not been released.

Two survivors are hospitalized at Harborview Medical Center, one with burns, the other with broken bones, said Mike Marrs, fire chief of King County Fire District 2. Their names were not released.

Others were treated and released from nearby hospitals.

This afternoon, the smell of smoke still hung in the air as survivors and neighbors watched firefighters mop up from the three-alarm blaze in the 400 block of Southwest 155th Street.

Several witnesses expressed shock at how fast the fire consumed the squat, two-story Tara, which had smoke detectors but no sprinklers. They said they first saw the fire inching up a wall of the building’s open-air stairwell.

Within minutes the entire building was engulfed and in a half-hour it was gone, said Shan Coleman, a Jamaican musician who lives in an apartment across the street.

Alerted by a woman’s screams, Coleman hurled a 15-pound rock through a sliding-glass door to rescue a family trapped in one of Tara’s ground-floor units.

Firefighters from five jurisdictions battled the blaze from about 1 to 4 a.m. Sunday.

Marr said firefighters could respond only defensively as the fast-moving blaze incinerated the Tara, spread to the Jenny Marie and then threatened other structures in a neighborhood.

Marrs said it was the deadliest fire he’d seen in his 17 years with the fire district. “I feel terrible for the families,” he said.

Several neighbors said they heard the victims were a young boy and his grandfather, who were trapped in an upstairs unit in Tara, and a middle-aged disabled man who lived in a unit below them.

Neighbors described the boy, about 8, as a playful child well-known for his love of animals. His grandfather was thought to be visiting from Oregon.

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